SERB GENERAL RATKO MLADIC IS FINALLY IN CUSTODY
Will we remember the crimes and complicity in the war in Bosnia?
By Danny Schechter, Editor, Mediachannel.org
In the TV business we speak of a "getting "a get" as in booking a big name for a highly rated TV appearance. It took nearly ten years to "get" Osama bin Laden although, in his case, his views were not wanted; he made more news, and generated more popular satisfaction, as a target of a possibly illegal liquidation.
He won't be giving any more interviews, that's for sure.
The world waited sixteen years for the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic to be taken into custody.
It seems clear that the Serbian authorities knew where he was but didn't want to upset the volatile and violent extreme nationalists still in their midst who backed the wars he led, and excused the massacres he carried out against the country's Muslims and all citizens who believed in multi-ethnic states.
Mladic will now face overdue war crimes charges in The Hague.
In the week of his arrest, Serbian State television finally apologized for its role in inciting the barbaric war though misinformation, deception and propaganda disguised as news.
AP reported, "Radio Television of Serbia, or RTS, said in a statement posted on its website yesterday that the station's program was "almost constantly and heavily abused'' by Milosevic's regime with the aim of discrediting his political and ethnic opponents and spreading official propaganda.
Liberal politician Marko Karadzic described the apology as a "positive step'' but said the television's managing board did not distance itself clearly enough from the past.
"RTS's program was an organized campaign of support to the policies of extinction and violence which we cannot view as insult or slander,'' aid Karadzic."
It's time for Croatian TV to make a similar statement,
This statement clearly defines the often complicit relationship between war and media showing how TV networks promote wars in the guise of covering them. Too many media organizations took their cues from state propagandist.
Many American TV news executive later issued more tempered apologies for their one sided coverage of the Iraq war.
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