[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1282-E1285]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CRISIS IN KOSOVO (ITEM NO. 10) REMARKS BY JEFF COHEN OF FAIRNESS &
ACCURACY IN REPORTING (FAIR)
______
HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH
of ohio
in the house of representatives
Wednesday, June 16, 1999
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, on May 20, 1999, I joined with
Representative Cynthia A. McKinney, Representative Barbara Lee,
Representative John Conyers and Representative Peter DeFazio in hosting
the fourth in a series of Congressional Teach-In sessions on the Crisis
in Kosovo. If a lasting peace is to be achieved in the region, it is
essential that we cultivate a consciousness of peace and actively
search for creative solutions. We must construct a foundation for peace
through negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.
Part of the dynamic of peace is willingness to engage in meaningful
dialogue, to listen to one another openly and to share our views in a
constructive manner. I hope that these Teach-In sessions will
contribute to this process by providing a forum for Members of Congress
and the public to explore options for a peaceful resolution. We will
hear from a variety of speakers on different sides of the Kosovo
situation. I will be introducing Congressional Record transcripts of
their remarks and essays that shed light on the many dimensions of the
crisis.
This presentation is by Jeff Cohen, a columnist and commentator who
is founder of the organization Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).
Mr. Cohen appeared at this Teach-In with Seth Ackerman, a Media Analyst
at FAIR. Mr. Cohen is the author of four books and appears regularly as
a panelist on Fox News Watch. He has also served as a co-host of CNN's
Crossfire. Prior to launching FAIR in 1986, Mr. Cohen worked in Los
Angeles as a journalist and a lawyer for the ACLU.
[[Page E1283]]
Mr. Cohen presents a superb critique of how the media is covering the
War in Yugoslavia, describing the importance of the words and concepts
that are being deployed. He talks about the reluctance of the media to
even use the term ``War,'' and the concerted attempt to demonize
Slobodan Milosevic. He decries the fact that the media has not paid
sufficient attention to the legality of the war, the destruction of the
civilian infrastructure, and the steady stream of NATO propaganda that
the media has adopted without question. Following this presentation are
several documents--one from London's The Independent Newspaper and the
other from FAIR--which further document these points.
Presentation by Jeff Cohen of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
It's not a glamorous job, but someone has to monitor
Geraldo and Christopher Matthews every night, and that's what
we do at FAIR. Seth Ackerman, my colleague, and I, and a
bunch of staff members monitor the nightly news, the talk
shows, the print press.
We were monitoring Chris Matthews on May 4, and he was
railing against President Clinton for trying to dump the war
and its failures on Secretary of State Albright. Matthews
questions ``is that gentlemanly conduct, to dump this on a
woman?'' It was the same show when he was interviewing
Senator McCain and Matthews said, ``Are we going back to that
old notion of the president as a leader, not a consensus
builder?` Senator McCain: ``I hope so.'' Matthews: ``John
Wayne, rather than Jane Fonda?'' McCain: ``That's my only
chance.'' Matthews: ``Cause, you mean, you're not running as
Alan Alda here?'' Senator McCain: ``No.'' Matthews: ``You're
running as John Wayne, more or less.'' McCain: ``That's the
only way I can succeed.'' Matthews: ``Well, you're doing
well. Thank you Senator McCain.'' That's what we call a
journalistic wet kiss. It's particularly unusual here from
two guys who are trying to be so macho at the time.
The first problem with the war coverage is that many
mainstream media outlets, especially network TV, are loathe
to even call it a war. It reminds me of the first day of the
Panama invasion before the government had signaled to the
media that it was ok to call it an invasion. So you had
mainstream media calling it a military action, an
intervention, an operation, an expedition, a military affair.
One TV anchor even referred to it as an insertion. I think
that a more accurate explanation might be ``the most unusual
and violent drug bust in human history''--but no one put that
heading on it.
