Edward S. Herman: The U.S. Media Coverage of Srebrenica

The late Prof. Edward S. Herman’s study of U.S. media’s deeply biased coverage of Srebrenica has lost none of its incisiveness. The media have evidently discarded the professional tenets of journalism in imitation of the Hague Tribunal, which did the same with the professional norms of jurisprudence.

By the time of the “Srebrenica massacre” in July 1995 the U.S. (and British) media had already adopted what was effectively a party line on the Bosnian and other conflicts in the Balkans, according to which the Serbs were aggressors engaged in “ethnic cleansing” in the interest of a “Greater Serbia.”  This gravitation to a party line is a familiar process in the Western media, which pride themselves on their freedom, yet often behave in a manner that fits the Western model of how media behave in a totalitarian system. Without coercion, the dominant media quickly demonize an officially targeted enemy’s leaders, use frames that support this demonization process, depend heavily on official claims, and fail to look for or report incompatible and inconvenient information. This was clearly evident in the media’s performance in the run-up to the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the supposedly free and independent media swallowed the false claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and “threat,” which served well the propaganda needs of the war-makers.

It was equally true of the media’s treatment of  Bosnia and related issues. The U.S. Secretary of State had named the Serbs the enemies and targets in December 1992, calling for a tribunal to deal with their villainy. The ICTY was organized shortly thereafter and has followed the U.S. remit, going almost uniformly after Serbs and clearly and sometimes openly serving a political role. [1] Canadian law professor  Michael Mandel has shown that the work of  the ICTY was hostile to peace-making; instead, under the guise of  seeking “justice” its function was to serve as an instrument of NATO’s dismantlement of Yugoslavia (and ex-post justification for NATO’s wars) [2] Despite the clear evidence of  this political role, the media have invariably taken the ICTY’s work and claims as reflecting a genuine search for justice. [3]

The U.S. (and British) media jumped on the war bandwagon early, and have maintained their self-righteous and party line positions  up to the present. This has always entailed a high gullibility quotient. For example, Bosnian Muslim officials claimed 200,000 Bosnian Muslim deaths as early as December 1992, and the media accepted this and other very problematic claims and spoke regularly about an ongoing “genocide.” U.S. journalist David Rieff even asserted that. the “genocide” of Bosnian Muslims had been “almost completed” by 1994. [4]  It was therefore very awkward for the U.S. (and British). mainstream media when researchers Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, of the Demographic Unit of the ICTY, and Mirsad Tokaca of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center, in 2005-6, independently produced estimates of the total Bosnian war dead on all sides—including both civilians and soldiers–as approximately 100,000. [5]

The mainstream media of  the United States (and Britain) were very reluctant to absorb this new information, which ran counter to their established beliefs; commentators even adopted the widespread use of the term “revisionism” to describe new facts and interpretations that ran counter to the party line and that they were unable to absorb.  A study of 14 English language newspapers showed that through May 2007 only once did a paper mention the names of the authors of these two studies. [6] Equally interesting, a study of the Bosnian death toll being reported in the mainstream media after the death of Milosevic in 2006 found that the inflated figure of 200,000 (or higher) was used in 202 items, versus only 13 using the revised establishment figure of 100,000. In the U.S media the ratio was 76 to 2 in favor of the obsolete higher figures that better fitted media biases. [7] “Journalists of attachment” like The Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy and The Nation Magazine’s Ian Williams have never abandoned the 200,000 or more deaths, or ever bothered to discuss the lower value fixed by Tabeau-Bijak and Tokaca. [8]  In an appearance on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show  in June 2007, Carla Del Ponte claimed 300,000 civilian deaths in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, all attributable to Milosevic. She was not challenged on this or anything else by the deferential host. In the United States anything negative can be said about an enemy target without fear of contradiction in the mainstream media.

This is clear as regards the treatment of Srebrenica. In July 1995 the Bosnian Muslims and United States needed a massacre to justify intensified U.S. and NATO intervention, and the United States needed a propaganda cover for the U.S.-supported Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina the following month. The “journalism of attachment” did an outstanding job in cooperating with this propaganda campaign, helped along by the ICTY, just as both would do several years later in making the “Racak massacre” a propaganda cover for the initiation of the NATO bombing war of March-June 1999. [9] The Srebrenica massacre claims were helped by the fact that the International Red Cross quickly reported 8,000 “missing” from Srebrenica, comprising 3,000 allegedly captured by the Serbs and 5,000 who had fled Srebrenica before the July 11 occupation and were unaccounted for. This was quickly transformed into 8,000 “executed,” on no substantial basis whatsoever, as it ignored that as many as 2,000 Bosnian Muslim soldiers who fled were killed in the fighting, large numbers got through Serb lines and reached Tuzla, and that hundreds fleeing Srebrenica made it to Serbia.

