AUTHOR,
AUTHOR!
The
media did not simply allow itself to be deceived – they
were active participants and the authors of this deception.
Journalists were not only willing instruments of NATO but
functioned as a kind of Greek chorus for the most extreme
wing of the War Party: during the latter stages of the conflict,
they ceaselessly
and shamelessly
bombarded officials with different variations of a single
question: "Isn't
it time to bring in the ground troops?" Now that the truth,
or at least some of it, is beginning to come out, are they
fessing up to their role as the courtier press, and beating
their breasts with a thousand mea culpas? Of course
not.
THE
NERVE
Not
only are they refusing to acknowledge their pernicious role
as frontline soldiers in NATO's war on the truth, but they
actually have the nerve to take umbrage at their postwar critics,
such as Philip Knightley, who has called the Kosovo war "a
disaster for journalism." During the war, Knightley –
the author of The
First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker,
which has just come out in a new edition including sections
on the Gulf War and Kosovo – saw through the barrage
of propaganda and predicted
that we would arrive at precisely this pass:
"The
theory at briefings is simply (to) appear open, transparent
and eager to help. Never go in for summary repression or direct
control; nullify rather than conceal undesirable news; control
the emphasis rather than the facts; balance bad news with
good and lie directly only when you are certain the lie won't
be found out during the course of the war. Looking back on
history we see that these sorts of lies often don't surface
until too late to make any difference to the outcome. Five,
10 years or 20 years later you suddenly discover the people
you trusted to tell you what was happening were lying to you."
DOWN
THE MEMORY HOLE
Knightley
recently
appeared before the Freedom Forum, a gathering of journalists
sponsored by a group devoted to maintaining the integrity
of the news media and its independence from governments, where
he made his "disaster" comment – to a storm of protests
from a mob of government toadies masquerading as the Fourth
Estate. "I'm afraid truth was the first casualty in the reporting
of the war in Kosovo, as it is in every war," said Knightley,
warning that unless journalists developed some form of institutional
memory to remind them of the lessons learned in previous wars,
his was a "gloomy assessment of the future of war reporting."
Michael Jermey of Britain's ITN had the temerity to stand
up and declare: "I think, in the Kosovo conflict, television
journalists from a lot of organizations did some very good
work trying to get at the truth." This from the representative
of a "news" organization that not only falsified
reports of an alleged Bosnian "concentration camp" with
its infamous "Photo
that Fooled the World," but launched a malicious
campaign to silence
its critics and cover-up its own complicity
in the selling of an immoral and increasingly disastrous war.
Are we to be spared nothing? The report did not mention
whether Jermey said it with a straight face. But I am willing
to bet that he did. In the Orwellian world in which we are
living, it brings to mind a quote from Eric
Blair's novel, 1984:
"It
was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you
were in any public place or within range of a telescreen.
The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an
unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything
that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having
something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression
on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even
a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime." [page
54]
THE
BRAZEN ONES
Mr.
Jermey was not alone in his brazenness. The shills for NATO's
lies were in an uproar at this conference, with Mark Laity,
a former BBC correspondent who made the effortless transition
to being a deputy to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, demanded that
Knightley withdraw a comment that he, Laity, had become a
"propagandist for NATO." In a heated reply, Knightley refused.
Addressing the conclave by telephone from Brussels, Laity
burbled: "I think the important thing [in assessing coverage
of the Kosovo conflict] is honest intent. Now, NATO didn't
get it right all the time, but I didn't believe then and I
don't believe now they were deliberately lying ... NATO was
trying as far as it could to get it right, and Belgrade wasn't."
NATO's intent can be seen as we witness the consolidation
of KLA rule in Kosovo, and as NATO troops invade the so-called
demilitarized zone. A pretext for a renewed war is in the
making; in light of this, the debate at the conference, and
Knightley's remarks, are particularly ominous.
