<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML> The excerpt below is from John Pilger's assessment of contemporary journalistic practice which appears in the current edition of The New Statesman.  The full text, which begins with refutations of two Blairite attacks on Pilger's integrity is here: <A HREF="http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199907120012.htm">Propaganda Dressed as Journalism</A>                          <<It is this dissembling and hypocrisy, wedded to a born-again, deeply                          reactionary world-view, that inspires the "new moral cause" announced by                          Blair. The spun truth of its application in the Balkans is now unravelling                          for all to see, as it usually does when the media pack departs. Few now                          doubt that the Rambouillet talks were a set-up, used to "deliberately set                          the bar higher than the Serbs could accept", a US State Department official                          has now admitted. The terms that the Serbs accepted in June were virtually                          the same as those they themselves offered before the bombings began.                          <<The whole bloody travesty was almost certainly avoidable. Thousands of                          men, women and children, including those Kosovars Nato was claiming                          to "save", would now be alive were it not for the post-cold-war                          machinations of American power, egged on by Blair, Robertson and Cook                          with their few ageing Harrier aircraft and squadrons of propagandists. Ian                          Black, the Guardian's man at the Foreign Office, who reported the                          Rambouillet talks, admitted that he never read the Rambouillet document                          in full.                         <<Now that reverse ethnic cleansing is under way in Kosovo, under Nato                          auspices, the drums are silent. No one is putting out more flags as                          thousands of Shea's "missing" Albanians have been "found" in their                          homes. Terrible events occurred, but nothing is what it seemed, as we                          shall continue to find out. Those who indulged Shea's deceptions, Blair's                          scripted histrionics and Clare Short's on-cue buffoonery misled the public:                          the antithesis of their remit. In a memorable piece in the Independent last                          week, Robert Fisk described vividly the flocks of sheep who reported Shea                          without a "baa". For Fisk, it was an especially angry piece, and rightly so.                          Like him, I have reported numerous wars and upheavals for more than 30                          years, and I have known nothing to compare with the sheer intensity of                          this propaganda dressed as journalism.                          <<Fisk has since been subjected to an insidious McCarthyism we have grown                          used to, that of personalised abuse and smear, with one sheep last Sunday                          plying schoolboy gossip suggesting that our greatest war correspondent                          was a Serb apologist. Fisk need not worry. Truth may be the first casualty;                          it is seldom the last.>>  </HTML>