From: ddc@nyquist.bellcore.com (Daniel Chukurov 21324)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.croatia,soc.culture.bosna-hercgvna,soc.culture.europe
Subject: Understanding the Media, by Peter Brock
Date: 3 Jan 93 19:06:51 GMT
Organization: Bellcore


		UNDERSTANDING THE MEDIA
	The War of Delusion and 'Media Cleansing'

	You might  be  wondering  why an obscure working journalist on a
daily  newspaper in El  Paso,  Texas, is here in San Diego talking about
biased, inaccurate reporting on the civil war in Yugoslavia by the major
news media, newspapers,  television and wire services. You're right. You
could have gotten Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson,
George Will or Jack Anderson or Tom Wicker to come here. Except that they
would have  had to tell some measure of the truth. And make no mistake - 
they KNOW or SHOULD KNOW what the truth is.
	I'm not on expert. But I will tell you the truth, as I see it.
	I am not of Serbian, Yugoslav or Balkan ancestry. I have developed
some ideas, some thought and a lot of opinions about what I am seeing now.
And I am going to share them with you.
	We're going to be looking into the closets of the 'media.' And I
doubt you will find too many people like me, who will go in there and show
you some of the things we don't publicly discuss about the profession and
the industry.
	But the thing that sits on your coffee table at night - your
newspaper - and the thing in the living room of your home that your kids
have grown up with - the television set - absolutely have dominated your 
life. And so, it's no accident that you're feeling a reaction from your 
gut, an outrage in your heart that seems to have no end.
	In listening to me, I will advise you that you are hearing somebody
who is a news professional for 25 years, and who never started out to become
an advocate and activist for justice for Serbia. I have very close friends in
Belgrade, Novi Sad, Backo Gradiste, Zrenjanin, Doboj, Zagreb, Ljubljana,
Munich and Frankfurt. I intend to keep them, and I do not endorse any
politicians in the old and new Yugoslav republics.

