Issue #07/62, April 8 - 21, 1999  

by Matt Taibbi

American coverage of the NATO air attack against Yugoslavia is continuing to prove that the United States is much better at being the Soviet Union than the Soviet Union ever was.

Independently of each other, and without being directly coerced by the U.S. government itself, virtually every major American television network and print publication has allowed the White House to define the terms of all discussion surrounding the bombing. What they have all done is allow an essentially fraudulent conception of the entire Kosovo military operation to serve as the foundation upon which all the critical reporting and commentary related to the war rests, resulting in blown coverage from start to finish.

During the Vietnam war, throughout virtually the entire conflict, not a single mainstream press outlet thought to ask out loud whether or not we should even be in Vietnam, or whether we had any moral right to be there. The press never thought to challenge the government's contention that it was not the aggressor in South Vietnam, even though there was clear evidence that the concept of a defense of the Democratic South Vietnamese government was as much a fiction, say, as the Soviet defense of Afghanistan. Instead, the main questions the press asked, when it decided to question the war effort at all, were these: are our tactics working? Is the war unwinnable? Will we fail despite having had the best intentions for the Vietnamese people?

The same process is now underway with the coverage of Kosovo. Not a single mainstream press outlet has bothered to ask the right questions out loud. The only questions that have arisen in mainstream press coverage are exactly the ones the government wants us to ask, mainly, "Is there ethnic cleansing going on in Kosovo? If there is, what is the best way to stop it, since we have a clear moral obligation to do so?" Or: "Is the air attack working, and if not, should we invade with ground troops?"

Here's a typical lead from a typical Washington pool report, by Charles Babington of the Washington Post:

"WASHINGTON - With polls showing that a narrow majority of Americans support his handling of the Kosovo situation, President Bill Clinton is sticking steadfastly to using air strikes alone to combat Serbian aggression, despite reports of atrocities committed against Kosovar civilians."

Babington's lead is little more than an outright apology for Clinton's stance on the bombing. Like virtually every other reporter covering this business, he focuses obediently on the two pet government themes, which are: 1) NOT whether or not military action is appropriate at all, but what KIND of military action is appropriate. 2) NOT whether or not we have a good enough reason to be attacking Yugoslavia, but HOW SUCCESSFUL our attack has been in halting ethnic cleansing.

Babington also goes out of his way to juxtapose the U.S. air strikes with the phrase "Serbian aggression", so that the reader does not identify the United States as the aggressor--despite the fact that the U.S. meets the definition of the aggressor in this conflict in every sense of the word. We attacked first; we bombed a foreign country in a purely offensive manner, without having ourselves been threatened in any way. The idea that Serbia is the "aggressor" against NATO by virtue of its repressive ethnic cleansing policies is bogus on its face; if we were to regard every country that repressed or slaughtered ethnic minorities as military aggressors against us, we'd be at war with dozens of countries right now. Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Bhutan...we wouldn't have time to reach them all every day. We'd have to do it in shifts.

But Babington buys the "Serb aggressor" line, and now his readers will, too. After hearing it often enough in coverage like his, the only question which will ultimately interest American audiences is whether or not there is ethnic cleansing going on, and how effective we're being in stopping it. And once that premise has been set, no other questions will be let in. Here's a more recent lead, from a Tuesday front-page story by Anne E. Kornblut of the Boston Globe:

WASHINGTON - US military officials said yesterday they have gathered the first clear proof of ethnic roundups, including pictures of Kosovar Albanians being herded onto Yugoslav roads and marched out of the country. '

Kornblut, like most of the rest of the press corps, has taken last week's Babington model and one-upped it. Not only does she let the government ask the questions, but she lets it answer them. The "news" in her article is the revelation that the Pentagon had obtained a fuzzy photograph which it insisted showed evidence of Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians, although what was in the picture was by no means obvious to the lay observer. As corroboration of the story, she turns to--you guessed it--U.S. government spokesmen. Here's the breakdown of the sources quoted in her story, noting how many times each source was quoted:

U.S. Government: Bill Clinton (3 times); Defense Secretary William Cohen (Twice); "Officials" (Once); Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon (Twice); U.S. War Crimes Investigator David Scheffer (Twice); State Department spokesman James Rubin (Twice); NATO Air Commodore David Wilby (Once); Madeline Albright (Once); The "UN High Commissioner on Refugees" (Once)

Serbia: Slobodan Milosevic (Once; two words in rebuttal) Of the 1,113 words in Kornblut's story, 1,090 are devoted to information obtained from U.S. Government sources. Only 23 are used to sum up Milosevic's response to the ethnic cleansing charges (U.S. is "aggressor" and "criminal"), and even those 23 are shouted down by a macho follow-up quote by Clinton, who is allowed to get in the last word.

If such pure spoon-fed jingoism wasn't transparent enough, some news outlets allowed themselves a few deliberate liberties with the truth in the service of the war. Here's the CNN Website's "Timeline" entry regarding the KLA:

When CNN drew up this timeline, the KLA's links to heroin dealing, as well as its Marxist-Leninist origins, had already been well-documented in the Times of London, as well as the New York Times. Not to mention that, and simply call them a "small militant group", is an obvious and ridiculous attempt to whitewash the past of our local allies in Albania. It's worth noting, incidentally, that only a handful of American newspapers even bothered reporting the background on the KLA's communist past.

That's war reporting, American style. First, you let the government tell you the plot. Then you let it fill in the dialogue. And then, when holes form in its story, you fill them in. The Soviets couldn't have done it better. In fact, they didn't. Russians under communism at least knew their newspapers were a bunch of lies. How many Americans know the truth about theirs?