--- In yugoslaviainfo @ yahoogroups.com, Predrag Tosic wrote:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HER20051229&articleId=1667
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALIZATION (CANADA)
December 29, 2005
Z Magazine
Book Review
Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting—Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia
By Peter Brock
Los Angeles: gmbooks.com, 2005
Review by Edward S. Herman
This important and valuable book complements perfectly the superb
volumes on Yugoslavia by Diana Johnstone (Fools' Crusade) and Michael
Mandel (How America Gets Away With Murder). Johnstone provides
essential history and context to the Balkan wars, analyzing the
indigenous participants, their backgrounds, motivations and
strategies, and the very important role played there by external
interveners (the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim diaspora and PR firms,
Austria, Germany, the United States, and the UN and Yugoslavia
Tribunal [ICTY]). Mandel provides an outstanding study of the recent
U.S. aggressions and the role and abuse of international law and the
ICTY in facilitating those aggressions. Brock focuses on the role of
the media, which like the NATO powers and ICTY were "co-belligerents,"
doing yeoman service in advancing the program of the individuals,
groups and governments that wanted war. "Embedded" journalists did not
start with the Iraq invasion-occupation; voluntary embeds were a
dominant feature of the Western media in the Balkans conflicts.
The huge irony that Brock reveals so clearly is that the media
co-belligerents, pushing relentlessly for more aggressive action,
supposedly in the interests of stopping ethnic cleansing and killing,
played into the hands of parties with a political agenda that
assured and produced far more ethnic cleansing and killing than might
have taken place without their bellicosity and war propaganda service.
The same irony is clear in Johnstone's and Mandel's volumes that deal
with the ends and means of the indigenous and external participants.
The focus on "justice" as opposed to peace, and the demonizing of the
Serbs and making them the unique group needing punishment, was the
vehicle used by Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and his close
associates, and Clinton/Albright and Kohl-Genscher and their
associates, to prevent a peaceful settlement--most importantly in
backing out of the 1992 Lisbon Agreement--and to work incessantly to
get NATO to intervene militarily on behalf, first, of Izetbegovic and
the Bosnian Muslims and then the Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo
Albanians. Brock shows that the media served these pro-violence and
anti-peace ends relentlessly and effectively.
He argues convincingly that this was a model case of "pack
journalism," and also of what has been called "advocacy journalism" or
"the journalism of attachment." The journalists were quickly convinced
that good was fighting evil, or that it was obligatory and less risky
to take this as a given, and so they joined the pack and became
advocates attached to the supposed good side and their victims. This
was aided in the Balkans by the fact that most of the journalists
didn't know the language or history of the area, and that, because of
the threat of bodily harm in trying to do real journalism, they tended
to congregate in protected areas—many of them, as one cynical observer
noted, only reported what they saw "150 meters on either side of the
Holiday Inn" (General Lewis MacKenzie).
This made them dependent for "news" on one another and on the official
sources happy to service their needs. As they stayed in the part of
Sarajevo controlled by the Bosnian Muslims, they, along with U.S.
officials, were the main sources of news, and as Brock notes they were
hardly aware of the existence of a large Serb population in Sarajevo,
some 50,000 of whose members left or were driven out of the city. The
pack were even unaware of the exodus of the Jewish population of
Sarajevo (pp. 131-3), quietly threatened by the dominant Muslims and
recalling well (like the Serbs) the murderous behavior of the Muslims
and Croats in the era of Nazi rule during World War II.
The pack journalists in Sarajevo (and elsewhere in the Balkans) were
thus highly manageable, knowing the broader truth in advance,
dispensing with notions of substantive objectivity and balance, and on
the hunt for stories that would both confirm the institutionalized
bias--and therefore please their editors at home--and advance the
cause that they advocated and for which they campaigned. Journalists
like David Rieff, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy openly acknowledged that
they were campaigners for more aggressive NATO intervention (i.e.,
war), and they were by no means alone. But this meant that they had
ceased to be serious journalists who would check out the facts and
claims of all sides and provide a full and fair picture of the
complex events in the struggle. They would instead gravitate to
stories that advanced the cause and would treat them with uncritical
zeal. As another cynical observer described it, this meant that
Izetbegovic "could play them like a Stradivarius," and in effect use
them as agents of Bosnian Muslim propaganda and disinformation. (The
more "balanced" Roy Gutman was played like a Stradivarius by the
Croatian information service and U.S. Embassy as well as Muslim
authorities.)
This pack and bandwagon process fed on itself. As it focused only on
the victimization of the Bosnian Muslims, featuring grim pictures and
stories of their suffering, ignoring Serb victims and context, and
aided by the parallel agenda and bias of the ICTY and Western
political establishment, the party line of almost exclusively
one-sided evil was steadily reinforced. (Former State Department
official George Kenney's research disclosed, however, that "the
percentage of each population base killed was roughly identical," and
even an ICTY-sponsored study found Serb deaths not far below their
proportion of the Bosnia-Herzegovina population--see Ewa Tabeau and
Jacub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in
Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent
Results," [
http://www.springerlink.com/(ze3qfg45eqaiph2v3qbovh45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,10;journal,1,34;linkingpublicationresults,1:102885,1
] European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie,
June, 2005). Gullibility and the demand for more spectacular showings
of evil encouraged increasingly irresponsible reporting and claims of
victimization in "rape camps" and Auschwitz-like "death camps." The
books of these journalists would be what Brock calls "victim epics,"
with politically correct selective victimization based largely on
witness evidence supplied by partisan sources that was regrettably
"unconfirmed."