So look at today. What are the logos? CNN: `Strike against
Yugoslavia.' Fox News: `Conflict in Kosovo.' The Consensus
winner used at CBS, NBC, and ABC: `Crisis in Kosovo.' I would
argue that there had been a crisis in Kosovo. It went on
throughout 1998, but no one in any of these networks could
find time for even a one hour special on what was then a
crisis in Kosovo. That's because that was the year of
``All Monica, All The time.'' So when there was just a
``crisis in Kosovo,'' TV didn't cover it. Now that it's a
war, TV won't acknowledge it's a war. The White House and
the State Department will not use the word ``war''--and
then the media adopt the euphemisms from the government,
they're acting more as a fourth branch of government than
they are as a fourth estate, and that's very dangerous.
We need only think back to the early years of the 1960s
when U.S. government officials would refer to Vietnam as a
``police action.'' At best it was the ``Vietnam conflict.''
And in the early years of the 1960s many mainstream media
followed the government lie and did not call it a war until
many American soldiers began dying. So words matter.
Then we have the problem with this war of who the enemy is.
As usual in our mainstream media, the U.S. is not making a
war against a country, Yugoslavia, but against one
individual. His name is Slobodan Milosevic. On TV the air war
is not something that's terrorizing lots of people in what
were once modern cities. It's basically a personalized soap
opera. You had Catherine Crier on Fox News on May 5,
seemingly with a broad smile on her face, saying ``The
bombing intensifies. Just how much can Slobodon stand?''
Anchors talk to military experts about how badly Milosevic
has been hurt, how badly he has been humiliated. You'll hear
an anchor say to a military expert, ``How much have we
punished Milosevic?,'' and you expect that the anchor might
get up from behind the anchor desk and show that they're
wearing a U.S. Air Force uniform, but they're not. They're
using the term ``we'' as if they're an adjunct to the
military.
We heard the same thing during the Iraq war. ``How much are
we punishing, humiliating, hurting Saddam Hussein?'' We know
now that probably one of the only people in all of Iraq who
was assured of a safe place to sleep and three square meals a
day, and a warm home, was Saddam Hussein. And similarly,
Milosevic may well be one of the most safe and secure people
in Yugoslavia today.
Now the understandable goal of the White House and the
State Department and their propaganda is to demonize
Milosevic. Propaganda simplifies issues as it tries to
mobilize action. But journalism is supposed to be about
covering a story in all its complexity. On that score,
Journalism has largely failed. You'll remember the Newsweek
cover photograph, with the picture of Milosevic and the
headline: ``The Face of Evil'' Then you had the Time magazine
writer who writes about Milosevic almost as a sub-human--with
``reddish,'' piggy eyes set in a big, round, head.'' Now,
assumedly, Milosevic had the ``reddish, piggy eyes set in a
big, round, head'' going back many, many years. But it's only
when the American war machine goes into war mode that this
particular writer at Time magazine goes into war propaganda
mode.
The good news with the end of the Lewinsky story is it
ended the wall-to-wall parade of attorneys. The bad news,
with the beginning of this war, is we've begun the wall-to-
wall parade of military analysts. On March 24th, for example,
Margaret Warner introduced her PBS NewsHour panel with, ``We
get four perspectives now on NATO's mission and options from
four retired military leaders.''
The problem with retired generals is that they're rarely
independent experts. They have a tendency to become overly
enthusiastic about how smart and accurate our weapons are.
You remember all the false hype from the militar experts
during the Guld War about the Patriot missile, a missile that
was an object failure during that war. And you might remember
NBC News did a blowing report about the Patriot, and Tom
Brokaw said it was ``the missile that put the Iraqi Scud in
its place.'' Completely false. Brokaw neglected to mention
that his boss, General Electric, made parts for the Patriot
missile, as if makes engines for many of the aircraft like
the Apache helicopters that are in the Balkans right now.
