"An instrument of propaganda"

In his recent interview with Amy Goodman, Wesley Clark made some extraordinarily frank admissions regarding his conscious manipulation of the US media (in particular CNN) with regard to the bombing of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) by NATO forces under his command in 1999:

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: [...] I was asked to take out that television by a lot of important political leaders. And before I took it out, I twice warned the Serbs we were going to take it out. We stopped, at one news conference in the Pentagon, we planted the question to get the attention of the Serbs, that we were going to target Serb Radio and Television.
[...]

AMY GOODMAN: You told CNN, which was also there, to leave?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I told -- I used -- I think I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at the Pentagon press conference. But we didn't tell anyone specifically to leave. What we told them was it's now a target.

Read that again: "I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at the Pentagon press conference."  That's a truly remarkable bit of candor from Clark in describing how he used the supposedly independent media in the US--apparently with their consent, based on his description--to send military warnings to the Serbian leadership.  And his uncertainty about which specific media outlet he'd used implies that that practice wasn't limited to CNN (which wouldn't surprise me in the least based on my monitoring of media outlets at the time).

This is remarkable only for its candor, though, not  its uniqueness.  In February of 2000 there were reports that CNN had allowed military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group to work as interns at CNN headquarters in Atlanta.  According to Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service:

"Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program, 'Training with Industry'. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news."

CNN later verified this story (though it understandably tried to minimize the PR damage by quibbling over the specifics).  And beyond the PSYOPS connection there's also the fact that Christiane Amanpour, CNN's premier correspondent in Kosovo at the time, was married to Jamie Rubin--the US State Department's then spokesman.

The intense irony here is that Clark has repeatedly defended the bombing of RTS because it was "an instrument of propaganda" used by Yugoslavia to further its war aims, and yet he sees no inconsistency between that and his admitted use of a major US media outlet to plant questions at a Pentagon press conference and to act as a conduit for sending military warnings to Yugoslavia.  And sadly, Amy Goodman failed to confront him on this hypocrisy, just as she failed to confront him in general throughout the interview.

At the very least, this should be a warning for anyone who considers the mainstream US media in general and CNN in particular as a reliable or even remotely unbiased source of news.

Comments

[Jai]

Clark did not defend bombing the RTS because it was an "instrument of propaganda." He said it was a valid military target because it was part of Milosevic' command and control of his military. And for what it's worth (obviously not much to someone like yourself who values his own opinion more than international law) the UN and every single NATO member nation agreed.

[John Caruso]

Jai,

You're mistaken:

A message from Clark was read by one of his chief spokesmen, British Air Commodore David Wilby. "Serb radio and TV [represent] an instrument of propaganda and repression," Wilby read.

You're correct that Clark also called it part of the Yugoslav military's "command and control network"--as I cited in the post just before this one. The two quotes aren't exclusive, of course. For the purposes of this posting, however, the key phrase was the one that I cited--for obvious reasons. I'd reiterate (as I did in that previous posting) that simply calling it part of the Yugoslav "command and control network" is mere handwaving, and requires some sort of evidence--which has never been provided by Clark, or anyone else for that matter.

The fact is that RTS was bombed because it was providing immediate, graphic images of the results of US/NATO bombing attacks, thus undermining support for the bombing campaign. That's the "propaganda" that justified its destruction, and the murder of 16 civilians. And the US applied the same criminal logic again in Afghanistan and Iraq, destroying Al Jazeera offices in both countries and in the latter case killing journalist Tareq Ayoub.

As to your assertion that the UN "agreed" that RTS was a valid military target, you're simply wrong. If you want to claim otherwise feel free to provide a citation. And in fact I don't know of any explicit statements to that effect even from NATO members outside of the US and UK.

You seem to have missed the point of the posting entirely, however. I have to wonder: if Yugoslav agents had somehow managed to blow up CNN's Atlanta headquarters at that time, would you be equally willing to accept that as a valid military target? Or if Iraq had somehow infiltrated and destroyed CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS headquarters in 2003 (or 1991) as the US was laying waste to that country, would you have said, sure, no problem, those are valid targets? I imagine I can guess the answer.