Brock has a detailed and convincing deconstruction of the claims of
rape camps and rape as a Serb military tactic and exclusive (chapter
5). While certainly never denying Serb rapes, he shows that there is
not the slightest evidence that Serb rapes were more numerous or
organized than those of Bosnian Muslim or Croatian forces. He points
out that the documentation of Serb rape victims is more extensive and
of better quality than that of victims of Serbs, despite the sizable
resources put into collecting evidence of the latter. The Serb data
just never could attract the interest of the pack (and the same was
true of the pack's treatment of Serb dossiers of war crimes and
prison camps in which Serbs were victims). The bias confused the
media—Paul Lewis writing in the New York Times on "Rape Was Weapon of
the Serbs" (Oct. 20, 1993) noted that a UN report had identified "800
victims by name," but Lewis failed to mention that they were Serb
women. The estimates of 50,000 or 20,000 rape victims of Serbs were
based on no evidence whatsoever, and the belief that rape was a
special Serb crime rested strictly on the overwhelming political bias
of the pack and superior public relations and propaganda activity of
the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. (A January 1994 UN report evaluating
all the documentation on rapes, excluding evidence from the Serbs,
listed 126 confirmed victims. This finding did not interest the media.)
The media role in this hysterical propaganda barrage, with the best
of the reports noting that the claims are "unconfirmed" (!), was a
scandal, reflecting a media completely out of control and justifying
UN official Aracelly Santana's comment that "I've never seen so much
lack of professionalism and ethics in the press." The UN
representatives and British officials dealing with the media in
Sarajevo looked upon the pack with contempt as a destructive force,
some of them even calling its members "the reptiles."
Brock also has a very good discussion of the famous photo of Fikret
Alic, taken at the Trnopolje transit camp in August 1992, another fine
illustration of the quest for denigration of the enemy and the lack of
scruple of Western reporters and media. He shows that the three
British reporters, two from Independent Television News (ITN) and one
from the Guardian, sought out the uniquely emaciated man among the
camp residents, and carefully arranged for a photo that made it look
as if Alic was enclosed in a fenced prison, the reporters having
deliberately placed themselves behind four strands of rusted and
sagging barbed wire, strung haphazardly between two posts, with a thin
chicken wire mesh hanging beneath, with Alic on the other side. "The
cameramen and layout editors cropped the photos of Alic so that the
three or four strands of barbed wire were emphasized." There was no
barbed wire fence around the camp, which was a transit facility and
not even a prison encampment, and the refugees in the camp were even
free to leave.
But the Fikret Alic picture was quickly seized upon by the Western
media, and juxtaposed with pictures of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the
media featured this "death camp" with frenzied indignation and
thoroughgoing dishonesty. Compelling evidence by Thomas Deichmann that
the photo was a propaganda fraud led to a journalistic bloodbath: "The
reactionary attacks from pack-journalism's interventionists commenced
with fury and gusto," and led to a libel suit and bankruptcy of the
British magazine Living Marxism that had published Deichmann's
article. The suit was lost by Living Marxism not on the ground that
the facts in the article were wrong but rather that it had not been
proved that there was an intent to deceive—the huge deception, which
happened to fit both the biases of the reporters, editors and Western
establishment, was inadvertent!
This deceptive photo worked wonders in advancing the demonization
process and war agenda, and though based on serious misrepresentation
it was not correctible in the mainstream and remains alive today (in
Emma Brockes' recent attack on Noam Chomsky in The Guardian she
mentions that ITN won its libel suit on this topic, but she failed to
note that it was won on the question of intent, not on the question
of whether the facts relating to the photo were misleading). And the
pack journalists would provide a steady stream of followup negatives,
always one-sided and stripped of context, and often falsifications.
Brock has a number of pages that simply list misrepresentations,
sometimes photos of victims identified as Muslims but actually Serbs
(see pp. 30-32, 122-4, 170-2), and dozens of illustrations of
blatant bias are scattered throughout the book. Brock also shows how
regularly the pack journalists would report on Serb attacks on various
towns—e.g., Goradze, Mostar, Bihac, Vukovar, and Struga—never
mentioning either the fact that the towns had previously been
ethnically cleansed of Serbs, or that the Serbs were retaliating for
recent attacks emanating from these towns. The decontextualization and
misreading of the recent sequence of events was standard reportorial
operating practice, resting on bias plus uncritical dependence on
Bosnian Muslim or Croat sources. (On lies regarding the Serb attack
on Goradze, pp. 75-76; on Vukovar, pp. xiii-xv; on the remarkable
effectiveness of Croat propaganda and lack of integrity of AP and
other Western sources at Struga, pp. 42-45; on Michael Gordon's lies
on the numbers in Serb concentration camps, pp. 80-81).
Brock notes that there were dissenters from party line pack
journalism, but he shows that these were quickly attacked and
marginalized, in a familiar process. This is the "media cleansing,"
that permitted the triumph of "dirty reporting." Brock himself, having
written an article critical of the already closed party line media
coverage back in 1993 ("Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press,"
Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-1994), was harshly assailed by members of
the pack, and the publisher of his article was also put under
pressure and threatened for this deviationism. George Kenney, a former
State Department official working on the Balkans, who had quit because
of insufficient U.S. intervention in the ongoing wars, changed his
views and became a serious critic of the party line. Kenney, like
Brock, was quickly subjected to nasty attacks and dropped by the BBC
and U.S. mainstream media as a commentator on the Balkans struggle.