	To 'understand the media' in the Yugoslav war is no easy task even
though all of us know that the media - or the press - has become a dangerous
and fanatical participant in the cicil and religious war we are now
withnessing. And to really understand the media's involvement requires much
more than conventional or traditional perspectives.
	Remember, we're going into the 'closet.'
	Now, let me give you my definition of the 'press' as the source of
news and information - namely newspapers, news magazines and other
publications - that preceded the 'media' with its advent of television news.
	The heart, soul and nature of television is to focus on created and
creative appearances and images, sets, personalities, entertainment and a
manipulation of stimulus to human senses which not always have to do with
reason and truth. With regard to 'television news,' fiction is indeed
stranger than truth.
	Of course, this is my opinion. It is also my opinion that the
newspaper profession and industry have feverishly attempted to imitate -
because of survival - the electronic-media journalism in recent years. The
press didn't have to. It chose to. I will leave it to others to judge the
result. I will be commenting mostly on what I am seeing, reading and
experiencing in 'the press.'
	Because of television and 'the media,' the civil war in Yugoslavia
has become a surrealism, a distortion and an abstract because the Western
media has created it this way. That is the issue in a nutshell.
	For no other reason than simple mathematics, the coverage of this war
in the United States and the West is proportionally distorted and inflated
because of the small readership and viewing audiences who would otherwise NOT
be interested. On the basis of population alone, a very, very small
percentage of Americans consider themselves as passionately enough
interested, with an even smaller percentage - bordering the fractional - as
being concerned about justice for Serbia in the media coverage of this war.
	Therefore, the tendency - if not the motive and, so far, the results
- has been to distort this conflict or series of conflicts beyond practical
significance to the world and to the Unated States because very, very few
people are concerned. Fewer still in the U.S. are interested. Of course,
worldwide attention should be drawn to the mounstrous degree of human
suffering, tragedy and atrocities that deserve exposure, outrage and
condemnation.
	Because mass media must appeal to the greatest number of masses in
audiences and readerships to justify its quantity of 'coverage' of anything,
it is not surprising taht sentiments have been created to favor other-than-
Serbian-Americans.
	I call it 'the the anti_Serbianism of the media.'
	It had to be inflated to its present dimension of abstract and
surrealism in order, as they say, 'to sell newspapers.'
	My wife has offered one of the most credible insights to the enormous
quantity of anti-Serbianis sentiments in the U.S. and Western Europe where
people, politicians and journalists are attempting to psychologically
compenstae for their collective quilt and immoral silence during the horrors
of tWorld War II. They are going overboardto create trough distortion and
bias the Yugoslav conflict to a dimension which has required the volume of
outcry we are witnessing.
	But remember, we're seeing and hearing in the ABSTRACT. We are
witness to SURREALISM and DELUSION.
	And it requires a nearly surrealistic or abstract ability and
dedication to see and hear - let alone report or write or televise - the
facts and the truth.
	The consequence and cost for accepting and embracing - and TOLERATNG
- the surrealistic or abstract journalism in the media is the present
distortion and loss of REALITY.
	Zagreb writer Zarko Puhovski, a critic of the regime puts it this
way:
	'There is no way to find a political solution if it is not connected
to the present political reality.'
	It is the Western media that have diverted us from 'reality' into the
present condition of surrealism, abstract and delusion.
	What has happened to the 'media' in this war is not very different
from other wars - except in the media technique and technology. And the
demands of technology are exceeding - if not abusing - media technique.
	I'm talking about news-gathering, observing, assessing, checking and
re-checking, verifying and re-verifying, writing and fairness by reporters
in contrast to the voracious appetite of the technology and its demands for
progression and parade of stories, reports, breaking news, human interest
features, analyses, commentaries, editorials and official reactions,
so-called. Especially in the electronic media, this demand from technolgy
races far ahead of the results.
	What fills the gaps for something new, something progressive,
something with a new angle, a new slant  before the next hourly telecast of
CNN Headline News and the next hourly telecast after that? A manipulation of
the present reports and facts - or, worse, a repetition of the previous
hour's story with whatever defects or omissions or slant or bias or naunce or
one-sidedness.
	The evolving viewpoints and politics and strategic iniatives,
reactions and results are practically the same as in the Vietnam War and - to
a lesser degree - the Gulf War because of time but no lesser degree of impact
and persuasion of world opinion.
	And so, the 'media technique' has diminished, and that is because of
the special phenomenon of 'media cleansing' that is occurring in the Yugoslav
civil and religious war.
	Let's call it what it is.
	'Media cleansing' is simply the removal or suppression of the
initiative and responsibility for fair reporting that is the supposed
foundation and cornerstone of journalism. Don't let anyone kid you, not only
are the media the most blatant when it comes to chasing ambulances. But we
like to tell ourselves that if our mother says she loves us, we check it out
anyway.
	I think it was Benjamin Franklin who answerd that he would rather
have a free press when asked to choose between a free press OR democratic
