Shredding the mags

It's the kind of trouble-making headline we should see more of from our
important news magazines --

"The Kosovo
Cover-Up."

It's not Newsweek's cover story. That honor belongs to a fluffier, more digestible subject, a feature on the "groundbreaking" digital tricks used to make Disney's $200 million

"Dinosaur"
movie that will be unleashed upon us this summer.

But Newsweek should get extra credit this week for sticking it to the Pentagon for fudging (i.e., lying about) the effectiveness of the U.S.-NATO air war in Kosovo.

You don't remember Kosovo? Come on. That great American military victory back in the last century?

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The nationally televised video war game that saved the ethnic Kosovars from being cleansed from the countryside by the Serbs so they could later ethnically cleanse the Serbian population?

The war in which, according to our trusty generals and Defense Secretary William Cohen, we "severely crippled" the Serb military by knocking out 120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers and about 450 artillery pieces? And we did it from 15,000 feet with smart bombs and without using or losing a single ground soldier?

The trouble is, as Newsweek asserts and as some critics have been saying all along, the "air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective."

Quoting from a suppressed Air Force report, Newsweek's John Barry and Evan Thomas show that the Air Force knew the high-altitude bombing was doing little damage but covered up reports that proved it.

Why the lies and cover up? Because the military was under intense political pressure from its masters in Washington to produce positive bombing results so no U.S. ground troops would have to be sent to the Balkans.

Newsweek's story puts all the blame on the military. It says the cover up "is revealing of the way military bureaucracies can twist the truth -- not so much by outright lying, but by 'reanalyzing' the problem and winking at inconvenient facts." And what about President Clinton?

It was he and his underlings who applied all of that political pressure on the military and he ultimately took the credit for our great "success." But in Newsweek's piece, the commander in chief gets off scot-free. His name is mentioned nowhere in the article and appears only in a photo caption.

As for the actual results of the air war, it turns out that the Serbs lived up to their reps as masters of camouflage. They lost a lot of fake bridges, inflatable tanks and long black logs attached to old truck wheels, but only 14 real tanks, 18 armored cars and 20 pieces of artillery.

It was the terror-bombing of civilians in Belgrade -- something the Air Force and its D.C. bosses do not like to issue press releases about -- that made Slobodan Milosevic cry uncle. His military machine was hardly scratched and, according to a Newsweek sidebar, the Balkan strongman is as entrenched as ever.

Newsweek was soft on President Clinton. But its exclusive report convincingly shows that our great air victory, like the "genocide" that Serbian police and paramilitary thugs were supposedly practicing on the Kosovars, turned out to be a big pile of allied propaganda.

Quick reads

Talk magazine still doesn't have an online edition. And it isn't as hot and trendy as it was when it was born last year. But Talk continues to reflect the tastes of founder/editor Tina Brown, who created it after earning fame in the '90s for editing Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. The May issue, which has "Gladiator" Russell Crowe on the cover, is the usual three-way mix of craven celebrity worship, esoteric entertainment-industry insiderism and good journalism.

If you really care which super-egomaniacal CEO is going to run Viacom after it merges with CBS, you can read all the details. Plus, there's a good profile of Tony Blair, the pragmatic left-wing Prime Minister who admits he built his "New" Labor Party on ideas copied from his New Democrat friends Clinton and Gore.

Looking for something edgier? In "When Crack Comes to Town" Jim Defede hung out with a special undercover DEA team that was called in to help the cops in a small Florida town that was experiencing big drug problems. After four months of setting up drug stings, hiring snitches (one of whom sold out his own son for $200) and spending $500,000 of the taxpayers' money, the team netted 43 arrests.

Defede's article opens with a two-page photo of DEA agents kicking in somebody's front door during a pre-dawn raid. It would have made a perfect illustration for "Smash-up Policing," Dave Kopel's latest article in the May 22

National Review.

Kopel's piece is part of NR's continuing outrage over the use of "stormtroopers" to seize Elian Gonzalez. It mostly deals with showing how the escalation of the war on drugs is causing local police forces to become more like the military and less like the local "peace officers" they're supposed to be.

But Kopel also makes a point about the Elian case that too few in the mainstream media have made. Many Americans were understandably shocked by the photo of Elian being seized, he says. But they shouldn't have been.

As the photo of the drug raid in Talk demonstrates, Kopel says "Similar events -- in which people are assaulted in their homes by SWAT teams waving machine guns, spewing foul language, threatening to shoot people and trashing the house as a tactical distraction -- happen every day in the United States, without media attention."

National Magazine Awards

Generally, the more you know about how industry awards like the Oscars or the Grammys or even the Pulitzer Prizes are given out, the less credibility they have. But each year the National Magazine Awards invariably seem to go to magazines that truly deserve them.

The awards are presented by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to magazines that "consistently demonstrate superior performance in carrying out stated editorial objectives, innovative editorial techniques, noteworthy journalistic enterprise, and imagination and vigor in layout and design.''

Politically, of course, the tilt is always toward the left-liberal end of the spectrum. And don't ever look for such congenitally incorrect publications as Maxim or Guns & Ammo to win a prize. Nevertheless, the choices made last week by the American Society of Magazine Editors are hard to argue with.

National Geographic, The New Yorker, Saveur (food and lifestyle) and Nest (a "home" magazine) were named the top magazines in their categories, which are based on circulation size. Other winners this year included Sports Illustrated, which won for feature writing and profiles. Vanity Fair won twice, for reporting and for photography. So did The New Yorker, which won for fiction and for public service.

Warning: shameless personal plug ahead

"Hollywood's Missing Movies" is the cover piece for the June issue of

Reason. It explains why the tender hearts and deeply caring social consciences of Tinseltown have virtually ignored the major conflict of our time -- the struggle between democracy and Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It wasn't because of ignorance, says writer Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley. It was because so many members of the entertainment community were -- and still are -- blinded by their left-liberal ideology.

Reason includes "Death by Wrecking Ball," an article on the eminent-domain abuse and bad urban planning being perpetrated by the mayor's office in Pittsburgh. Written by some guy named Bill Steigerwald, it comes to the defense of the small merchants and lower-income shoppers who will become victims of a massive redevelopment project planned for downtown Pittsburgh.

This column will not appear next week because its author will be engaged in a week-long experiment in Internet journalism. Armed with a laptop computer, a Web-access digital phone and a digital camera, Steigerwald will spend seven days driving around Tornado Alley (Kansas and Oklahoma) with a gang of nutty but scientifically minded tornado chasers. His "live" dispatches and photos will be posted intermittently to the

Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette's Web site each day.