NATO's high-tech military assault on Yugoslavia is not for couch potatoes. Televising a war without pictures -- the live pictures to which American viewers have become addicted -- is a cumbersome, and less than captivating, business as US networks have found in the past few days.
Since US and NATO planes, ships, and submarines began raking military targets in Yugoslavia with sophisticated bombs and missiles, television has struggled mightily to deliver action while having almost none to show.
The result has been an unexpected bonanza for the Clinton administration, whose officials have blitzed the airwaves to explain why NATO, led by the United States, is bombing a Central European country to make peace.
The indisputable star has been Defense Secretary William Cohen. He appeared on five different morning TV shows, spoke to two major radio networks, and then did three more TV interviews, winding up at midnight on the ABC News program Nightline -- and all on the same day.
White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have not quite kept that pace, although they, too, suddenly seem as accessible as Hollywood movie stars on a promotional tour.
And, for the other side, the ubiquitous Vladislav Jovanovic, Yugoslav ambassador to the United Nations, helped provide some minor fireworks with his version of events in Kosovo on CNN's Larry King Live on Friday.
An indignant James Rubin, the US State Department spokesman, accused Jovanovic of spreading disinformation.
"The spokesmen for the Yugoslav government have a habit of misrepresenting and denying what's going on," Rubin retorted.
But the exchange was hardly likely to win the type of ratings the networks, especially cable, reaped from their wall-to-wall live coverage of the Gulf War and subsequent air attacks on Iraq.
The problem -- for Clinton and the television networks -- is Slobodan Milosevic.
The Yugoslav president, whose state-run media has described CNN as "a factory of lies," pulled the plug on satellite transmissions before the attack even started on Wednesday.
On Thursday, he ordered journalists from NATO countries to leave Yugoslavia.
In doing so, Milosevic denied Americans the same front-row seats they had during the 1991 Gulf War.
Eerie, green-tinged night vision scenes of Baghdad lit by tracer and antiaircraft fire have been replaced by a few seconds of pre-recorded tape of Tomahawk missiles being fired by ships hundreds of miles away from their targets.
Serbian state television has provided a few short clips of burning buildings, bomb craters, and hospital patients. On Saturday, Belgrade released tape of what it said was a downed US F-117 Stealth fighter.
US universities, think-tanks, and the government have provided an endless stream of talking heads to fill the hours.
Pentagon briefings are carried live, but gone are the Gulf War's telegenic Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell, the familiar swagger of General "Stormin'" Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of allied forces, and their glitzy presentations replete with maps, charts, and cockpit footage.
Instead of standing on rooftops wearing flak-jackets and ducking "incoming," US reporters in the region -- often highly paid veteran war correspondents -- are limited to talking on the phone against a background of still photographs and maps pinpointing their location.
The Freedom Forum, a journalists' advocacy group, has accused Milosevic of "a bunker mentality."
It points out that even Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, not famous for his good press in the United States, tolerated the US media.
Copyright© 1999 Reuters Limited.
Related Wired Links:
Yugoslav Net at the Brink
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Email Assist for Yugoslavs
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Net Dispatches from Kosovo's War
26.Mar.99
Do-it-Yourself News
26.Mar.99
Kosovo Won't Be Televised
24.Mar.99
Yugoslav Free Radio Shut Down
24.Mar.99
