Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

aphorism about history being written by the victors notwithstanding,
wars since classical times have inevitably left behind
eyewitness accounts from a range of perspectives. Kosovo was no
exception, with the difference that its accounts, at least those
coming from citizens with access to a computer and a telephone,
were published during the course of the war, often with other
primary sources, alongside those of the world’s journalists. National
and global news providers on the web linked to such accounts,
giving them a global distribution and print and broadcast media
took them up to republish them. J.D. Lasica describes how the email
correspondence between Adona, an ethnic Albanian teenager, and
Finnegan Hamill, a young reporter for Youth Radio in California,
brought the reality of the war to younger audiences who might
otherwise have ignored it. CNN Interactive posted the correspondence
for audiences around the world. 31 Another account which
was linked on many news sites and published in part in Arena, Le
Monde, the Standard (Bulgaria) and Publico (Portugal), was ‘The War
Diary’ of a Serbian film-maker working in Belgrade and known only
as A.G. This took the form of diaries and a sequence of videos dating
from 2 March and finishing on 17 June. A.G. makes clear that, for
those who are caught up in it, one of the most unnerving effects of
war is the lack of information.
Wednesday, March 24
Armageddon.com: Home Pages and Refugees 113
We reach Belgrade soon after midnight. Everything is quiet and
nothing happens. When arrived at M.’s home, first thing we do is
turning on the Radio B92, independent radio station. But nobody
knows what’s going on. Suddenly, at 3.a.m. local time, Radio B92
was shut down. All TV and radio stations now broadcast the same:
old war movies, patriotic songs, Assembly conclusions … 32
The reference to B92 gives an indication of A.G.’s response to the
war, although he by no means accepted the Allied account unquestioningly
and found the BBC and CNN websites almost as frustrating
as the Serbian media. As a media worker himself he was very aware
of the clumsy approach to NATO strategies by Serbian military
spokespeople.