Military experts don't remember that it was only last
summer when a cruise missile aimed at an alleged terrorist
train camp in Afghanistan went four hundred miles off course
into the wrong country the country of Pakistan. If we think
about it, in the last nine months, the United States has
bombed four countries intentionally. It's also important to
remember that the U.S. has bombed an equal number of
countries by mistake.
Military experts know a lot about anti-aircraft
technologies, they know a lot about bomb yields, but they
don't know much about the politics or history of the region.
What's needed more in the mainstream media are experts on
Yugoslavia and the Balkans.
And what we need is a real debate about the war. Because of
the split among the politicians here in Washington, there's
been slightly more debate over the war, for example, the Gulf
War. That's not really saying a lot. Our organization, FAIR,
has posted on our website (www.fair.org) a full study of two
prestigious TV news shows and the range of debate or non-
debate during the first two weeks of this war. I'm talking
about PBS's NewsHour and ABC's Nighline. If you look at that
study, you'll see that in the first two weeks of this war,
opposition to the bomb war was virtually inaudible and when
it was heard it was mostly expressed by Yugoslav government
officials with thick accents, or Serbian Americans. On
Nightline there was only one panelist who was critical of the
bombing, and that a Yugoslav government official.
It's partly because of the marginalization of substantive
critics of the war that there has been not enough attention
in the mainstream media focused even on the legality of this
war under international law. What will happen under our
Constitution next Tuesday when the sixty day period elapses
on the War Powers Act and President Clinton has not won
Congressional authorization? That should be an issue that's a
raging debate in the American media today. I haven't even
seen it in a footnote in today's newspapers. Maybe I missed
one.
There's been not enough attention paid in the mainstream
media to the environmental damage in the region from U.S.
bombs striking petrochemical factories and fertilizer
facilities and oil refineries.
There has been not enough attention in the mainstream media
paid to NATO's targeting of civilian infrastructure. Whether,
for example, the bombing of the broadcast stations, which is
a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, was really aimed
at keeping video of NATO's civilian victims off the
television sets in the western countries. I have a hunch that
was its real motive.
Not enough mainsteam media attention has been paid to the
use, or possible use, by the United States of radioactive
depleted uranium rounds.
Not enough attention has been paid to NATO's propaganda,
and a steady stream of claims that have turned out to be
false. The Independent newspaper, based in London, on April
6, 1999, published an article collecting about eight of these
falsehoods. I would argue that from our monitoring, the
mainstream media in Europe have been more independent in
their coverage of this war, more skeptical in their coverage
of this war, than the U.S. mainstream media.
And there has not been enough attention paid to the events
immediately before the war. The best estimate of how many
people had died in Kosovo in all of 1998 was 2000 people.
That's a serious human rights crisis. It's also less than the
number of people who died in homicides in New York City in
1992. We need to look at the events that immediately led up
to this war.
[[Page E1284]]
____
[From the Independent, April 6, 1999]
A War of Words and Pictures
Nato casts doubt on the veracity of Yugoslav war reporting, but is our
own media any less guilty of propaganda?
(By Philip Hammond)
It takes two sides to fight a propaganda war, yet critical
commentary on the ``war of words'' has so far concentrated on
the ``tightly controlled'' Yugoslav media. We have been shown
clips from ``Serb TV'' and invited to scoff at their
patriotic military montages, while British journalists cast
doubt on every Yugoslav ``claim''.
But whatever one thinks of the Yugoslav media they pale
into insignificance alongside the propaganda offensive from
Washington, Brussels and London.
``They tell lies about us, we will go on telling the truth
about them,'' says Defense Secretary George Robertson.
Really? Nato told us the three captured US servicemen were
United Nations peacekeepers. Not true. They told us they
would show us two captured Yugoslav pilots who have never
appeared. Then we had the story of the ``executed'' Albanian
leaders--including Rambouillet negotiator Fehmi Agani--whose
deaths are now unconfirmed.