RAH,
RAH, SIS BOOM BAH
The
media, far from beating their breasts or even admitting that
there is a lesson to be learned, seem content with their role
as cheerleading rather than reporting the war. In response
to Knightley's denunciation of the Western media as little
more than the journalistic division of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, the cry went up: "What about Paul Watson's
reporting for the Los Angeles Times?" But Watson's
fearlessly honest dispatches – filed from inside Kosovo
during the war – stand out precisely because he is the
exception that proves the rule. Such weak apologias merely
served to underscore the trenchant point made by Knightley:
that the objective of the War Party in the media was to create
two illusions – that the facts about the war were actually
being reported, and that everything coming out of Belgrade
could be dismissed out of hand. At the height of the media-generated
war hysteria, the Freedom Forum reported Knightley's vigorous
dissent:
"The
hard facts on the battleground are simply not there and the
hard facts in the newspapers are not there. Again it's opinion
pieces or supposition,' he said. A second illusion that had
taken hold was a more dangerous one, Knightley said. This
was the idea put forth by NATO and Pentagon spokesmen that
'we as spokesmen for our side will always tell you the truth
and that Belgrade on the other hand will only pump out propaganda.'"
KNIGHTLEY
VINDICATED
The
assembled servitors of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton never laid
a glove on Knightley: the closest they got was with one Nancy
Durham of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., who claimed that
Knightley had erred in discussing her reporting from Kosovo.
Durham, it seems, had reported the story of a young woman
who claimed her young sister had been mercilessly slaughtered
by Serbs. Vengeance, the young woman movingly explained, was
her motive in joining the KLA, and the resulting CBC report
was part of a larger campaign to depict our noble allies in
a favorable light. As it turned out, however, the woman had
made up her story out of whole cloth – like so many of
the stories told by the KLA and their recruits among the refugees,
that were transcribed word-for-word by the Western media and
reported as fact. Durham reported the deception in a later
story, but Knightley apparently failed to note this in the
new edition of his book or to contact her. In graciously conceding
his error, however, Knightley once again is vindicated in
his prediction that one day, "five, ten, or twenty years later,"
we would be sitting around trying to figure out how they got
away with it.
THE
ROLE OF THE INTERNET
Knightley's
prediction was essentially correct, but please note that he
was off by quite a few years, and this brings me to a crucial
point: Knightley's pessimism about the future of wartime reporting
may be true when it comes to the Old Media, and in that I
am including the Internet editions of most of the old print-and-telecast
news organizations. But the reality is that it is not five,
ten, or twenty years later that a revised history of the Kosovo
war and its coverage by the media is being put together, piece
by piece, but only a year has passed – and already most
of the pieces of the puzzle have been put together and made
public. Nearly the whole truth is out – thanks almost
entirely to the power and reach of the Internet and Internet-based
institutions and news organizations, which has created a climate
of public opinion increasingly hostile to any further intervention
in Kosovo. The interventionists may have "won" the war on
the ground in Kosovo, but they are losing the battle for hearts
and minds on the home front.
IT
ISN'T TOO LATE TO STOP THE MADNESS
Even
as the Republicans
in the House join their Clintonian compadres in a vote
to fund Clinton's war in Kosovo – and make a new outbreak
almost inevitable – opposition is building in the Senate.
It isn't too late to stop this mad plunge into the European
quagmire – but if we do fall into that particular abyss,
we'll know who to blame, now, won't we? Trent Lott will have
a lot to answer for if and when the body bags start coming
home. The blood of American and Serbian patriots will be on
his hands, as well as on Clinton's and the Democrats, if he
goes along with Clinton's Kosovo adventure. This could have
a huge impact on the presidential race, with Reform Party
candidate Pat Buchanan appealing to the huge antiwar majority
– and racking up millions of votes on the strength of
that issue alone.
GOTTA
LOTTA
Lott's
complicity in sending billions to Kosovo would be compounded
by the treachery of the Republican House leadership: Speaker
Hastert made a personal appeal on behalf of the President's
bill. Worse, the Speaker and his enforcers led the effort
to kill a proposed amendment that would have required the
President to order the "safe, orderly and phased withdrawal"
of the US occupation force by June 1 if the Europeans don't
start paying out millions of dollars in pledges to fund the
Kosovo operation. The amendment failed, 219-200. If Senator
Lott caves in to the tremendous pressure from Establishment
types in the GOP, as well as the White House, then he is running
the risk of tying the Kosovo albatross around the neck of
his own party during a crucial election year. Does he really
want to hand this issue over to Pat Buchanan – and perhaps
deprive Boy Dubya of his hereditary right to put his presidential
feet up on the desk in the Oval Office? You gotta lotta things
to think about, Senator Lott – and if I were you, I would
ponder long and hard.
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