Even Lt. General Michael Rose, the UNPROFOR commander in Sarajevo, was
subjected to slashing attacks by pack members, who resented his
frequent confutations of pack disinformation, and who, as campaigners
for the Bosnian Muslims, were angry at the failure of UNPROFOR to
bomb the Serbs (see Brock's crushing analysis of Peter Jennings'
biased, ignorant and nasty attack on Rose--"The Peacekeepers—How the
UN Failed in Bosnia," ABC, April 24, 1995, at pp. 175-6; and on
Jennings' and ABC's journalistic abuses more broadly, p. 173 ).
Perhaps the most interesting case was that of David Binder, who
writes a Foreword to Brock's book under review here, and who was the
most experienced and knowledgeable New York Times reporter working in
the Balkans in the 1980s and 1990s. Binder, however, was not a party
liner, having witnessed and reported on the Kosovo Albanians attempts
to drive Serbs out of Kosovo in the 1980s and who recognized that
important elements of that community were striving for ethnic
purification. But with the firming up of the party line in the 1990s
his insistence on sometimes reporting items putting the Bosnian
Muslims or Kosovo Albanians in a bad light was looked upon with
disfavor by his editors. In one notorious case discussed by Brock,
Binder wrote an article based on the testimony of numerous qualified
UN and military insiders that pointed to the Bosnian Muslims as the
source of the bomb that killed mainly Bosnian Muslim civilians in
Sarajevo in the Markale market bombing of February 5, 1994, but which
helped sell more aggressive NATO actions against the Serbs. The Times
refused to publish the article, which forced Binder to resort to a
Swiss newspaper, Die Weltwoche and the journal Foreign Policy
("Anatomy of a Massacre," Winter 1994-95).
Eventually Binder was removed from reporting on the Balkans in favor
of reporters like Roger Cohen, Carlotta Gall, Marlise Simons, and John
F. Burns, who were prepared to toe the party line--and sometimes
disseminated lies, but only lies that reinforced the party line and
its biases (see the discussion of John F. Burns below). The treatment
of Binder was reminiscent of the removal of Raymond Bonner from
reporting on Central America in the 1980s, after Bonner failed to stop
sending in copy on the murderous operations of the U.S.-supported
Salvadoran army. The firing of Bonner was widely seen as a warning to
journalist deviationists; the removal of Binder and the attacks on
Brock and Kenney had a similar chilling effect.
Under the pack system, and with the triumph of the demonization
process and simple Manichean world view of the struggle, there was a
massive voluntary embedding and collapse of journalistic standards.
The rush was on to illustrate villainy at all costs, a process also
notorious at the end of the Kosovo war in June 1999 when NATO-country
pack journalists rushed into Kosovo searching for rape victims, dead
bodies, and stories of Serb atrocities. In this environment
journalistic fraud flourishes and gullibility is great, making the
journalists sitting ducks for interested propagandists. If Bosnian
Muslim officials claimed 200,000 Bosnian Muslim victims in 1992-1993,
that was swallowed uncritically by the media (and Clinton) despite
implausibility, inconsistencies, and doubts expressed by the likes of
George Kenney. This figure persists up to today--see the editorials
"Bosnia, 10 Years Later" in the New York Times, Nov. 25, 2005 and
"Bosnia's Slow Progress," Washington Post, Nov. 29--despite
repudiation even by ICTY-sponsored sources, which have lowered the
number for deaths on all sides, civilian and military, to something
like 100,000. (See the Tabeau/Biljac study cited earlier.) We may
recall the history of the figure of 2 million murdered by the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, first provided by Jean Lacouture in early 1977,
then acknowledged by him to have been created out of the whole cloth,
but accepted and persisting up to today. The rule for demonized
enemies is that the worst is believable and can be institutionalized
even if demonstrably fraudulent.
Brock shows that it was a regular practice for the media to swallow
and transmit without verification Bosnian Muslim official and even
ham radio station claims of deaths in various battle zones. These were
almost always inflated or entirely false, but the media took the bait,
and while disappointed to find later that they had been gulled,
neither issued corrections nor learned to be cautious. There were no
real costs for the journalists or media in making errors damaging to
the demonized enemy
Brock is at his best in analyzing the work of John F. Burns of the
New York Times and Roy Gutman of Newsday, who shared the 1993 Pulitzer
Prize for journalism for their work in Bosnia. Brock shows that this
award is a perfect manifestation of the corruption of the "journalism
of attachment" and of the Pulitzer award system, which is an index of
the corruption of journalism more broadly. The Burns case is the
more dramatic, and even funny, as Burns got the award based in large
part on a long Times article that focused on the confession of a
Bosnian Serb prisoner of the Muslims, Borislav Herak, who confessed
to having murdered 29 Muslims and raped eight women. Burns's article
was billed as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have
died in Bosnia."