When the Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was said to be
in hiding, turned up on Yugoslav television condemning Nato
bombing, the BBC contrived to insinuate that the pictures
were faked, while others suggested Rugova must have been
coerced, blackmailed, drugged, or at least misquoted.
They told us the paramilitary leader Arkan was in Kosovo,
when he was appearing almost daily in Belgrade--and being
interviewed by John Simpson there. They told us Pristina
stadium had been turned into a concentration camp for 100,000
ethnic Albanians, when it was empty. Robertson posing for
photographers in the cockpit of a Harrier can't have been
propaganda. Only the enemy goes in for that sort of thing.
Nato's undeclared propaganda war is two-pronged. First,
Nato has shamelessly sought to use the plight of Albanian
refugees for its own purposes, cynically inflating the number
of displaced people to more than twice the UN estimate.
Correspondents in the region are given star billing on BBC
news, and are required not just to report but to share their
feelings with us. As Peter Sissons asked Ben Brown in
Macedonia: ``Ben, what thoughts go through a reporter's mind
seeing these sights in the dying moments of the 20th
century?''
Reports from the refugee centers are used as justifications
for Nato strategy. The most striking example was the video
footage smuggled out of Kosovo said to show ``mass murder''.
The BBC presented this as the ``first evidence of alleged
atrocities,'' unwittingly acknowledging that the allies had
been bombing for 10 days without any evidence.
Indeed, for days, the BBC had been inviting us to ``imagine
what may be happening to those left in Kosovo''. After
watching the footage, Robin Cook apparently knew who had been
killed, how they had died, and why. Above all, he knew that
the video ``underlines the need for military action''.
The second line of attack is to demonise Milosevic and the
Serbs, in order to deflect worries that the tide of refugees
has been at least partly caused, by Nato's ``humanitarian''
bombing. Parts of Pristina have been flattened after being
bombed every day for more than a week. Wouldn't you leave?
And what about those thousands of Serbian refugees from
Kosovo--are they being ``ethnically cleansed'', too? Sympathy
does not extend to them, just as the 200,000 Serbian refugees
from Krajina were ignored in 1995. Instead, the tabloids
gloat ``Serbs you right'' as the missiles rain down.
The accusations levelled against the Serbs have escalated
from ``brutal repression'' to ``genocide'', ``atrocities''
and ``crimes against humanity'', as Nato has sought to
justify the bombing. Pointed parallels have been drawn with
the Holocaust, yet no one seems to notice that putting people
on a train to the border is not the same as putting them on a
train to Auschwitz.
The media have taken their cue from politicians and left no
cliche unturned in the drive to demonise Milosevic. The
Yugoslav president has been described by the press as a
``Warlord'', the ``Butcher of Belgrade'', ``the most evil
dictator to emerge in Europe since Adolph Hitler'', a ``Serb
tyrant'' a ``psychopathic tyrant'' and a ``former Communist
hard-liner''.
The Mirror also noted significantly that he smokes the same
cigars as Fidel Castro. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein
in the Gulf war, Panorama devoted a programme to ``The Mind
of Milosevic''.
Several commentators have voiced their unease about the
Nato action from the beginning. But press and TV have
generally been careful to keep the debate within parameters
of acceptable discussion, while politicians have stepped up
the demonisation of the Serbs to try to drown out dissenting
voices. The result is a confusingly schizophrenic style of
reporting.
The rules appear to be that one can criticize Nato for not
intervening early enough, not hitting hard enough, or not
sending ground troops. Pointing out that the Nato
intervention has precipitated a far worse crisis than the one
it was supposedly designed to solve or that dropping bombs
kills people are borderline cases, best accompanied by stout
support for ``our boys''. What one must not do is question
the motives for Nato going to war. Indeed, one is not even
supposed to say that Nato is at war. Under image-conscious
New Labour, actually going to war is fine, but using the term
is not politically correct.
