Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Armageddon.com: Home Pages and Refugees 125
human interest vignettes which denied any indication of the
complexity of the underlying issues. The refusal to face the effects of
the bombing of Serbia, and ultimately the economic and political
causes of the war, was in the interests of both the NATO governments
and Milosevic. The stress on the emotional and the personal,
lost children in the refugee camps for instance, served to remove the
world’s attention from other children simultaneously subject to the
Serb pogrom inside Kosovo and the bombing by NATO.
In a war served by news reports of five minutes and less the
founding ideology becomes crucial. The war is understood through
its allegories and, indeed, the very attempt to distinguish between
propaganda and objective reporting becomes redundant. The
context for the war is largely mythical for both sides, and hence is
better served by propaganda than by objectivity. Tony Blair assured
the world that NATO was ‘fighting not for territory but for values’
and the ‘new internationalism’. He distanced himself even from
Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War (an inappropriate allegory
tainted both by the risk it incurred for Britain and the sinking of the
Belgrano) by declaring that he was one of a ‘new generation’ of
leaders who ‘hail from the progressive side of politics’. For the television
war such sound bites were enough to guarantee the NATO
victory on every front.
For those who followed the more complicated war on the web
Blair’s declarations rang hollow and the evasions of Jamie Shea
sounded increasingly unlikely in the face of a mass of information
from the battlefield itself. Kerrin Roberts of CNN sees the decisive
difference between the Balkans and the Gulf or Argentina as technological.
‘… Yugoslavia is a wired country … It wasn’t that our
coverage was different. But the reaction is different. In this conflict,
people are able to communicate directly in chat rooms with people
in the conflict zone … Here, it is a global community.’ 49 Where such
direct communication is possible, even across the lines of battle, the
fog of myth soon condenses.
Carol Guensburg quantifies that community: 31 million related
pages viewed for CNN on 24 March, the first day of the NATO air
strikes, more than 154 million views by the end of the week and
Yugoslavian usage of CNN up by 963 per cent in that same week.
‘The country, which usually ranks 30th among foreign countries in
visits to the CNN site, rose to sixth place.’ 50 Roberts’ comments are