govenment. I'm not sure today - 200 years late - whether he might not have
answered: None of the above.
	'Media cleansing' was already the relity in the Western press and
media when it arrived on the scene of the Yugoslv civil war, because as
reflections of Western governments and societies, media representatives had
remained indoctrinated and habituated to the prejudicial manipulation and the
distortins by omission and historic exploitation against Balkan nations
especially Balkan Slavs.
	One of the most dangerous prejudices that find its way into
practically every story reported or published in the Western media in 1990
and 1991 routinely cited the historic and ancient hatreds among south Slavs.
Up until recent months, it was commonplace in nearly every wire story or
television news report to read or hear a brief description of how Serbs and
Croatians have been ancient enemies, immersed in endless episodes of grisly
fratricide.
	There is contraversy about whether that is true. But witness the
existence of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes during the early part
of the 20th Century, and, like it or not, the relative peacefulness between
Yugoslav peolple untill recently even though the republics were under
Communist and Socialist rule.	
	None can deny that Yugoslavia had at least peace in the absence of
conflict - but it was peace. And at the same time, American cities were
burning from racial rioting.
	The reference to ancient animosities has been curiously dropped
because of what is allowed if not intended to appear as the selffulfilled and
self-evident fact of current conflict.
	In October 1991, Belgrade Professor Sima Cirkovic put it this way:
	'The oft-repeated story of centuries of animosity between serbs and
Croats has no foundationd in their history. By showing that discord began
only in the last two centuries, one cannot either diminish its intensity or
solve contemporary problems. But by drawing attention to this misconception
we can confront hatred and prejudices which find fertile soil in ignorance
and bias, and an absence of consience or responsibility for what is being
said or written ...Despite the bloody period of 1941-45, their experience of
tolerance and the shared life together has been much longer and has deep
roots.'
	When the fighing began, the media was unsure about what was going on.
And so we read about the 'renegade republic of Slovenia...Slovene rebels...
Slovenian territorial defense forces.' Ljubljana was the 'renegade republic's
capital.'
	Later, we had 'Croatian police and national quard units, rebel Serbs,
Croatian security forces...ethnic Serb gunmen...the independence-minded
Croatian government...the rival Yugoslav republic of Serbia...Coats defending
their soil...breakaway Croatia.'
And, of course, there were attempts to explain resurrected 'Ustasha' and
'Chetniks.' This was all overloading the average American intelligence that
can't even handle foreign films with subtitles.
	It wasn't long before the media cleaned up the playing field and made
its choices by what sounds legitimate and even respectable and is called
'participatory' or 'advocacy journalism.'
	And it has led directly to reactionary perspective and public policy
churning out from Western governments trough the media and churning right
back in again. It goes on in a frenzy of cross-feeding between media and
politicians.
	More dangerously, the 'media cleansing' policies of news
organizations are evident in their unquestioning alliance as willful and
negligent extensions of the conspiratorial array of Western goverments now
intent upon loosing 'the' Serbian Apocalypse, a historically unique 'jihad'
or holy war ironically originating from mostly Christian nations! The
potential short-term result is annihilation of the better part of 10 million
Orthodox Christian people of Serbia. And, risking the accusation of being an
alarmist, it may be the begining of an unprecedented historical onslaught
against millions more of Orthodox Christianity throughout the world.
	The war being sold to us - as just another fractricidal war between
South Slavic cults and factions - is a war primarily against Orthodox
Christianity. And, in its beginning stages today, it is revealed in the form
of detectable 'suspicion' and ostracism of Orthodox Christianity BY and IN
the media which is more than ignoring it.
	The media has been and remanis the relentless sorcerer in
coparticipation in the 'cult' politics out of which ancient ethnic legacies
for statehood have been conjured and contrived into existance in order to
create new democratic republics which look more like feudal democracies.
	Serbian Apocalypse? Christian 'jihad'? Sorcery? Occult politics? Why?
What's the big picture?
	German journalist Johan Galtung said a year ago:
	'The Yugoslav crisis is being used not as a crisis to solve but as a
raw material for experimentation toward constructing a European Union
superpower.'
	Journalist Silvano Bolcic in Belgrade wrote:
	'To maintain the international incoherence on Yugoslavia is to
maintain the war...Only if the UN, the European Community and all the
European states convert the conflict into an international conflict will they
have any chance of decisively influencing the situation.'
	The civil war in Yugoslavia is today being reported by reporters from
Western news wire services and organizations who reflect the anti-Serbianism
of their national goverments. Especially for the United States, this is a sad
recurrence of early Vietnam-style reporting which undoubtedly prolonged that
war. This defference in today's Yugoslav civil war is that there WAS and IS
access to reports from credible Serbian reporters and other journalists
today.
	It is astounding to evaluate Western-oriented, Western-based
correspondents and reporters and their evolving anti-Serbian biases and
perspectives during 1991 and early 1992. This was the cruical period in the
formation of world opinion and the resulting hostility now arrayed against
Serbia.

