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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cody andre who wrote (43798)	4/24/1999 2:00:00 PM
From: JBL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

More info on the Serb TV hit. NATO Hit on TV Station Draws Journalists' Fire Washington Post; Page A17 4/24/99 Howard Kurtz The NATO attack on Serbian television headquarters yesterday drew protests from journalists around the world, sparking debate on whether a media operation is a legitimate military target. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said it was "deeply disturbed" by the bombing of the Belgrade facility, which killed 10 people and injured at least 20. "This could permanently jeopardize journalists covering conflicts all over the world," Chrystyna Lapychak, the group's director for Eastern Europe, said in an interview. "Under the Geneva Convention, journalists are supposed to be noncombatants. NATO is acting like the Yugoslavia government, deciding what people can or cannot watch. Despite the fact that it's propaganda and has effectively been used for warmongering purposes, the best way to counter that is through more information, more reporting." Lapychak called the bombing "frightening to us as journalists." But Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon defended the attack. "Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic's murder machine as his military is," he told reporters. "It has stirred up nationalist passions in the country, it has misreported what's going on in a way that has, I think, made it extremely impossible . . . for the Serb people to grasp the full magnitude of the problem in Kosovo. . . . It's right up there with control of the security and military forces." CNN and the U.S. broadcast networks, which had been feeding videotape from the building, abandoned it after receiving private warnings from senior White House and Pentagon officials that NATO would soon hit the facility. The attack stirred a debate about press freedom, particularly in light of complaints that NATO has been less than forthcoming in providing information about the war. Lapychak said Western audiences would now be deprived of pictures of the war, because most of them have come from Serbian TV. The International Federation of Journalists, based in Brussels, described the bombing, which reduced the building to rubble, as "a broken promise that threatens the lives of all journalists and media staffs." "Killing journalists and media staff never wins wars or builds democracy, it only reinforces ignorance, censorship and fear," said Aidan White, the group's general secretary, according to Reuters. Alexandre Levy of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said the attack "creates a very dangerous precedent for press freedom," according to the Associated Press. The European Broadcasting Union also expressed concern about censorship. And Igor Yakovenko, secretary general of the Union of Russian Journalists, was quoted by the ITAR-Tass agency as saying, "The war has spread to another level when attempts are being made to crush freedom of speech."