Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Armageddon.com: Home Pages and Refugees 95
Belgrade numbering civilians killed and planes brought down, influenced
much of what appeared in other media.
By the spring of 1999 and the commencement of NATO’s air
strikes there was already a wide range of historical, political,
economic and social information about the Balkans on the Internet
which determined an approach, both online and in traditional
media, very different to the media coverage of earlier wars, including
the civil war in Bosnia only a few years previously. The reporting of
that war was summed up by Matt Welch writing in the Online
Journalism Review.
From 1992 to 1995, when residents of Sarajevo were shot crossing
the street and bombed while standing in line for bread, reporting
about their plight was funneled to the world’s media giants
through a clutch of correspondents and stringers holed up at the
Sarajevo Holiday Inn. What a difference four years makes. 2
The earlier Balkan wars of the 1990s received the same quality of
media coverage as Korea, the Congo, Vietnam and the countless
other conflagrations that marked not only the Cold War, but the
latter half of the twentieth century itself. It was managed, more or
less, and heavily partisan. Broadcast news of the NATO bombing of
Serbia, which started on 24 March 1999, began very much like a
rerun of the Gulf War a decade previously. Military spokespeople
talked around bomb-sight video and aerial photos of the results of
‘precision’ bombing to an unquestioning cohort of largely handpicked
journalists. They, in turn, segmented the package into easily
digested bites framed by images of distraught refugees and the
comments of experts, usually older military men who had won their
colours in past conflicts, for the world’s news audiences.
On the Internet, even during the first days of the war, a very
different kind of narrative was unfolding. There had been some indication
of the potential brought by the Internet to such situations
with the activities of the Association for Progressive
Communications and PeaceNet in 1991. They were able to bypass
the blanket censorship imposed on world media by the Pentagon
and its allies to carry independent reports about the Gulf War and its
effects and to report a widespread antipathy towards the war. At that
time the 15,000 or so subscribers worldwide were hardly able to