By Vitaly PORTNYKOV, The Day
Those who have a chance to watch simultaneously, say, CNN news, a European
channel, then Russian and Ukrainian television can skip reading these notes.
You can see with the naked eye how the world has changed since NATO began
to act in the Balkans. It has changed, above all, in terms of information.
Although some people in the West also doubt the effectiveness of NATO
actions, there are no doubts at all there about the motivation of them.
Video footage of refugees telling about ethnic cleansing in Kosovo appeared
on Western silver screens well before the NATO strikes. Russian television
only began to cover this cleansing when it was impossible to hide it, when
the victims were counted not in tens but in the hundreds of thousands.
It still remains unclear for the Russian viewer why NATO began to act:
he thinks the ethnic cleansing results from the bombings, that it is Slobodan
Milosevic's reaction and not his real aim. Ukrainian commentators often
resemble either the Russian or the Western ones, but it is hard to see
a wish to analyze the situation from all sides, to explain what is going
on, let alone take a stand.
The world, which seemed united in terms of information - and civilization!
- has again broken into half-worlds with half-truths. The main achievement
of Gorbachev's perestroika, freedom of expression, has suddenly turned
into the freedom to hide information. And this depends not so much on government
instructions as on the sentiments of society; the latter seems to want
to hear what it wishes, while the media only mirror these wishes, the wishes
of the elite which become the needs of the masses.






