Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

100 Online Journalism
mass medium. The effect is dramatic and undermines one of the
fundamental strategies which enable nations to mobilise for war: the
demonisation of opposed populations and ethnic or religious groups.
Aldous Huxley’s comment about propaganda being ‘… to make one
set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human’, is no
less true now than it was in 1937. Veran Matic emphasises that the
web makes it impossible for NATO to construe Serbia as being ‘home
only to nationalism, warmongering and sheer brutality’. He goes on
to suggest that the silencing of all voices opposed to Milosevic by
both the Belgrade regime and NATO would have made ‘Yugoslavia a
European Iraq and a pariah state for the next ten years’. 8
The web also defused other strategies of information management.
It is now all but pointless for the generals or their spinners to schedule
events or conferences for the main news or the morning papers. Their
audiences are turning to satellite news and the Internet where they
are logging on 24 hours a day for news in real time. As they move
towards global audiences the flagship TV and radio news and current
affairs shows in America and Europe such as ABC’s ‘Nightline’ and
Radio Four’s ‘Today’, are streamed on to the web with lists of content.
Their consumers can download those parts of the programme which
most interest them at any time of the day or night and view them in
the context of a multifarious range of other media.
The sheer speed of the information war on the web also brings
with it the capacity to drive out ‘bad’ information. Don North
recounts the fate of the poorly researched Kosovo story filed for the
German paper Tageszeitung during August 1998. Its writer, on the
strength of a single unnamed source, described the ‘dozens’ of fresh
grave mounds, the result of a massacre, on a rubbish dump outside
the town of Orahovac. The story was placed on the Tageszeitung
website, instantly sending Kosovo’s 100 diplomatic observers and
300 accredited journalists to the town where the source was identified
and found to be completely unreliable. The Serbian explanation,
also on the web, and accepted by the diplomatic and media corps as
well as the townspeople, was that the graves contained the bodies of
some of those ‘legitimately’ killed in the battle for Orahovac. They
had been buried just outside the town because the cemetery was
already full. North makes the point that the speed with which
Tageszeitung’s claims were unravelled on the web prevented the
further inflaming of ‘already raw emotions’. 9