The limits of acceptable debate were revealed by the
reaction to the broadcast by SNP leader Alex Salmond. Many of
his criticisms of Nato strategy were little different from
those already raised by others, but what provoked the
Government's outrage was that he dared to compare the Serbs
under Nato bombardment to the British in the Blitz. Tony
Blair denounced the broadcast as ``totally unprincipled'',
while Robin Cook called it ``appalling'', ``irresponsible''
and ``deeply offensive''.
The way Labour politicians have tried to sideline critics
such as Salmond is similar to the way they have sought to
bludgeon public opinion. The fact that Blair has felt it
necessary to stage national broadcasts indicates the
underlying insecurity of a government worried about losing
public support and unsure of either the justification for or
the consequences of its actions.
Audience figures for BBC news have reportedly risen since
the air war began. Yet viewers have been ill-served by their
public service broadcaster. The BBC's monitoring service
suggested that the ``Serb media dances to a patriotic tune''.
Whose tune does the BBC dance to that it reproduces every new
Nato claim without asking for evidence? Just as New Labour
has sought to marginalise its critics, so TV news has barely
mentioned the protests across the world--not just in
Macedonia, Russia, Italy and Greece--but also in Tel Aviv,
Lisbon, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Sydney
and elsewhere. Are we to suppose that these demonstrators are
all Serbs, or that they have been fooled by the ``tightly
controlled'' Yugoslav media?
____
[From the Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, May 5, 1999]
Slanted Sources in NewsHour and Nightline Kosovo Coverage
A FAIR analysis of sources on ABC's Nightline and PBS's
NewsHour during the first two weeks of the bombing of
Yugoslavia found an abundance of representatives of the U.S.
government and NATO, along with many other supporters of the
NATO bombing. Opponents of the airstrikes received scant
attention, however; in almost all stories, debate focused on
whether or not NATO should supplement bombing with ground
troops, while questions about the basic ethics and rationales
of the bombing went largely unasked.
FAIR's survey was based on a search of the Nexis database
for stories on the war between March 25 and April 8,
identifying both guests who were interviewed live and sources
who spoke on taped segments. Sources were classified
according to the institutions or groups they represented, and
by the opinions they voiced on NATO's military involvement in
Yugoslavia.
Of 291 sources that appeared on the two shows during the
study period, only 24--or 8 percent--were critics of the NATO
airstrikes. Critics were 10 percent of sources on the
NewsHour, and only 5 percent on Nightline. Only four critics
appeared live as interview guests on the shows, 6 percent of
all discussion guests. Just one critic appeared as a guest on
Nightline during the entire two-week time period.
The largest single source group, 45 percent, was composed
of current or former U.S. government and military officials,
NATO representatives and NATO troops.
On Nightline, this group accounted for a majority of
sources (55 percent), while providing a substantial 39
percent on the NewsHour. It also provided the largest
percentage of live interviewees: 50 percent on Nightline (six
of 12) and 42 percent on the NewsHour (24 of 57). (Numerous
U.S. aviators who appeared on Nightline's 3/29/99 edition
were left out of the study, because their identities could
not be distinguished.
Overall, the most commonly cited individuals from this
group were President Bill Clinton (14 cites), State
Department spokesperson James Rubin (11) and NATO
spokesperson David Wilby (10). Of course, these sources were
uniformly supportive of NATO's actions. A quote from the
NewsHour's Margaret Warner (3/31/99) reveals the homogeneity
of a typical source pool: ``We get four perspectives now on
NATO's mission and options from four retired military
leaders.''
Former government officials were seldom more critical of
NATO's involvement in Yugoslavia. Cited less than one-third
as often as current politicians, former government officials
mainly confined their skepticism to NATO's reluctance to use
ground troops. Bob Dole (Nightline, 3/31/99) voiced the
prevailing attitude when he said, ``I just want President
Clinton . . . not to get wobbly.''
Albanian refugees and KLA spokespeople made up 18 percent
of sources (17 percent on the NewsHour, 19 percent on
Nightline), while relief workers and members of the U.N.
