Pictures of refugees like these have helped bolster NATO's case.
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Belgrade, meanwhile, has opened up a bit. Television and other journalists have been allowed to report out of the Yugoslavian capital, albeit under restrictions. "This gives some sense of how the citizenry there is reacting to the war," says ABC's Murphy. CBS News is particularly pleased to have gotten its anchorman, Dan Rather, into Belgrade. "His name recognition has allowed us to get access to various officials and places," says Marcy McGinnis, CBS vice president for news coverage.
In some sense, the reporting out of Kosovo may be superior to what came out during the Gulf War. Operation Desert Storm occurred in a remote part of the world. "People were kept away from it and that conflict happened way away from the cameras," recalls ABC's Murphy. "Those affected on the other side also stayed in place." There was no outpouring of refugees capable of bringing information out to reporters about what was going on inside the war zone.
So what perception of the conflict is television bringing back to the living rooms of America this time? There is an emerging consensus that the TV pictures thus far have helped the NATO cause. The reason is simple: The one set of images that has been able to come out of the war unimpeded has been those of the refugees escaping out of Kosovo. The agony, the desperation and the tragedy etched on the faces of the victims have helped give a moral imperative to the NATO action.
"In the beginning it did not look that way," says McGinnis of CBS, "because the desperate escape made it look like NATO had no plan." But the recurring images of suffering had a secondary, and thus far more significant, impact. "The footage day after day of human misery helped to galvanize public opinion," says NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, "and perhaps just as significantly it also strengthened the resolve of NATO officials" to carry on. TIME lifestyle senior editor Richard Zoglin, a longtime television observer agrees: "The only up close and personal stuff we have seen is from the refugees. And almost all of the information on the military damage has been filtered by the Pentagon. Those NATO aerial shots have kept the war at a distance."
And that is perhaps one of the most important caveats to remember as television brings the Kosovo war home. "We are still not getting good full data from the military," warns TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. NBC's Miklaszewski concurs. "They are ordering up more warplanes and reserves," he says. "So despite what they're saying, the air war is not going as successfully as they're indicating." The images, such as we see them, may be illustrative and compelling, but they are not complete. For that to happen, the cameras and the full army of TV and print journalists waiting on the sidelines still need to be let in to mount their own ground offensive.