	Belgrade-based correspondents predominated in the volume and quality
of reporting done on the civil war until late 1991 when they were BENCHED,
and wire services imported reporters from Western European and American
bureaus where anti-Serbian bias was already established.
	But hoe can anti-Serbian bias be demonstrated, let alone proven?
	I know of no such method of quantifying 'bias,' and so I recently
decided to create a tabulation and study of 1,526 out of about 3,500 articles
I've collected from the daily Associated Press and New York Times newswire
services - that's daily for the last two years! Over 63 million Americans
subscribe to about 1,500 daily newspapers in the Unate dStates, and most of
these newspapers are clients of the AP and New York Times wire services.
	(This is very important to understand: The majority of articles and
wire reports represent the routine of rewrites, updates, revisions with
numerous additions and deletions performed in the daily activities of news
wire services. There were other variables, which I cannot go into now. But
since these articles were placed on the wires as separate, complete news
reports, they can be considered quatifiably valid for the purposes of this
tabulation and analysis. The sheer volume of articles that move on the wires
increase the likelihood for selection and publication and broadcast. In most
cases, bylines are removed from the tops of articles before they were
printed. I collected the articles before the bylines were edited out.)
	
	I selected the time periods of May through September of 1991 and 1992
for making my evaluation of the 1,526 articles, breaking them down into three
general categories:
	* There were 1,087 breaking news stories,
	* 347 human interest or feature stories,
	* 92 opinions, analyses, editorials, interpretive articles.
	I identified 131 writers, correspondents or reporters, 9 of which
included 5 Serbs, 2 Croats and 2 Bosnian/Muslims.
	* There were 122 non-Yugoslav reporters!
	* Apart from the 131 identified writers, there were 181 articles
without bylines. These were written by unidentified correspondents, rewrite
persons or wire/copy editors.
	* 5 Serb reporters wrote 254 stories in 1991 (for an average of
50.8).
	* One Croatian reporter wrote 17 stories in 1991.
	* Three Serb reporters wrote 117 stories in 1992 (for an average of
39).
	* Two Croatian reporters wrote 38 stories in 1992.
	* 54 non-Yugoslav reporters wrote 295 stories in 1991 (for an average
of 5.5).
	* 69 non-Yugoslav reporters wrote 325 stories in 1992 (for an average
of 4.7).
	* 93 non-Yugoslav reporters wrote 5 or less stories in 1991-92!
	* 7 non-Yugoslav reporters wrote 478 stories in 1991-92 (for an
average of 68.3).
	* 1 non-Yugoslav reporter wrote 247 stories in 1991092.

	The trend here is that fewer and fewer reporters or correspondents
with critical depth and comprehensive understandings about the republics -
i.e. susufficiently oriented Yugoslav reporters - wrote stories between 1991
and 1992 as more and more no-Yugoslav reporters wrote fewer stories but
collectively wrote and are writing most of the stories up until today.
	Western-biased, Western-orinted and Western-biased professionals are
telling the story.
	In focusing the tabulation to detect bias, I studied only two
categories of articles where you can ecpect 'bias' or 'slant' - that would be
in the 347 human interest stories and in the 92 opinions, analyses and
editorials. This is not to say that there
was not detected a great amount of interpretable if not overt bias in the
1,087 breaking news stories. But this part of the study period was for May
trough September of 1992 ONLY.

	I made the following inferences and conclusions:

	* The combined total ratio of articles WITH bylines that contained
direct or inderect anti-Serb bias was 25.5:1.
	* The combined total ratio of articles WITHOUT bylines that contained
direct or indirect anti-Serb bias or slant was also 25:1.
	(Now, that's a striking consistency!)

