Then they insisted the airstrikes were not to blame for the heart-rending sight of more than 200,000 ethnic Albanians being forced out of Kosovo. Those pictures, in turn, were replaced by the chilling shots of three American soldiers captured by Serb forces, and interviews with worried relatives. They had warned President Clinton that air power alone was not sufficient to stop Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and indeed might increase his violent attempts at ethnic cleansing. CIA Director George J. Tenet had been forecasting that Serb-led Yugoslav forces might respond by accelerating their campaign of ethnic cleansing. But this tactic is all the more striking during a military conflict, when official spokesmen generally insist that everything is going as well as could be expected.
All sides try to control the words and images in times of war.
Top Yugoslav officials have ventured onto the networks to accuse the Western media of lies and to portray their country as the victim of NATO aggression. The Serb decision to release footage of burning government buildings in Belgrade undoubtedly reflected an attempt to show the horror of war visited on their capital. The American side has unsheathed its big guns as well. How quickly the images carried around the world have changed. The conflict began with NATO cockpit footage of controlled explosions, suggesting an antiseptic war, but soon dissolved to the latest scenes of devastation and mass human exodus.