Burns, who was well-known at the time to be an Izetbegovic favorite,
had been given quick access to Herak, along with a Soros-funded
movie-maker (whose presence at the interrogation was never
acknowledged in the Burns report). Herak appeared very frightened,
told his story to Burns "partly in the presence of prison officials,"
and after one session asked Burns to get the prison authorities to
promise not to beat him after his testimony! There was no
corroborating evidence in corpses or eyewitnesses to his alleged
crimes, and a fellow Bosnian Serb arrested with Herak had said right
away that Herak was lying. Both Burns and the movie-maker suppressed
the fact that Herak had accused UNPROFOR head, Canadian General Lewis
MacKenzie, of having raped Bosnian women in a local bordello. Burns
acknowledged to MacKenzie that this would reduce Herak's credibility
and spoil the story, but he suppressed the information in violation of
professional standards and in support of lies that he should have
known were lies.
Several years later Herak recanted, claiming that he had been tortured
and forced to memorize his confession lines. Shortly after this
admission two of his alleged murder victims turned up alive. The
Times, in reporting on the appearance of the two supposed Herak
victims, said that this was an embarrassment to the Bosnian Muslim
government, but it found nothing embarrassing in the incident to the
New York Times, and there has been no move by the Pulitzer award
committee to remove Burns' Pulitzer award based on a confession under
torture with compromising evidence suppressed.
Brock has quite a few other illustrations of Burns' violations of
journalistic ethics. Burns pioneered in alleging 200,000 Muslim deaths
in the warfare as early as July 1993, up from his estimate in April of
140,000; and, "venturing less and less outside Sarajevo, [Burns]
consistently reported the government's inflated casualty counts during
the war." On the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour (Jan. 10, 1994) Burns upped
the ante to 300,000 killed and 900,000 wounded. (For other Burns lies,
misrepresentations and suppressions of evidence, pp. 77-80, 187.)
Brock's analysis of the work of Roy Gutman is equally devastating. He
shows compellingly that Gutman was not A Witness to Genocide (the
title of Gutman 1993 book based on his dispatches from Bosnia), but
rather an agent of propaganda provided, directly or indirectly, by
parties with an axe to grind. Many of his sources were not witnesses
but purveyors of hearsay evidence from alleged witnesses. Gutman
treated his sources uncritically; even speaking at one point of
"reliable rumors." He rarely demanded--and even more rarely obtained
and supplied--any corroboration to allegations of Serb abuse. If the
Bosnian Muslims and Croats claimed 100,000 prisoners in Serb prison
camps that was enough for Gutman; the fact that the Red Cross
estimated that there were only some 10,000 prisoners in the camps of
the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims taken together was of no
interest to him; their finding meant that his preferred larger number
was "unconfirmed." His business was making the case against the bad
guys, and he didn't just cut corners in making that case, with the
help of his badly compromised sources he wrote works of fiction that
had some "unconfirmed" elements of reality.
Gutman located most of his sources with the help of Croatian, Bosnian
Muslim and U.S. Embassy intermediaries, most extensively from the
Croatian Information Center (CIC), a government propaganda agency
whose work Gutman found to be "more or less scholarly." Gutman
claimed to have met a major propaganda agent of the CIC, and Gutman
source, Jadranka Cigelj, "by chance," but he admits to having gotten a
number of witnesses (or purveyors of witness hearsay) from Croatian
"charitable foundations" and the U.S. embassy. As one critical
journalist (Joan Phillips) put it, his death camp stories "are based
on very few accounts from alleged survivors. They rely on hearsay and
double hearsay. They are given the stamp of authority by speculation
and surmise from officials."
Gutman was very free in using analogies to Belsen, Auschwitz and
references to "death camps" and "concentration camps,"
"deportations," and estimates of Serb death camp killings running up
to 5,000, although his word usage and numbers varied based on probable
audience knowledge and receptivity. The lack of scruple here was
marked, and misstatements were frequent. "It was like Jews being
deported to Auschwitz" was a lie, as there was no evidence whatsoever
that Bosnian Muslims moved around by the Serbs were going to gas
chambers. Phillips notes that the 350 journalists who rushed into
Bosnia looking for death camps "didn't find them, nor did they find
any evidence that they existed." There was in fact never any evidence
that treatment in the Bosnian Serb camps was any worse than that in
the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim camps, that were of no interest to Gutman.
Brock's detailed analysis of Gutman's work (pp. 87-116) is a
compelling study in journalistic malpractice that should by read by
every student of the media, especially given the fact that the
outrageous performance that Brock describes here resulted in a
Pulitzer prize, shared by Gutman's rival in disinformation John F.
Burns! Gutman didn't relish any analysis by Brock, warning him by
e-mail that his Witness to Genocide could "not be quoted under any
circumstances." He didn't even relish exposure at the Hague, refusing
to testify there, where he would have had to deal with cross-examination.
Brock's book has many other good things in it, like a discussion of
the role of George Soros, public relations firms, Germany, the
Vatican, and of course the Tribunal as an instrument of NATO. It is a
very important work filling a needed gap in the critical literature on
the Balkans wars and enlightening on the work of the mainstream media.
It is a sad commentary on the intellectual culture that this book,
like that of Johnstone and Mandel, which contests an institutionalized
party line, will be ignored in the mainstream.
Equally troubling, just as neither Johnstone nor Mandel was reviewed
in the supposedly "left" Nation, In These Times, Progressive, and
Mother Jones, there is a good chance that Brock will join them in
being bypassed in favor of less "controversial" works. This is a
testimonial to the ability of imperialism to make an official party
line on an imperial project unchallengeable even on its purported
left. This is hegemony at its finest.
