David Rieff

During the Bosnian war, many international journalists traveled to the country in order to cover the action. On the ground in the war zone, journalists were able to talk to people on all sides of the conflict and make their own assessments of the war. News reports from the region began to sympathize with the Bosnian government and depict the Bosnian Serbs as the aggressors. The United Nations, an international organization charged with keeping the peace in Bosnia, tried to remain impartial and accused journalists of hampering the peace effort by writing distorted accounts about the war.

In the following excerpt from his book Slaughterhouse, American journalist David Rieff defends the international media's coverage of the Bosnian war. Rieff, who lived off and on in Bosnia between 1992 and 1994, claims that he and other journalists witnessed too many Serb atrocities not to...