In November 2003 the chief ICTY forensic investigator reported that 2570 bodies had been found in the Srebrenica area graves between 1996 and 2001, most neither identified nor shown to have been executed. [10]  Witness evidence on executions was extremely problematic. [11] On August 10, 1995 Madeline Albright showed the Security Council photos of areas near Srebrenica, one displaying a large group of assembled people (prisoners?), another showing a cleared area where the ground was disturbed. These photos were not available for public examination, and neither these nor any others showed killing, dead bodies, or the burial or transport of dead bodies. Albright warned the Serbs that “we will be watching,” but nothing more was made public based on this watching in later years. However, reporter David Rhode did visit the area in mid-August 1995 and saw a single exposed limb from a dead body, from which he and the media inferred the probable truth of the claim of a great massacre. Similarly, in early June 2005 a video was introduced at an ICTY proceeding that purportedly showed Serbs executing six Bosnian Muslims. Here again, although the authenticity of  this video was problematic, the mainstream media not only gave it huge publicity, they allowed it to be serious evidence of the claims of  8,000 executed at Srebrenica.[12] On the other hand, when Bosnian Muslim Srebrenica leader Naser Oric showed Western journalists videos he had taken of  killed and beheaded Serbs, and bragged about an episode in which he had killed 114 Serbs in the Srebrenica area, [13] this was of minimal interest to the U.S.-U.K. media, and no large inferences were drawn.

In a study of 95 U.S. print media articles featuring Srebrenica in their title, published between April 1993 and November 2004, 71 from July 1995-November 2004, this writer found their main features to be their formulaic character, their uniform adherence to the Western party line, their limited use of sources, and their failure to provide context or ask obvious questions. [14] Twenty one of the 71 from July 1995 and after referring with minor variation to the killings as “the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.”  They also soon gravitated to the figure of 7,500- 8,500 as the massacre total; and most speak of “men and boys,” although there has never been any evidence of  “boys,” as opposed to military-aged men, being found in nearby graves. This same usage extends to the present; including the execution total of (usually) 8,000. [15]

The high initial figure being politically convenient, it was quickly made a “truth” that could not be questioned without drawing the charge of apologetics for genocide. In the 71 U.S. news articles there is not a word of doubt or question about the possible bias in the initial level as a measure of executions, nor is there any call or thought to reconsider in the light of the absence of credible confirming evidence. While often stating the usual number of  executed and buried (7,500-8,500)  as an established fact–one even has them all in a single mass grave–the reporters very often say that executions or grave site body numbers are “believed to be” very large, or  grave sites “could contain” large numbers, or  “investigators say” or are “suspicious” that large numbers may be buried or that “executions allegedly occurred”—a stream of speculation from interested parties, but never critiques of  such speculation. [16]

There is solid evidence that a large number of Serbs were driven out of Srebrenica in the years 1992-4 and that scores of  nearby towns were destroyed and subjected to ethnic cleansing and killings that ran to over  a thousand civilians, [17] but in the articles of  1993 and later the phrase ethnic cleansing is  absent and the facts of ethnic cleansing of Serbs is barely detectable. [18] Only three articles mention the name Naser Oric, the Bosnian Muslim military leader in Srebrenica, who openly bragged to Western journalists about killing and beheading  Serb civilians, but who is treated in these articles as a virtual hero and in the one extensive discussion as merely a “tough” guy. [19] The British media actually made him into a “widely praised” truth-teller, a “Robin Hood” who “led the defense of Srebrenica before thousands of Muslim men were massacred.” [20].

This neglect and downplaying of the prior and serious Serb victimization helped make the Bosnian Serb killings of Bosnian Muslim soldiers in July 1995 incomprehensible as vengeance killings and part of a tit-for-tat cycle and fitted the notion of irrational vengeance and one-sided killing by the forces of evil.

