[branko_d]

> the war criminals were the pundits on TV

Mila Štula comes to mind.

I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history.

I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.

[rhn_mk1]

What event are you describing? A quick search doesn't reveal any English sources for Mila Štula.

[hnuser123456]

translated from https://www.espreso.co.rs/vesti/hronika/197603/umrla-mila-st...

Mila Štula is mostly remembered by the public as one of the leading media poets of the Milošević regime on Serbian Radio and Television from the beginning of the 90s of the last century. She became famous for her famous comments in the daily Dnevnik in which she disqualified the opposition and its leaders. Her statement that Vuk Drašković has a villa on Lake Geneva is particularly noteworthy, which has never been proven.

The other side saw her as a victim of Tuđman's regime, who became unwelcome in Zagreb after HDZ came to power, as she provoked, or asked unpleasant questions, to the first president of independent Croatia at media conferences. She was a journalist for "Danas" in Zagreb. The Croats, among other things, accused her of working for the counter-intelligence service of the JNA. This led to her moving to Belgrade in 1991.

[branko_d]

I’m describing the breakup of Yugoslavia. TV pundits had a big role in demonizing everybody who might oppose the regime, be it the other political parties or the other republics/ethnicities. This paved the road to the war.

Imagine Alex Jones-level “journalism” directed by the government, blasting from the official and more-less the only widely available TV station in the country. Štula was one of the most notorious examples, but I’m not surprised she’s a relative unknown to the people who didn’t watch her with their own eyes.

The most disappointing aspect about the whole situation was that it was so transparent. It was obvious what they were doing, and yet the population at large somehow went along with it… the socialist apparatchik Milošević won elections at the time Eastern European countries were getting rid of their old communist/socialist power structures. Not that he was the only problem, far from it, but to this day I believe that reformists like Ante Marković would have had a fighting chance if not for Milošević.

And then, when there were no answers to economic problems, it was easy to put blame on others: your neighbors and far-away foreign powers alike. Do that in a powder keg that is the Balkans, where so much blood was spilled in the past and everybody remembers it, and the consequences are predictable.

I think that people who lived in democracies their whole lives underestimate how dangerous the malicious journalism and misinformation can be when enough people start believing it.