	I also quantified the 'datelines' or points of where these articles
originated as a probable reference for the bias or slant because TECHNICAL
bias is suggested by atmospheres and surroundings and perspectives of events
or locations where the reporting is originating: such as basement shelters or
the morgues in Sarajevo, or in walking among the ruins in Vukovar, Vinkovci,
Pakrac Okucani, Bjelina, or from the perspectives of Berlin, Vienna, London,
Washington, New York, etc. During the Croatian and Bosnian periods of
reporting, there is an enormous absence of datelines or story locales
accessible to aggressively obtaining the 'other side of story' from credible
Serbian sources!

	I made the following inferences and conclusions based upon datelines
from where the articles were originated:

	* The combined total ratio of articles with datelines OUTSIDE
Yugoslavia that contained direct or indirect anti-Serbian bias or slant was
41:1. (Not surprisingly, these included a significant nuber of human interest
stories about refugees and a large nuber of resulting editorials, opinions,
analyses and interpretive articles by non-Yugoslav writers.)
	* The combined total ratio of articles with datelines INSIDE
Yugoslavia that contained direct or indirect anti-Serbian bias or slant was
19:1.

	It is a reasonable conclusion that the Belgrade-based reporters and
correspondents were completely competent to continue their coverage and
well-knew the professional and ethical demands of Western journalism. It is
also reasonable to evaluate that Western journalists are not. In fact, the
Western media was and is poorly equiped to cover this conflict because it
rarely, if ever, comprehended practical, theoretical and evolving Marxist
Leninism, communism or its alleged demise.

	Now, let's return to the issue of news-reporting technology and the
ability of and demand by the technology to fill its appetite for
instantaneous data and information.
	The ability and initiative for critical follow-up reports and
'getting the other side of the story' is simply not convenient to NEWS
FORMULA AND FORMATS DICTATED BY THE TECHNOLOGY to 'get it now' which may not
necessarily be 'getting it right.' That is a surrealistic expectation and
self-deception by the media.

	And there is the problem of using independent television and other
third-party sources - such as CNN trough Independent British Television last
summer made initial reports about the alleged Serb-run 'concentration camps.'
There was no evident control or options for verification by CNN - or later,
by NBC, CBS and ABC who used the same footage. Newswire services simply
repeated and reported what was seen on the films.
	The demands of contemporary news-reporting technology have resulted
with superficical accounts, more often than not minimally substantiated if
not based in outright fabrication.
	Some of the more notorious exaples:
	* The killings of the two infants on the bus leaving Sarajevo. Did it
matter that one of the victims was later determined to be Serbian? And at the
funeral, did it matter whether the films showed a Serbian or Muslim cemetery
or mourners?
	* The killing of newsmad David Kaplan near Sarajevo should have
provoked the media to do some real reporting. But it didn't. And the death
was first blamed - even only if by deliberate inference - on Serbian snipers.
Few Western news organizations gave attention to subsequent reports from UN
officials in Sarajevo that the fatal shot could NOT have come from areas then
occupied by Bosnian Serbs.
	* The downing of an Italian aircraft en route to Sarajevo with relief
cargo was immediately blamed upon Bosnian Serbs.
	Few, if any, news outlets reported with any urgency the subsequent
developments that the aircraft was hit above Muslim and/or Croat-controlled
areas and out of range from the nearest areas held by Bosnian Serbs or that
UN officials attributed the entire incident to an attack by Croatian troops.
	Also, there was no publicizing of claims by Bosnian Serbs about
intercepted radio messages between Bosnian Muslim units purporting that they
had downed the plain.
	* In the early days of hostilities in Eastern Croatia, none but the
briefest mantion was made on television or by newspaper correspondents about
forced evacuation and later destruction of dozens of Serbian villages or that
forced evacuation of Serbs has not ceased. In fact, during the first
tentative steps for Serb refugees to return to such villages as Grubisno
Polje in Slavonia just a few days ago, their visits for assessing demaged or
destroyed houses were followed by the incidents where the wreckage of their
homes and structures were blown up again - a year after the initial
distruction.

