Bill Fancher wrote:
> I've been wallowing in "appalling, oozing self-righteousness" and am
> delighted that Dr. K. finds it objectionable. My impression is that
> most
> on this list agree with him, Buchannan, Safire, Helms, Lott, Will,
> Limbaugh, etc. Strange company for "leftists".
>
> To me, the most puzzling aspect of all this is that "the left"
> believes
> U.S. media coverage favored NATO. That was not my impression. I've
> since
> heard it claimed that, in fact, Serbian propaganda recieved more
> airtime
> than NATO propaganda did. This seems to be supported by the fact that
> only 40% of the public believes NATO "won" in Kosovo. Where is FAIR?
>
>
FAIR is right here, Bill. We've done a lot of work on the media's coverage of Kosovo over the past few months -- but we've come to sharply different conclusions than yours.
(You can check out what we've written at http://www.fair.org/international/yugoslavia.html).
It seems unlikely that the U.S. media could have been a conduit of pro-Serb propaganda while simultaneously condemning the entire ethnicity as a race of genocidal psychopaths. Maybe you missed the New York Times Week In Review article on "How to Cleanse Serbia," nearly genocidal in its tone (whose author, the awful Blaine Harden, has recently been rewarded by being made Belgrade correspondent); or maybe the chorus of commentators urging NATO to commit war crimes against Serb civilians, on the assumption of collective guilt, including the Times' Foreign Affairs Columnist, Thomas Friedman.
As for the public's belief that NATO hasn't won a victory, it only makes sense. The war was presented to them as a humanitarian effort to end an episode of ghastly barbarism not seen since the Holocaust. Therefore, the public rightly judged it by humanitarian criteria. There was no way to spin the fact that the refugees left Kosovo in greater numbers after the bombing began than before. There was no way to frame the deaths of 80 ethnic Albanian refugees in a convoy near Djakovica or 100 ethnic Albanian displaced persons huddled in Korisa -- both by NATO missiles -- as a heroic rescue.
But the public were also given a picture of Serbia and the Serbs that was manufactured strictly for propaganda purposes -- that is, no nuance, no irony, only a nation of monsters bent on exterminating their neighbors. The media refused to treat the pre-March 24 Kosovo conflict as what it was: a totally unremarkable counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in widespread human abuses. That would be too banal, would not have produced the proper pro-war response, and might involve unpleasant comparisons with similar situations elsewhere in the world. Instead, there was a shameful abuse of the concept of genocide.
And I won't even get into the momumental distortion in the coverage of the diplomacy.
Seth Ackerman
Media Analyst
FAIR
www.fair.org