Only two of the 71 articles dealing with the Srebrenica events of 1995 mention the ethnic cleansing of some 250,000 Serbs from Croatia’s Krajina region in August 1995, and only one of the two mentions a possible link to the Srebrenica massacre. Bias is evident here at several levels. For one thing, the sheer lack of interest in this case is enlightening. This was the largest single act of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars, yet it is given negligible attention here and in the Western media more generally. The estimates of killings in this operation are uncertain, but run up to 2,500, and the deaths in this case, in contrast with the “Srebrenica massacre,” were largely of civilians, including women and children (not just “men and boys”). It is very possible that more civilians were killed in this episode than in Srebrenica in July 1995. This episode is actually celebrated annually in Croatia, in a “Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day,” without notice or comment in the West. [21]

Although this massive operation in the Krajina region, was carried out in the month after the Srebrenica takeover, and although Madeleine Albright began to focus intensively on the Srebrenica massacre and show satellite photos supporting the Western claims in the very month of  the Krajina assault, there is only the vaguest hint in a single article that one function of the outcries over Srebrenica might be to obscure the U.S.-supported massive ethnic cleansing in Krajina. In this respect, as well as others, the U.S. media’s adaptation to U.S. policy was all that U.S. policymakers could ask.

In six articles there is mention of satellite evidence that the United States presented to the UN in August 1995 giving supposed photo documentation of massacres in July. None of the six quote Madeleine Albright’s statement in August 1995 that “We will be watching,” which suggests that special attention would be given to providing satellite evidence. None of the six ask obvious questions, such as: with an acknowledged interest in providing evidence of Serb executions why are there no photos of corpses, burials in process, and trucks carrying away several thousand bodies to new grave sites as later alleged?  This lack of media interest in satellite-based evidence is especially notable as the media were claiming a  “huge Serb effort to hide bodies by moving and reburying them.” [22] They never ask why the photos have been kept out of public view or challenge this secrecy. The failure to even raise such questions reflects the gullibility of journalists who know the truth in advance of  gathering relevant facts, and who therefore serve as de facto propagandists.

In none of the articles is it suggested that the United States and its NATO allies have any interest in the Balkans except as honest brokers and peace-makers pained by ethnic cleansing.  They are regularly portrayed as mainly good-hearted but ineffectual bunglers, who failed to recognize evil and intervene with force.

In none of the articles was it ever suggested that the Bosnian Muslims needed a “Srebrenica massacre” to achieve their political aims, and that they played an important role in facilitating the Srebrenica takeover, in assuring some killings, and in helping produce an adequate number massacred. None of the articles mention the credible report that Clinton told Izetbegovic that he needed 5,000 bodies at Srebrenica to obtain NATO military support.  None of them mention the fact that the Bosnian Muslims refused to provide the Red Cross with the names of people who fled Srebrenica and made it to Bosnian Muslim lines, which would have reduced the initially established “missing” total. None of them mention the claims and evidence that Izetbegovic and associates were willing to kill or see killed their own civilians and personnel to make political capital.  None of them mention the ease with which a small number of Bosnian Serbs were able to capture Srebrenica in July 1995 and none speculate on the politics of  the Bosnian Muslim withdrawal. [23]

Although the articles regularly mention that Srebrenica was  declared a “safe area,” and stress both the Bosnian Serb violation of their safety and the UN failure to protect it, they give little or no attention to the fact that the Bosnian Muslims were supposed to have been disarmed in those areas, but were not and in fact carried out regular forays against the nearby Serb towns from those safe retreats. Ignoring this other side of the “safe area” failure helped make the Serb attacks seem even more outrageous.

A repeated theme of the supporters of the Yugoslavia Tribunal and campaigners for retribution for the Srebrenica massacre is that justice is required in order to begin a reconciliation process. This of course is the alleged basis of the insistence that the Bosnian Serbs confess to their crimes at Srebrenica, as well as for the substantial investment in forensics and body counts and identification at Srebrenica.  This justice-for-reconciliation demand is very selective: there is no such demand for justice for the Krajina Serb victims or literally thousands of Serb victims in Western Bosnia, only for the Bosnian Muslims.  There is also no reason to believe that a one-sided call for justice, with the other side feeling strongly the discrimination, will help reconciliation in any way. Nor is there any reason to believe that reconciliation is the aim of those pushing for Serb confessions and other acts of penance. But the articles examined here repeat this theme without qualification.

