Re: Hot Pursuit - Louis Proyect comment

[Paul Flewers <paul.flewers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Russell Grinker wrote: < Is B Wool aware that LM reporters such as Joan
Philips and Thomas Deichmann spent a large amount of time on the ground
in various parts of the former Yugoslavia (rather than only on one side
as was the case with most of the western press), that they published
carefully researched material and made TV documentaries on the situation
there, and that they and a number of others were subsequently denounced
in the "liberal" press and continue to face legal action from the mighty
ITN? >

The problem with LM's coverage of the Yugoslav war is that in its
concentrating upon purely responding to the anti-Serb bias in the
liberal press in Britain, by the mid-1990s its coverage at times started
to look more like a damage-limitation exercise on behalf of the Belgrade
regime. The odd statement that LM didn't actually side with any of the
warring parties tended to get obscured by the rest of the magazine's
coverage.

The episode that provoked the ITN writ was LM's declaration that ITN
edited its footage of Trnopolje camp to give the impression it was a
Nazi-style concentration camp. When all this came out in early 1997, I
had more or less drifted away from LM and its parent (and now defunct)
party. A party supporter called me up, asking if I'd seen the material
in LM, and what I thought of it. I replied that ITN may well have edited
the material in this way, but none of this could really advance our
understanding of the Yugoslav wars.

I declared then and I still declare that I defend LM against ITN's writ,
in the interests of free speech.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the ITN writ on LM is that such is the
dramatic change in direction of the magazine, that I don't think it
would touch the Trnopolje story today!

Paul F