	It is not my intention to impugn the integrity of the Western
reporters and correspondents from the press under whose names appear finished
products after numerous write-thru's, insertions, deletions, naunces,
complete rewrites, corrections, and other substential changes made by the
copy editors throughout the accumulation and distribution process of the
news. Add to this the reporters' or correspondents' dependence upon stringers
and interpreters with varying expertise in English. The volumes of some
stories overwhelm what is required by clients of the wire service and news
organizations - again, the insatiable demand fromthe technology.

	This is worse than a Vietnam-style situation, and the media is
horrified at that because it remembers it wasn't until at the very end of
that 27-year war that it realized it was part of the grand deception,
confessed its role and began doing its job! The media dreads another episode
of self-exposure. However, it is signifivant that once the media began to
correct its coverage of the Vietnam War - it appear to end quisker.

	The media and press operate with the kind of thinking that is
traditionally, conventionally binary - black and white, left or right, up or
down, over under, them or us, here or there, sweet or sour, right or wrong,
good or bad. That's the way it covers sports, crime and politics.
	Again from journalist Galtung:
	'Politicians, journalists and regular people in Western Europe (and,
I would add, America) seem unaware of their deeply embedded anti-Serbian
bias. The cold war pattern is automatically projected onto Yugoslavia: East
is the communist and bad; West is democratic and good.'
	In essence, from the president and president-elect on down, it is now
fixed in the American mentality that the Serbs are the bad guys. This
devastatingly simplistic bias has been placed there by the 'media,' by the
'press' because it came from nowhere else.
	 And so it is predictable that by doing nothing about their
international image - probably because they were confident that all would
recognize their historically justified cause for survival - Serbs became the
bad guys in the international public relations war waged by Croatia, Slovenia
and Germany.
	The war has been irretrievably lost.
	It is irrelevant whether there exists proof that Ruder & Finn and/or
others were paid multi-millions of dollars for a P-R campaign by Croatia. The
fact is that Croatia has gotten many more millions worth of it and probably
will continue that success. It bought them their ill-timed independence and
prepared a bias for cantonization not of Bosnia-Hercegivina - but of Serbia
in the minds of the media.
	Germany's fears are well-founded about the potential for common
market competition from emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.
Let's not forget that those sparkling, new post-Warld War German cities were
built in large part by the hands of Yugoslav, Turkish and other guestworkers
whomGermany now wants to get rid of so that their East German cousins can
take the level of jobs West Germans have not performed, would not perform for
decades and which were instead given to the gastereiters. These are the same
guestworkers who took more back home with them than Mercedes, BMWs and
Deutschemarks. They also took home the training, skills, ideas, labor and
occupational disciplines and the heart required to raise up modern cities,
new economies - and the potential to become competitive against the
German-dominated European market!
	A year ago, the repected Croatian economist Branko Horvat was
interviewed in the Belgrade weekly Vreme. He was asked about an earlier
remark he'd made on the potential for a 'single market stretching from the
Baltic to the Balkans' and the likelihood that Western Europe would allow it.
	His response: 'Nowdays you can only stop competition by introducing
some other form of competition.'
	Inddeed, the ultimate form of 'competition' had once befor been
introduced with catastrophic results when Germany instigated an 'unbridgeable
river of blood' between Yugoslavs, as the late Louis Adamic described it,
which was designed by the Germans to work to the advantage of Germany's
interest. I submit that nothing has changed. And, I tell you, THAT is the
real story behind this war.
	Again, with the limitations of sizable Western audiences and
readerships who were conditioned to the thrilling, exciting and sensational
news coverage in the Gulf War, the media product today appears passive from
the Yugoslav conflict. In the Gulf War, the media took us to box seats right
on the warheads of missiles themeselves and we could all ride 'smart' bombs
into the target.
	And there were the daily, hourly press briefings and multy-media
presentations by and about 'our boys.'
	The Yugoslav conflict - a B-grade, two-star movie - is the Gulf War's
worst possible successor because the appetite cultivated in the Gulf for
instant, sensational and gripping news is only being fed by the hollow
experts holding appearances of press conferences. And the message has somehow
gotten across that for all the wrong reasons we in the West don't have a
stake in this war.
	Indeed, we in the West have a stake in the Yugoslav civil war that is
being ignored deliberately or negligently by the media: collective and
individual sovereignty.
	Worthy of some enterprise reporting are the words spoked more than a
year ago in London by Serbian Democratic Party President Micunovic:
	'We have lost sovereignty because of this enornous ambition for
sovereignty. Sovereignty has been handed over to international bodies, and
our fate is no longer in our hands.'
	I would add that in this historic episode of media surrealism
'ambition for sovereignty' can be demonstrated by institutions - such as the
media - as well as individuals.
	An insightful, ex-Zagreb journalist wrote last year (I am taking some
liberty with her context as I feel it expresses a permissable spirit of
understanding and compassion:
	'Some of my friends are still living in the United States and, until
yesterday, we had so many things in common. Now I am living in a country at
war, and they don't understand me anymore. How can they understand that in
the last year, being a Croat became my destiny? How could I explain to them
that in this war I am defined by my nationality - and by my nationality only?
This is what the war is doing to us - reducing us to one dimension. Befor, I
thought I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character and -
yes - my nationality too.
	'Now, I feel stipped of all that. I am nobody, because I am not an
idividual anymore. I am only one of 4.5 million Croats. It is not only Serbs
and federal army troops who look at me like that; it is hard to be anything
else in Croatia itself...Being Croat in this war makes me an orphan too,
because it robbed me of the only possession I acquired in my life - my
individuality...So, no one is allowed NOT to be Croatian...My only choice is
to negotiate the slim maneuvering space that allows me to suppoert the
suffering people and homeland but not take the side of the goverment - if
this distinction still means anything.'

