Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

124 Online Journalism
A Wired Country
For news consumers the war in Kosovo brought with it some seemingly
irreconcilable contradictions. It was fought by NATO with a
‘zero-casualty’ strategy which, while it was expensive for the chancelleries
of the Allied states, shifted the entire burden of mortal risk
to the target populations not only of Yugoslavia but of Kosovo as
well. The founding assumption of such a strategy, derived from an
unspoken allegory this time of Vietnam, was that Western taxpayers
would stomach astronomic costs and the loss of unnumbered Balkan
lives, even those who NATO was purportedly bombing to save, but
not a single Allied death. NATO entered the war with the belief that
the strategy could be sold to global audiences by employing the news
management systems that had worked so well in the Gulf War. Four
months saw the loss of much of the infrastructure of Serbia and a
looming environmental disaster as well as the patent destruction of
Kosovo as a practicable society. In addition, many of the ideological
fractures which had marked the Cold War seemed for a terrible
moment to have been fully restored. That something had gone
terribly wrong was clearly apparent to those who took their news
from the Internet.
For television news viewers, in contrast, the one-sidedness of the
conflict turned it into an arcade game of atrocity-fuelled slash and
kill completely insulated by its packaging from its contingent reality
and obscuring the contradictions of its outcome. Even when it
confronts its audiences with the ‘realities’ of death, despair and
suffering, television refuses to dwell on them, immediately erasing
their bleak images with sport or advertisements for breakfast cereal
and the good life, all in over-saturated primary colours. In Kosovo
the medium was largely served by a generation of journalists who
had been systematically excluded from the more malign effects of
war ensuring that print and broadcast media began the war in the
same militarised condition that had prevailed for them during the
Gulf War. ‘Intelligence sources’ or ‘NATO spokesmen’ was attribution
enough to corroborate the most excessive story.
Television coverage, and the audiences that it draws, tended to
influence how the war was conducted at a political level with, for
example, the insistence on no NATO casualties. That coverage
largely comprised a series of only loosely connected anecdotes –