--- End forwarded message ---
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HER20051229&articleId=1667
CENTRE FOR RESEARCH ON GLOBALIZATION (CANADA)
December 29, 2005
Z Magazine
Book Review
Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting—Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia
By Peter Brock
Los Angeles: gmbooks.com, 2005
Review by Edward S. Herman
This important and valuable book complements perfectly the superb
volumes on Yugoslavia by Diana Johnstone (Fools' Crusade) and Michael
Mandel (How America Gets Away With Murder). Johnstone provides
essential history and context to the Balkan wars, analyzing the
indigenous participants, their backgrounds, motivations and
strategies, and the very important role played there by external
interveners (the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim diaspora and PR firms,
Austria, Germany, the United States, and the UN and Yugoslavia
Tribunal [ICTY]). Mandel provides an outstanding study of the recent
U.S. aggressions and the role and abuse of international law and the
ICTY in facilitating those aggressions. Brock focuses on the role of
the media, which like the NATO powers and ICTY were "co-belligerents,"
doing yeoman service in advancing the program of the individuals,
groups and governments that wanted war. "Embedded" journalists did not
start with the Iraq invasion-occupation; voluntary embeds were a
dominant feature of the Western media in the Balkans conflicts.
The huge irony that Brock reveals so clearly is that the media
co-belligerents, pushing relentlessly for more aggressive action,
supposedly in the interests of stopping ethnic cleansing and killing,
played into the hands of parties with a political agenda that
assured and produced far more ethnic cleansing and killing than might
have taken place without their bellicosity and war propaganda service.
The same irony is clear in Johnstone's and Mandel's volumes that deal
with the ends and means of the indigenous and external participants.
The focus on "justice" as opposed to peace, and the demonizing of the
Serbs and making them the unique group needing punishment, was the
vehicle used by Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and his close
associates, and Clinton/Albright and Kohl-Genscher and their
associates, to prevent a peaceful settlement--most importantly in
backing out of the 1992 Lisbon Agreement--and to work incessantly to
get NATO to intervene militarily on behalf, first, of Izetbegovic and
the Bosnian Muslims and then the Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo
Albanians. Brock shows that the media served these pro-violence and
anti-peace ends relentlessly and effectively.
He argues convincingly that this was a model case of "pack
journalism," and also of what has been called "advocacy journalism" or
"the journalism of attachment." The journalists were quickly convinced
that good was fighting evil, or that it was obligatory and less risky
to take this as a given, and so they joined the pack and became
advocates attached to the supposed good side and their victims. This
was aided in the Balkans by the fact that most of the journalists
didn't know the language or history of the area, and that, because of
the threat of bodily harm in trying to do real journalism, they tended
to congregate in protected areas—many of them, as one cynical observer
noted, only reported what they saw "150 meters on either side of the
Holiday Inn" (General Lewis MacKenzie).
This made them dependent for "news" on one another and on the official
sources happy to service their needs. As they stayed in the part of
Sarajevo controlled by the Bosnian Muslims, they, along with U.S.
officials, were the main sources of news, and as Brock notes they were
hardly aware of the existence of a large Serb population in Sarajevo,
some 50,000 of whose members left or were driven out of the city. The
pack were even unaware of the exodus of the Jewish population of
Sarajevo (pp. 131-3), quietly threatened by the dominant Muslims and
recalling well (like the Serbs) the murderous behavior of the Muslims
and Croats in the era of Nazi rule during World War II.
The pack journalists in Sarajevo (and elsewhere in the Balkans) were
thus highly manageable, knowing the broader truth in advance,
dispensing with notions of substantive objectivity and balance, and on
the hunt for stories that would both confirm the institutionalized
bias--and therefore please their editors at home--and advance the
cause that they advocated and for which they campaigned. Journalists
like David Rieff, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy openly acknowledged that
they were campaigners for more aggressive NATO intervention (i.e.,
war), and they were by no means alone. But this meant that they had
ceased to be serious journalists who would check out the facts and
claims of all sides and provide a full and fair picture of the
complex events in the struggle. They would instead gravitate to
stories that advanced the cause and would treat them with uncritical
zeal. As another cynical observer described it, this meant that
Izetbegovic "could play them like a Stradivarius," and in effect use
them as agents of Bosnian Muslim propaganda and disinformation. (The
more "balanced" Roy Gutman was played like a Stradivarius by the
Croatian information service and U.S. Embassy as well as Muslim
authorities.)
This pack and bandwagon process fed on itself. As it focused only on
the victimization of the Bosnian Muslims, featuring grim pictures and
stories of their suffering, ignoring Serb victims and context, and
aided by the parallel agenda and bias of the ICTY and Western
political establishment, the party line of almost exclusively
one-sided evil was steadily reinforced. (Former State Department
official George Kenney's research disclosed, however, that "the
percentage of each population base killed was roughly identical," and
even an ICTY-sponsored study found Serb deaths not far below their
proportion of the Bosnia-Herzegovina population--see Ewa Tabeau and
Jacub Bijak, "War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in
Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent
Results," [
http://www.springerlink.com/(ze3qfg45eqaiph2v3qbovh45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,10;journal,1,34;linkingpublicationresults,1:102885,1
] European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie,
June, 2005). Gullibility and the demand for more spectacular showings
of evil encouraged increasingly irresponsible reporting and claims of
victimization in "rape camps" and Auschwitz-like "death camps." The
books of these journalists would be what Brock calls "victim epics,"
with politically correct selective victimization based largely on
witness evidence supplied by partisan sources that was regrettably
"unconfirmed."
