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How did the western media report the ICTY?
Very supportively. The idea of looking critically at a court established by the UN seems to have been off-limits for most journalists. At a time when 24-hour rolling news was sweeping the world, the conflicts in Yugoslavia provided a steady flow of material and many opportunities to take the high, humanitarian ground.
What should journalists have done?
Their job. They should have looked at the ICTY in the same rigorous way as any other organisation. Had it been properly set up as a legal court? Was it being operated in accordance with the instructions set down by the UN Security Council? Was it dispensing fair and impartial justice based on good law and impeccable process?
Did this happen?
No.
Why was the media so incurious?
For the most part, they took everything on trust, as did the vast majority of politicians and ordinary people. Few could imagine that the UN could have spawned such a travesty of a court.
Surely there were some dissenting voices?
Yes there were. But what they said was ignored and they were attacked as ‘genocide deniers’.
Did the media ever realise it’s mistake, even if it didn’t admit it?
When the story broke in 1992 that up to 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped in 1992, countless news organisations dispatched teams to Bosnia to get the detail. They found nothing and returned without filing reports. Nothing was said or written, with the exception of one French reporter who courageously proclaimed that he had uncovered no evidence. The myth lived on and was used as a key example of wartime rape in a worldwide campaign in 2014.