	It is my opinion that 'media accountability' is not demonstrated and
does not essentially exist within the profession and industry of the media in
this war.
	'Accountability' is a word that keeps editors and reporters awake at
night. And 'accountability' in the media will not result without there first
being confrontation.
	And in the war against delusion, we should expect some sacrifice and
casualities. But there will be no justice - either contemporary or in the
future.
	The American media MUST be made accountable. It must be confronted -
corporately and locally.
	You first force them - that's right 'them' because they're only
people like you and me - to confront themselves first by our Constitution that
GUARANTEES a free press NOT for the profession, NOT for the networks, NOT for
the wire services, Not for the editors and reporters - but FOR the people!
	When I arrived at this convention and met some of the directors and
listened to them and their ideas and dialogue, I got depressed. I wandered,
'What do they need me for? They don't need me to tell them their ideas and
thoughts back to them.'
	So, I put on my Serbian Unity Congress button that first afternoon
and took a walk through a nearby mall. After all, it was California, and I
wondered whether somebody might asm me about it. Nobody did - this is where
we are.
	I even strolled into one of the sessions of the veterinarian
convention next door. Maybe I would finally hear how it is that you take the
rectal temperature of a Doberman pinscher! I suspect it is just as hazardous
as attempting to rehabilitate the media.
	But you do need to hear about 'media cleansing' from a news
professional, from a non-Serbian. Because I am living proof that you can
succeed.
	You can persuade and convince the media and press IF, IF, IF you
communicate to them your own sense of urgency and if you can build and
sustain that fire in YOUR belly.
	You can and will touch them. You'll spread that fire, and novices
like me will go over there, year after year, to Belgrade and walk the Bulvar
Revolucije again and again, watching and listening and finally getting up the
nerve to speak and ask questions and to LISTEN to yhe answers - until they
learn. They'll walk along streets with names they can't yet pronounce, the
cold winds driving them inside shops to eat burek and drink yogurt WITH
Yugoslav people.
	They will touch the people, and they will be changed.

	Thank you for listening to me.

				Peter Brock
				Third annual Serbian
				Unity Congress
				Convention 
				Nov. 21, 1992