Prime Time Crime

This volume tells the riveting tale of how media malfeasance stirred up the ethnic hatreds that led to the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s. Drawing on extensive interviews with journalists in the region, Kurspahic recounts how - after serving Yugoslavia's communist party for decades - key Balkan media readily shifted loyalties to nationalist ideologies, doing their warmongering for them. He shows how the media in Serbia "gave birth" to Sobadon Milosevic, who as a low-level communist party apparatchik befriended influential Belgrade journalists. The book is also the story of independent journalists who risked their livelihoods and their lives in an effort to tell a more balanced story, and is a disquieting account of how the international community post-Dayton undermined the goal of creating a civil society in Bosnia by leaving the nationalists in control of the media. It ends on a hopeful note, with the election of a liberal democrat as president of Croatia, the gradual removal of the nationalist Muslim party from power in Bosnia and the defeat of Milosevic by Serbia's democratic opposition. Finally, the author offers recommendations for the international community in the Balkans.