Manipulating the Media Is Milosevic’s MO

As any government in a similar position would do, Serbia eagerly broadcast images of an American Stealth fighter downed over Yugoslavia. The flaming wreckage, shown repeatedly, was an embarrassment to the Americans, a coup for the Serbs.

“Nighthawk plucked by Yugoslav air defense!” the state news service, playing with the Stealth’s nickname, proclaimed after the warplane went down on a mission Saturday.

And so Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic again flexed his strongest muscle, control of the media. His ability to manipulate the media, particularly television and radio, has enabled him to survive and even thrive through crises that would have doomed any other regime.

Milosevic has used propaganda to ignite and wage war, then to beat a hasty retreat when battlefield fortunes dim. He has emerged largely unbroken while at the same time creating a reality, a new history, that he has persuaded many Serbs to believe.

Milosevic knows that good propaganda starts with a few grains of truth. The media he controlled stoked ethnic hatred in the months leading up to the 1991 outbreak of war in the Balkans, where first Slovenia and Croatia and, later, Bosnia-Herzegovina fought Serbian forces.

Ethnic resentment already existed in the region as a residue of World War II atrocities. But for the most part, Serbs, Croats and Muslims, where they lived in mixed areas, did so peacefully. Then suddenly, many became convinced that their neighbors were out to get them, because that’s what they were told on the radio and the evening news.

Such propaganda worked to reinforce a feeling among Serbs that they belonged to a tribe, as Mark Thompson noted in his well-regarded book “Forging War,” which studied the use of media as an instrument of war in the former Yugoslav federation.

“It was always pretty crude propaganda,” said Alex Ivanko, who served as a United Nations spokesman in the former federation for five years and now handles issues of media freedom for the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Atrocities committed by Serbs were often portrayed on television as having been committed by Muslims or Croats, Ivanko said. And accounts of atrocities committed by Muslims or Croats were embellished and repeated endlessly to fan hatred and fear.

Serbs through the years were told not only that they were a special tribe but that they were in danger of being destroyed.

In the current conflict, it was especially important for Milosevic to be rid early of Western reporters such as crews from CNN, which can be picked up by satellite dish and seen in Yugoslavia.

Opposition media outlets have on occasion been allowed to spring up in Yugoslavia, but only when Milosevic was confident that they could do no harm.

When media like Belgrade’s independent B-92 radio started to have an impact, Milosevic would shut them down, as he did at the height of anti-government demonstrations in the winter of 1996-97.

B-92 was forced to close again as NATO bombs began to fall, and is now putting out reports only through the Internet. That has raised its international profile but done little for the people living in Yugoslavia.

Throughout this decade, Milosevic’s media have made a policy of denying what is eminently obvious to the rest of the world.

When tens of thousands of Serbs were driven from Croatia in the fall of 1995 and forced to flee to Serbia as pitiful, downtrodden refugees, Milosevic ordered television to cover stories about the country’s economic upturn instead.

Many Serbs are convinced that there were no mass graves in Bosnia; Sarajevo, the besieged Bosnian capital, wasn’t shelled; as for Srebrenica, site of the largest slaughter of Muslims by Serbs during the war in Bosnia, many Serbs believe that the Muslims simply left on buses.

“I know that’s what happened because I saw it with my own eyes on television,” one Serbian woman living in the abandoned home of a Srebrenica Muslim told this newspaper in 1996.

Now, according to Serbian television, Serbs in Kosovo, the embattled Serbian province at the center of the current conflict, are fighting only ethnic Albanian terrorists. Thus, the sole explanation for NATO’s bombardment is the Western alliance’s determination to destroy the Serbs.

As more NATO airstrikes were underway, Milosevic on Sunday was shown on television meeting calmly with his Cabinet. The news announcer read a statement assuring viewers that the nation’s economic life is continuing normally and that spring planting “is being conducted according to schedule.”