In sum, the U.S. media treatment of Srebrenica has lacked minimal journalistic integrity. It  has followed a de facto party line, tapped sources that take that line as a given and excluded all others,  failed to provide adequate context and is simply unable and unwilling to ask obvious questions and  investigate issues that cry out for investigation (like the alleged satellite evidence of  killings). Like the U.S. media’s news coverage of the Iraq threat of 2002-3, or the Iran threat today, this is propaganda under the guise of  news.

End Notes

1. For illustrations, see Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 117, pp. 214-216. Tribunal judge Antonio Cassese famously bragged that an ICTY indictment had prevented Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic from participating in the 1995 Dayton negotiations: “Let us see who will sit down at the negotiating table now with a man accused of genocide,” Cassese told L’Unita newspaper. Antonio Cassese’s interview with L’Unita was reported in “Karadzic a Pariah, Says War Crimes Tribunal Chief,” ANP English News Bulletin, July 27, 1995.

2. Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, pp. 124-146. Also see John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007), passim.

3. For an exemplary illustration, see the study of the work of Marlise Simons, the chief New York Times reporter during the Milosevic trial, in Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The New York Times on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda Service,” ColdType, 2004, <http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.04/Essays.04/YugoTrib.pdf>.
4. David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, 2nd Ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 12.

5. Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population, Volume 21, June, 2005, 187-215; and see Patrick Ball et al., Bosnian Book of the Dead: Assessment of the Database (Sarajevo: Research and Documentation Center, June, 2007).

6. This single citation was in the London Independent. For details on the study of this media coverage, see Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,” Monthly Review, October 2007, pp. 25-26, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/1007herman-peterson1.php>.

7. Herman and Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,” pp. 25-26.

8, Herman and Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,” pp,  23-24,  p. 44.

9. See the study of Racak as a “Mythical Bloodbath,” in Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), pp. 95-101, <http://monthlyreview.org/books/politicsofgenocide.php>.

10. “The total number of individuals located in the Srebrenica mass grave sites exhumed between 1996 – 2001 is 2,570.” (Witness Statement—Investigations Team Leader Dean Paul Manning, Prosecutor v. Slobodan Milosevic, IT-02-54-T, November 24, 2003, para. 59, <http://www.domovina.net/archive/2003/20031124_manning.pdf>

11. On the chief witness, Drazen Erdemovic, see Germinal Civikov, Srebrenica: Der Kronzeuge ([“Srebrenica: The Crown Witness,”] Vienna: Promedia, 2009). Also see, Jonathan Rooper, “The Numbers Game,” and George Szamuely, “Securing Evidence: The Misuse of Witness Evidence at the Hague,” Chapters 4 and 5 in Edward S. Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics (forthcoming, 2011).

12. For a discussion of this videotape and its reception, Herman and Peterson, “Dismantling Yugoslavia,” p. 40.

13. For details, Herman and Peterson, “Dismantling Yugoslavia,” pp. 40-41.

14. The data here are taken from Edward S. Herman, “U.S. Media Coverage of Srebrenica,” Chapter 8 in Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre.

15. The “Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims” is stated as a simple fact in “US strips citizenship, deports man tied to Bosnian war crimes,” Agence France Presse, June 3, 2010.
16. Quotes from Herman, “U.S. Media Coverage of Srebrenica,” in Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre.

17. See George Bogdanich, “Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica,” Chapter 2 in Herman, Ed., The Srebrenica Massacre.

18. Common parlance was that Serb removal was “revenge,” and in the Washington Post there was an explicit denial that the Serbs suffered “ethnic cleansing,” a denial left unchallenged. See Herman, “U.S. Media Coverage,” in Herman, Ed., The Srebrenica Massacre.

19. John Pomfret, “Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica’s Tough Guy,” Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1994.

20. Cited in Philip Hammond, “The UK Press on Srebrenica,” Chapter 9 in Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre.

21. See Herman and Peterson, “Dismantling Yugoslavia,” pp. 20-22.

22. David Rhode, “The World Five Years Later,” New York Times, July 9, 2000.

23. These issues are discussed in Bogdanich, “Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica,” and Herman, “Introduction,” Chapter 1 and 2 in Herman, ed., The Srebrenica Massacre