It may have been disruptive to acknowledge the rise of an armed militant faction in Kosovo, but it also was true. And it was the last warning light given off before war, one that was sadly ignored by Rugova and his Western backers. Instead of acknowledging these reports as the rumblings of a coming catastrophe, they turned, as often happens, on the messengers. When it came time to walk three or four miles into towns where the Serbs had butchered women and children in Kosovo our reporting stung, precisely because it had refused to serve any one particular cause. While many diplomats and Rugova supporters chastised us for our coverage, our refusal to consider the implications of our coverage gave us credibility when we wrote of killings by Serb forces.
Credibility is a fragile and delicate commodity and once damaged is very hard to repair.
Indeed, it is against the credibility of Western reporting that the Serbian regime, like most regimes, has waged war since the fighting began eight years ago. It behooves us not to assist them by bowing to what, in the short term, is politically expedient. The temptation every reporter faces is to paint the world in his or her own image, or the image we would like it to assume. Thus rebels in Nicaragua, Muslims in Sarajevo or even Serbian opposition leaders in Belgrade have sometimes been portrayed more as we wish them to be, or they ought to be, rather than as they are. This is the disease of our profession, one exacerbated because such reporting allows us to be celebrated by people under siege, people whose adoration we find gratifying.