MEDIA CLEANSING: A REVIEW
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - January 8, 2008
 

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson
 

Normally I don't review books, but Peter Brock's book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting Journalism & Tragedy in Yugoslavia (2005, GM Books, Los Angeles) is an exceptionally important book. It is an insider's account of the Western media's role in the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s.

Mr. Brock is an award winning newspaper journalist with a career spanning more than 30 years. His career has been highlighted by 17 professional awards - including finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize competition in Public Service. He holds the Southern Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting (Duke University), the Thomas L. Stokes Award for Environmental Reporting of the Washington Journalism Center, and several other distinctions.

What sets this book apart from the rest is the fact that Mr. Brock blows the whistle on his fellow journalists' reporting of the Yugoslav crisis. He traveled in the same circles as they did, he talked to them, and then he wrote a book filled with their dirty little secrets. Mr. Brock not only exposes the incompetence and bias in his fellow journalists' reporting -- he exposes them as co-belligerents and propagandists in the war.

Needless to say, Mr. Brock's whistle blowing has made him quite unpopular in certain circles. According to his publisher, he has been blacklisted and hasn't been able to find work as a journalist since the book was published.

This is the book that the mainstream media does not want you to read. According to the publisher, Sherri Gausset (an ex-Skynews reporter), did a story about the book and was promptly fired. The rest of the media have ignored the book and the consequence has been that it isn't getting the publicity it deserves -- in two years only 3,800 copies have been sold.

The information brought out in this phenomenal book exposes a pattern of corruption, bias, and deception that goes straight to the heart of the mainstream media’s reporting of the Yugoslav crisis.

Brock isn’t afraid to name names in the book. One of the journalists he exposes is a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter named John F. Burns. According to the information Brock presents in the book, Burns’ source for his 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning story about mass-rape and concentration camp style killings in Bosnia was a captured Bosnian-Serb soldier named Borislav Herak who had been tortured to lie by his Muslim captors. In addition, Brock shows that Burns omitted crucial details from Herak’s forced confession that cast serious doubt upon his credibility as a source.

Brock also singles out New York Newsday’s Roy Gutman, who also won a Pulitzer Prize, for reporting he did on Serbian “concentration camps” in Bosnia. Brock sheds light on the methods that Gutman used to write his stories, which were mostly penned from the safety of Zagreb, Croatia. Brock exposes Gutman’s excessive use of hearsay and even double-hearsay from dubious sources, including a paid Croatian government propagandist who operated under four different aliases!

Brock doesn’t shy away from getting personal to show how the character flaws of individual journalists compromised the objectivity and integrity of their reporting. He exposes a Washington Post writer-turned country music singer named Mary Grace Battiata who attacked a pro-Serbian analyst named George Kenney in the pages of that renowned newspaper after the romantic relationship she was having with him came to an end.

Much of the information in Media Cleansing can not be found anywhere else. Brock actually interviewed most of the people that he wrote about including, the former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, Gen. Lewis MacKenzie. Brock writes that “Lewis MacKenzie expected journalists to call him frequently in Etobicoke, but what he did not expect were the kinds of questions they asked. What is interesting is that most of the calls now deal more with: ‘Could you tell us again what happened on such and such a date because we are taking another look at the way we covered it in our reporting.’ MacKenzie’s message to them when they started wallowing in their anguish was. ‘Do not feel too guilty about all of this because you only reported what you saw, and what you saw was only 150 meters on either side of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn.’”.

Brock paints an unflattering picture of the media – a picture of lazy journalists, who couldn’t speak a word of the Serbo-Croatian language, eating steak at Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn hotel while filing reports about Bosnian suffering that were spoon-fed to them by the Izetbegovic regime in Sarajevo. 

Media Cleansing is a long book, but you won’t be able to put it down. It is well written, well documented, and easy to understand. I can’t do it justice. You need to buy it and read it for yourself. It is available from:

http://www.mediacleansing.com/

and

https://www.gmbooks.com/gmshop/index.php?categoryID=13
 

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