Brock has a detailed and convincing deconstruction of the claims of
rape camps and rape as a Serb military tactic and exclusive (chapter
5). While certainly never denying Serb rapes, he shows that there is
not the slightest evidence that Serb rapes were more numerous or
organized than those of Bosnian Muslim or Croatian forces. He points
out that the documentation of Serb rape victims is more extensive and
of better quality than that of victims of Serbs, despite the sizable
resources put into collecting evidence of the latter. The Serb data
just never could attract the interest of the pack (and the same was
true of the pack's treatment of Serb dossiers of war crimes and
prison camps in which Serbs were victims). The bias confused the
media—Paul Lewis writing in the New York Times on "Rape Was Weapon of
the Serbs" (Oct. 20, 1993) noted that a UN report had identified "800
victims by name," but Lewis failed to mention that they were Serb
women. The estimates of 50,000 or 20,000 rape victims of Serbs were
based on no evidence whatsoever, and the belief that rape was a
special Serb crime rested strictly on the overwhelming political bias
of the pack and superior public relations and propaganda activity of
the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. (A January 1994 UN report evaluating
all the documentation on rapes, excluding evidence from the Serbs,
listed 126 confirmed victims. This finding did not interest the media.)
The media role in this hysterical propaganda barrage, with the best
of the reports noting that the claims are "unconfirmed" (!), was a
scandal, reflecting a media completely out of control and justifying
UN official Aracelly Santana's comment that "I've never seen so much
lack of professionalism and ethics in the press." The UN
representatives and British officials dealing with the media in
Sarajevo looked upon the pack with contempt as a destructive force,
some of them even calling its members "the reptiles."
Brock also has a very good discussion of the famous photo of Fikret
Alic, taken at the Trnopolje transit camp in August 1992, another fine
illustration of the quest for denigration of the enemy and the lack of
scruple of Western reporters and media. He shows that the three
British reporters, two from Independent Television News (ITN) and one
from the Guardian, sought out the uniquely emaciated man among the
camp residents, and carefully arranged for a photo that made it look
as if Alic was enclosed in a fenced prison, the reporters having
deliberately placed themselves behind four strands of rusted and
sagging barbed wire, strung haphazardly between two posts, with a thin
chicken wire mesh hanging beneath, with Alic on the other side. "The
cameramen and layout editors cropped the photos of Alic so that the
three or four strands of barbed wire were emphasized." There was no
barbed wire fence around the camp, which was a transit facility and
not even a prison encampment, and the refugees in the camp were even
free to leave.
But the Fikret Alic picture was quickly seized upon by the Western
media, and juxtaposed with pictures of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the
media featured this "death camp" with frenzied indignation and
thoroughgoing dishonesty. Compelling evidence by Thomas Deichmann that
the photo was a propaganda fraud led to a journalistic bloodbath: "The
reactionary attacks from pack-journalism's interventionists commenced
with fury and gusto," and led to a libel suit and bankruptcy of the
British magazine Living Marxism that had published Deichmann's
article. The suit was lost by Living Marxism not on the ground that
the facts in the article were wrong but rather that it had not been
proved that there was an intent to deceive—the huge deception, which
happened to fit both the biases of the reporters, editors and Western
establishment, was inadvertent!
This deceptive photo worked wonders in advancing the demonization
process and war agenda, and though based on serious misrepresentation
it was not correctible in the mainstream and remains alive today (in
Emma Brockes' recent attack on Noam Chomsky in The Guardian she
mentions that ITN won its libel suit on this topic, but she failed to
note that it was won on the question of intent, not on the question
of whether the facts relating to the photo were misleading). And the
pack journalists would provide a steady stream of followup negatives,
always one-sided and stripped of context, and often falsifications.
Brock has a number of pages that simply list misrepresentations,
sometimes photos of victims identified as Muslims but actually Serbs
(see pp. 30-32, 122-4, 170-2), and dozens of illustrations of
blatant bias are scattered throughout the book. Brock also shows how
regularly the pack journalists would report on Serb attacks on various
towns—e.g., Goradze, Mostar, Bihac, Vukovar, and Struga—never
mentioning either the fact that the towns had previously been
ethnically cleansed of Serbs, or that the Serbs were retaliating for
recent attacks emanating from these towns. The decontextualization and
misreading of the recent sequence of events was standard reportorial
operating practice, resting on bias plus uncritical dependence on
Bosnian Muslim or Croat sources. (On lies regarding the Serb attack
on Goradze, pp. 75-76; on Vukovar, pp. xiii-xv; on the remarkable
effectiveness of Croat propaganda and lack of integrity of AP and
other Western sources at Struga, pp. 42-45; on Michael Gordon's lies
on the numbers in Serb concentration camps, pp. 80-81).
Brock notes that there were dissenters from party line pack
journalism, but he shows that these were quickly attacked and
marginalized, in a familiar process. This is the "media cleansing,"
that permitted the triumph of "dirty reporting." Brock himself, having
written an article critical of the already closed party line media
coverage back in 1993 ("Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press,"
Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-1994), was harshly assailed by members of
the pack, and the publisher of his article was also put under
pressure and threatened for this deviationism. George Kenney, a former
State Department official working on the Balkans, who had quit because
of insufficient U.S. intervention in the ongoing wars, changed his
views and became a serious critic of the party line. Kenney, like
Brock, was quickly subjected to nasty attacks and dropped by the BBC
and U.S. mainstream media as a commentator on the Balkans struggle.
