Freedom of the Press

This is a response to an Edwards blogger I wrote on November 13 2003:
Re:Like him, but......

Whew!...that was loooong! When I arrived here in 1991., this was one of my first shocking revelations. I would spend the day downloading news (about war in Yugoslavia) from the Internet (no WWW then yet). Sources from Japan, Israel and Ukraine were the most objective, followed by France, Russia and Switzerland. By evening, there would be a consensus, pretty much, on what happenned on the ground,e.g., which side did the shelling that killed a bunch of civilians etc. Then I would turn on the TV and watch, in amazement, Rather, Brokaw and Jennings telling a lie. No matter what really happenned, the bad guys were always the Serbs as that was 'the party line'. Knight-Ridder (Edit: It was Rudder-Finn, not Knight-Ridder, I did this from memory!) service openly stated that they were paid by Croatian government to influence the US public opinion against the Serbs. Bob Dole, an Albanian by origin, and recipient of massive campaign donations from the Albanian immigrants, did a lot of pushing on the Balkan policy. At the beginning of the war, newspapers sent their best journalists to the Balkans. Within months, most of them resigned because the editors turned their articles upside down, or directed what they were to report. So, the you ng guys were sent in, too dependent on the editors for keeping the job and starting the careers to have strength to say No or quit and go independent. A number of the old journalists published a book about the whole issue of 'directed' reporting. The book was published in Switzerland, in French, and still cannot be found in the USA. So, whatever you may heard in US media about the Balkan wars of the 1990s is completely wrong. Sorry! ;-)