Last night I heard writer Peter Brock being interviewed on his new book, Media Cleansing.

The book goes into how the media demonized the Serbs in the Yugoslavian conflict of the 90s and slanted their reporting based on propaganda fed to them by the Muslim side.

As he put it, in that three-sided war, "nobody wore a white hat", but it was decided in the media that the Serbs would be the bad guys.  Reports of infrastructure damage and civilian Serb casualties inflicted by our forces was suppressed or minimized (2,000 Serb civilians killed by our bombing and all of the bridges over the Danube taken out).

The reports of ethnic cleansing, genocide, concentration camps, and rape camps were exagerated and in some cases fabricated.  For example, all three sides operated internment camps, but we only heard about the Serb-run camps.  Under pressure the Serbs released their internees, but the Muslims kept their prisoners.  The media has repeated the mantra of 60,000 women systematically raped without any digging.  The UN's own report (certainly no friend to the Serbs) says that there were 120 incidents of rape.

Serb prisoners were beaten into confessing to fabricated war crimes.  One man who was coerced into confessing to murdering scores of men and raping dozens of women was convicted and sentenced.  According to the author, some of his "murder" victims can be seen walking the streets of Sarajevo.

This book sounds like the type of expose on the media and the Yugoslavian conflict that is long overdue.  Sounds like it's worth checking out.

www.mediacleansing.com