Even Lt. General Michael Rose, the UNPROFOR commander in Sarajevo, was
subjected to slashing attacks by pack members, who resented his
frequent confutations of pack disinformation, and who, as campaigners
for the Bosnian Muslims, were angry at the failure of UNPROFOR to
bomb the Serbs (see Brock's crushing analysis of Peter Jennings'
biased, ignorant and nasty attack on Rose--"The Peacekeepers—How the
UN Failed in Bosnia," ABC, April 24, 1995, at pp. 175-6; and on
Jennings' and ABC's journalistic abuses more broadly, p. 173 ).
Perhaps the most interesting case was that of David Binder, who
writes a Foreword to Brock's book under review here, and who was the
most experienced and knowledgeable New York Times reporter working in
the Balkans in the 1980s and 1990s. Binder, however, was not a party
liner, having witnessed and reported on the Kosovo Albanians attempts
to drive Serbs out of Kosovo in the 1980s and who recognized that
important elements of that community were striving for ethnic
purification. But with the firming up of the party line in the 1990s
his insistence on sometimes reporting items putting the Bosnian
Muslims or Kosovo Albanians in a bad light was looked upon with
disfavor by his editors. In one notorious case discussed by Brock,
Binder wrote an article based on the testimony of numerous qualified
UN and military insiders that pointed to the Bosnian Muslims as the
source of the bomb that killed mainly Bosnian Muslim civilians in
Sarajevo in the Markale market bombing of February 5, 1994, but which
helped sell more aggressive NATO actions against the Serbs. The Times
refused to publish the article, which forced Binder to resort to a
Swiss newspaper, Die Weltwoche and the journal Foreign Policy
("Anatomy of a Massacre," Winter 1994-95).
Eventually Binder was removed from reporting on the Balkans in favor
of reporters like Roger Cohen, Carlotta Gall, Marlise Simons, and John
F. Burns, who were prepared to toe the party line--and sometimes
disseminated lies, but only lies that reinforced the party line and
its biases (see the discussion of John F. Burns below). The treatment
of Binder was reminiscent of the removal of Raymond Bonner from
reporting on Central America in the 1980s, after Bonner failed to stop
sending in copy on the murderous operations of the U.S.-supported
Salvadoran army. The firing of Bonner was widely seen as a warning to
journalist deviationists; the removal of Binder and the attacks on
Brock and Kenney had a similar chilling effect.
Under the pack system, and with the triumph of the demonization
process and simple Manichean world view of the struggle, there was a
massive voluntary embedding and collapse of journalistic standards.
The rush was on to illustrate villainy at all costs, a process also
notorious at the end of the Kosovo war in June 1999 when NATO-country
pack journalists rushed into Kosovo searching for rape victims, dead
bodies, and stories of Serb atrocities. In this environment
journalistic fraud flourishes and gullibility is great, making the
journalists sitting ducks for interested propagandists. If Bosnian
Muslim officials claimed 200,000 Bosnian Muslim victims in 1992-1993,
that was swallowed uncritically by the media (and Clinton) despite
implausibility, inconsistencies, and doubts expressed by the likes of
George Kenney. This figure persists up to today--see the editorials
"Bosnia, 10 Years Later" in the New York Times, Nov. 25, 2005 and
"Bosnia's Slow Progress," Washington Post, Nov. 29--despite
repudiation even by ICTY-sponsored sources, which have lowered the
number for deaths on all sides, civilian and military, to something
like 100,000. (See the Tabeau/Biljac study cited earlier.) We may
recall the history of the figure of 2 million murdered by the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, first provided by Jean Lacouture in early 1977,
then acknowledged by him to have been created out of the whole cloth,
but accepted and persisting up to today. The rule for demonized
enemies is that the worst is believable and can be institutionalized
even if demonstrably fraudulent.
Brock shows that it was a regular practice for the media to swallow
and transmit without verification Bosnian Muslim official and even
ham radio station claims of deaths in various battle zones. These were
almost always inflated or entirely false, but the media took the bait,
and while disappointed to find later that they had been gulled,
neither issued corrections nor learned to be cautious. There were no
real costs for the journalists or media in making errors damaging to
the demonized enemy
Brock is at his best in analyzing the work of John F. Burns of the
New York Times and Roy Gutman of Newsday, who shared the 1993 Pulitzer
Prize for journalism for their work in Bosnia. Brock shows that this
award is a perfect manifestation of the corruption of the "journalism
of attachment" and of the Pulitzer award system, which is an index of
the corruption of journalism more broadly. The Burns case is the
more dramatic, and even funny, as Burns got the award based in large
part on a long Times article that focused on the confession of a
Bosnian Serb prisoner of the Muslims, Borislav Herak, who confessed
to having murdered 29 Muslims and raped eight women. Burns's article
was billed as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have
died in Bosnia."
