Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are

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Pack Journalism can be Lethal
Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are
saying

by Gregory Clark


Global Research, April 10, 2006
Japan Times

Some call it pack journalism. It is also lazy journalism.

Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are
saying. And what others are saying is often inspired by establishment
hardliners seeking to impose their agendas with the help of bogus news
agencies, subsidized research outfits and hired scribblers.

Beijing is a frequent victim. One example is the pack journalistic
myth of a Tiananmen Square massacre of students in 1989. All one needs
to do to get the true story is insert "Tiananmen" into Google and read
the re****ts at the time from none other than the U.S. Embassy in
Beijing.

You will discover that the so-called massacre was in fact a mini civil
war as irate Beijing citizens sought to stop initially unarmed
soldiers sent to remove students who had been demonstrating freely in
the square for weeks. When the soldiers finally reached the square
there was no massacre. There were in fact almost no students.

As evidence of its alleged heavy-handed approach to Taiwan we are
often told how Beijing labels that territory as a "renegade province."
We are never told the source of the term, because it almost certainly
does not exist (I read and speak Chinese and have never come across
it). What Beijing does say is that there is only one China, and that
Taiwan is part of that China. But the fact that all the major powers,
including the United States, have agreed to or acknowledged that claim
finds little mention in the international media. Beijing is almost
always ****trayed as unilaterally and forcefully laying claim to the
island.

The death of former Yugoslav and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic saw
pack journalism at its worst. "Butcher of Belgrade" was the favorite
accusation. Few were interested in the background, which begins with
the fact that during the wartime German occupation of the former
Yugoslavia, up to one million resisting Serbs were butchered by the
Nazis and their fascist Muslim and Croatian allies -- the Usta**** --
whose brutalities were said to have shocked even the Nazis.

The post-1945 communist regime did all it could to dampen the
resulting ethnic hatreds. Even so, s****adic attacks on Serbs by
Usta**** fanatics continued. Then came the premature recognition by the
West of Croatia and Bosnia as independent states in 1991/92. This
meant the large Serbian minorities in both regions would have to
accept the rule of their former oppressors. Bitter hostilities were
inevitable, with the Serbian so-called "ethnic cleansing" in many
cases being part of an effort to recover the towns and villages from
which they were so cruelly expelled before 1945.

True, there were also atrocities by not only the Serbs. One of the
worst was the brutal expulsion of some 500,000 Serbs from the Krajina
region of Croatia -- an act of genuine ethnic cleansing that attracts
little attention from anti-Serb critics, as does the fact that prior
to the much-mentioned expulsion of 7,000 Bosnian Muslims from the
former Serbian town of Sebrenicia, with some massacred, there had been
systematic massacres of Serbs in the surrounding villages.

The true "butchers" in Yugoslavia were the U.S., British and German
planners who orchestrated the break-up of this once ethnically stable
nation. Their aim: to weaken Serbia, seen as pro-Moscow, and to extend
Western influence into a formerly neutral area of Eastern Europe. The
planners must have known how past ethnic hatreds would surface. For as
we see in Iraq and Dafur today, when deep-seated ethnic or religious
differences within a nation are triggered, atrocities and even mass
exterminations are inevitable.

Every civilian, on the other side, has to be seen as a real or
potential enemy. Atrocities can only be ended by forceful separation
of the rival groups. But in Bosnia, the U.S. opposed separation
through till 1995, claiming remarkably that it might create a
precedent for ethnic division in the U.S. The U.S., incidentally, was
the first to practice Dafur-style scorched-earth policies with its
free-fire-zone policies during the Vietnam conflict.

The attempts to blame Milosevic for the Kosovo conflict were even more
biased. We now know that as early as the 1980s, the U.S. and Britain
were encouraging and training ethnic Albanian extremists of the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) to undertake guerrilla war against the Serbian
presence. Somehow the legitimate Serbian military resistance to these
attacks was supposed to be yet another form of "ethnic cleansing." We
were supposed to believe that the Serbian 10 percent minority was
determined to cleanse Kosovo of its 90 percent ethnic Albanian
majority.

Ironically "ethnic cleansing" was a term originally invented by the
KLA to describe its goal of driving all Serbs out of Kosovo -- a goal
it has now largely achieved with the help of the West. The trigger for
much of the anti-Serbian demonization was a speech Milosevic made in
Kosovo in 1989. It is described repeatedly as a racist manifesto
calling for a Greater Serbia state. No one seems to have bothered to
read the speech. If they did they would see that in fact Milosevic was
calling for racial tolerance to cope with the tense situation created
originally by deep-rooted and long-standing ethnic Albanian hostility
to the Serbian presence in Kosovo -- a presence that had once been
strong in this former Serbian homeland but had been greatly reduced by
pro-Nazi Albanian wartime rampages against Serbian villages.

Worse was to follow. Forced to move out of Kosovo or have his country
bombed, Milosevic agreed to move provided the respected ethnic
Albanian moderate Ibrahim Rugova was put in charge. But the U.S., in
the shape of feisty Secretary of State Madeline Albright, insisted on
the young, vigorous KLA leader Ha****m Thaci. When Milosevic objected
to what in effect would be a death or expulsion sentence for any Serbs
remaining in Kosovo, NATO launched its vandalistic bombing attacks on
Serbia to force compliance. The KLA under Thaci then went on expel
more Serbs, Jews and other minorities from Kosovo and to launch
attacks into southern Serbia and Macedonia as part of its campaign to
create a Greater Albania.

Today Thaci rejects even the role of the United Nations in Kosovo.
Meanwhile Serbia, which has seen much of its economy destroyed and has
had to absorb close to one million refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and
Kosovo, still suffers demonization. Pack journalism is a powerful
weapon.


 Global Research Articles by Gregory Clark