Commission for Refugees accounted for another 4 percent on
NewsHour and 2 percent on Nightline. Sources from these
groups also provided 4 percent of live interviewees on the
NewsHour and 25 percent on Nightline.
These sources stressed the Kosovar refugees' desperation,
and expressed gratitude for NATO's airstrikes. Said one KLA
member (Nightline, 4/1/99), ``The NATO bombing has [helped
and] has been accepted by the Albanian people.'' Although one
refugee
[[Page E1285]]
(Nightline, 4/1/99) suggested otherwise--``We run away
because of NATO bombing, not because of Serbs''--all other
sources in this group either defended or did not comment on
NATO's military involvement in the conflict.
Those most likely to criticize NATO--Yugoslavian government
officials, Serbians and Serbian-Americans--accounted for only
6 percent of sources on the NewsHour and 9 percent on
Nightline. Overall, only two of these sources appeared as
live interviewees: Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesperson
Nebojsa Vujovic (Nightline, 4/6/99) and Yugoslav Ambassador
to the United Nations Vladislav Jovanovic (NewsHour, 4/1/99).
This group's comments contrasted radically with statements
made by members of other source groups, e.g., calling NATO's
bombing ``unjustified aggression'' (Nightline, 4/6/99), and
charging that NATO is ``killing Serbian kids.'' (NewsHour, 4/
2/99).
On Nightline, no American sources other than Serbian-
Americans criticized NATO's airstrikes. On the NewsHour,
there were seven non-Serbian American critics (4 percent of
all sources); these included schoolchildren, teachers and
college newspaper editors, in addition to a few journalists.
Three out of the seven American sources who criticized the
NATO bombing appeared as live interviewees, while the rest
spoke on taped segments.
Officials from non-NATO national governments other than
Yugoslavia, such as Russia's and Macedonia's, accounted for
only 2 percent of total sources (3 percent on the NewsHour, 0
percent on Nightline) and added only four more critical
voices overall. Only twice did a government official from
these countries appear as a live interviewee (NewsHour, 3/30/
99, 4/7/99).
Eleven percent of sources came from American and European
journalists: 7 percent on Nightline, 13 percent on the
NewsHour. This group also claimed 17 percent of all live
interviews on Nightline and 40 percent on the NewsHour. In
discussions with these sources, which tended to focus on the
U.S. government's success in justifying its mission to the
public, independent political analysis was often replaced by
suggestions for how the U.S. government could cultivate more
public support for the bombing.
Three independent Serbian journalists also appeared--two on
the NewsHour and one on Nightline--but they did not add any
voices to the anti-bombing camp. Instead, they spoke about
the Serbian government's censorship of the independent media.
Of a total of 34 journalists used as sources on both shows,
only four opposed the NATO airstrikes. Three of these four
appeared as live interviewees, and all four appeared on the
NewsHour.
Academic experts--mainly think tank scholars and
professors--made up only 2 percent of sources on the NewsHour
and 5 percent on Nightline. (Experts who are former
government or military officials were counted in the former
government or military categories; these accounted for five
sources.) On the NewsHour, the only think tank spokesperson
who appeared was from the military-oriented Rand Corporation,
while Nightline's two were both from the centrist Brookings
Institution. Just two experts appeared in live interviews on
the NewsHour, and no expert source was interviewed live on
Nightline. While these percentages reflect a dearth of
scholarly opinion in both shows, even the experts who were
consulted didn't add much diversity to the discussion; none
spoke critically of NATO's actions.
On a Nightline episode in early April that criticized
Serbian media (4/1/99), Ted Koppel declared: ``The truth is
more easily suppressed in an authoritarian country and more
likely to emerge in a free country like ours.'' But given the
obvious under-representation of NATO critics on elite
American news shows, independent reporting seems to also be a
foreign concept to U.S. media.
____________________