Burns, who was well-known at the time to be an Izetbegovic favorite,
had been given quick access to Herak, along with a Soros-funded
movie-maker (whose presence at the interrogation was never
acknowledged in the Burns report). Herak appeared very frightened,
told his story to Burns "partly in the presence of prison officials,"
and after one session asked Burns to get the prison authorities to
promise not to beat him after his testimony! There was no
corroborating evidence in corpses or eyewitnesses to his alleged
crimes, and a fellow Bosnian Serb arrested with Herak had said right
away that Herak was lying. Both Burns and the movie-maker suppressed
the fact that Herak had accused UNPROFOR head, Canadian General Lewis
MacKenzie, of having raped Bosnian women in a local bordello. Burns
acknowledged to MacKenzie that this would reduce Herak's credibility
and spoil the story, but he suppressed the information in violation of
professional standards and in support of lies that he should have
known were lies.
Several years later Herak recanted, claiming that he had been tortured
and forced to memorize his confession lines. Shortly after this
admission two of his alleged murder victims turned up alive. The
Times, in reporting on the appearance of the two supposed Herak
victims, said that this was an embarrassment to the Bosnian Muslim
government, but it found nothing embarrassing in the incident to the
New York Times, and there has been no move by the Pulitzer award
committee to remove Burns' Pulitzer award based on a confession under
torture with compromising evidence suppressed.
Brock has quite a few other illustrations of Burns' violations of
journalistic ethics. Burns pioneered in alleging 200,000 Muslim deaths
in the warfare as early as July 1993, up from his estimate in April of
140,000; and, "venturing less and less outside Sarajevo, [Burns]
consistently reported the government's inflated casualty counts during
the war." On the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour (Jan. 10, 1994) Burns upped
the ante to 300,000 killed and 900,000 wounded. (For other Burns lies,
misrepresentations and suppressions of evidence, pp. 77-80, 187.)
Brock's analysis of the work of Roy Gutman is equally devastating. He
shows compellingly that Gutman was not A Witness to Genocide (the
title of Gutman 1993 book based on his dispatches from Bosnia), but
rather an agent of propaganda provided, directly or indirectly, by
parties with an axe to grind. Many of his sources were not witnesses
but purveyors of hearsay evidence from alleged witnesses. Gutman
treated his sources uncritically; even speaking at one point of
"reliable rumors." He rarely demanded--and even more rarely obtained
and supplied--any corroboration to allegations of Serb abuse. If the
Bosnian Muslims and Croats claimed 100,000 prisoners in Serb prison
camps that was enough for Gutman; the fact that the Red Cross
estimated that there were only some 10,000 prisoners in the camps of
the Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims taken together was of no
interest to him; their finding meant that his preferred larger number
was "unconfirmed." His business was making the case against the bad
guys, and he didn't just cut corners in making that case, with the
help of his badly compromised sources he wrote works of fiction that
had some "unconfirmed" elements of reality.
Gutman located most of his sources with the help of Croatian, Bosnian
Muslim and U.S. Embassy intermediaries, most extensively from the
Croatian Information Center (CIC), a government propaganda agency
whose work Gutman found to be "more or less scholarly." Gutman
claimed to have met a major propaganda agent of the CIC, and Gutman
source, Jadranka Cigelj, "by chance," but he admits to having gotten a
number of witnesses (or purveyors of witness hearsay) from Croatian
"charitable foundations" and the U.S. embassy. As one critical
journalist (Joan Phillips) put it, his death camp stories "are based
on very few accounts from alleged survivors. They rely on hearsay and
double hearsay. They are given the stamp of authority by speculation
and surmise from officials."
Gutman was very free in using analogies to Belsen, Auschwitz and
references to "death camps" and "concentration camps,"
"deportations," and estimates of Serb death camp killings running up
to 5,000, although his word usage and numbers varied based on probable
audience knowledge and receptivity. The lack of scruple here was
marked, and misstatements were frequent. "It was like Jews being
deported to Auschwitz" was a lie, as there was no evidence whatsoever
that Bosnian Muslims moved around by the Serbs were going to gas
chambers. Phillips notes that the 350 journalists who rushed into
Bosnia looking for death camps "didn't find them, nor did they find
any evidence that they existed." There was in fact never any evidence
that treatment in the Bosnian Serb camps was any worse than that in
the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim camps, that were of no interest to Gutman.
Brock's detailed analysis of Gutman's work (pp. 87-116) is a
compelling study in journalistic malpractice that should by read by
every student of the media, especially given the fact that the
outrageous performance that Brock describes here resulted in a
Pulitzer prize, shared by Gutman's rival in disinformation John F.
Burns! Gutman didn't relish any analysis by Brock, warning him by
e-mail that his Witness to Genocide could "not be quoted under any
circumstances." He didn't even relish exposure at the Hague, refusing
to testify there, where he would have had to deal with cross-examination.
Brock's book has many other good things in it, like a discussion of
the role of George Soros, public relations firms, Germany, the
Vatican, and of course the Tribunal as an instrument of NATO. It is a
very important work filling a needed gap in the critical literature on
the Balkans wars and enlightening on the work of the mainstream media.
It is a sad commentary on the intellectual culture that this book,
like that of Johnstone and Mandel, which contests an institutionalized
party line, will be ignored in the mainstream.
Equally troubling, just as neither Johnstone nor Mandel was reviewed
in the supposedly "left" Nation, In These Times, Progressive, and
Mother Jones, there is a good chance that Brock will join them in
being bypassed in favor of less "controversial" works. This is a
testimonial to the ability of imperialism to make an official party
line on an imperial project unchallengeable even on its purported
left. This is hegemony at its finest.
--- End forwarded message ---