The date was May 15, 1995: the United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary in the town of its birth, San Francisco, and the mood was self-congratulatory. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali spoke of his organization's many successes. In his speech, President Bill Clinton decided not to mention the most embarrassing word for the United Nations--Bosnia. "ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" unmistakably corrected that omission. It carried a report on the celebration in San Francisco but followed it with pictures of yet another three children killed that day by a Serbian shell in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. And it presented Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Sllajdzic saying, "It is sad that in the 50th year of its existence, the United Nations is presiding over the genocide in Bosnia!"

It was a lesson on news reported in proper perspective. Yes, there was the United Nations' anniversary. And, yes, there is ongoing in the century of "never again," in which the United Nations was created to prevent another episode of genocide. Jennings simply couldn't miss the point. With his "ABC World News Tonight," he has followed the Bosnian story in a way that challenges international ignorance, neutrality and the our-national-security-interests-are-not-involved attitude of the Bush and Clinton administrations.

As the anchor of the most respected news program in the United States, Jennings didn't have to go to Bosnia himself, but he went there twice in wartime and produced two powerful hourlong documentaries: one in 1994 on the failure of the two administrations in Washington to deal with the Bosnian tragedy and one in 1995 on the failure of the United Nations. His reports on the genocidal Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia, on cover-ups in the State Department, on massacres of civilians in the U.N.-declared "safe zones" of Sarajevo, Gorazde and Bihac–and on systematic efforts by the U.N. British General Michael Rose to lower the numbers of killed in order to escape responsibility for the protection of Bosnian civilians--provided viewers with firsthand, first-class insights on the story that has torn apart a country and humiliated international leadership since April i992.

Jennings' example offers an important lesson: In stories like Bosnia, a journalist can be objective without necessarily being neutral. It is exactly the sick concept of neutrality between the victims and perpetrators of genocidal crimes that makes the United Nations and NATO impotent in the face of mass killings in Bosnia. And it is the confusion between the concepts of neutrality and objectivity that distorts the picture of events in Bosnia in some American media. One recent example: When the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in July 1995 issued an official indictment against the self-styled Bosnian and Croatian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Milan Martic, some reporters rushed to express their concern that "the Tribunal might lose credibility if it continues to indict Serbs only," suggesting that there should be some balance in indictments since some Muslims and Croats committed crimes too.

Trying to balance things this way inevitably distorts the picture. A CIA report suggests that at least 90 percent of the crimes of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans were committed by the Serbian forces, and a report by the United Nations' Commission of Experts on War Crimes states that "there is no factual ground for moral equivalence in responsibility for the atrocities" committed in Bosnia. In the search for balance in events where there are no balances on the ground--as in Bosnia--some radio and TV stations in Washington have made a routine of inviting to their studios for commentary on Bosnia Danijela Sremac, whom they present as a "Bosnian Serb representative" in the United States. But in representing those who are indicted for genocidal crimes, like Karadzic and Mladic, Ms. Sremac spreads the Serbian propaganda line through American media.

"This is only the Bosnian Muslim government trying to blame Serbs, nothing else," she said on CNN on the subject of Serbian ethnic cleansing in the U.N.-declared safe zone of Srebrenica in July 1995. Does that help objectivity? Not at all, since Serbs in Srebrenica tortured, raped and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. The United States estimates that as many as 2,000 to 2,700 men from Srebrenica were executed, and some 6,ooo are still listed as missing.

The American media’s reporting on Bosnia can be followed on two different levels. One is reporting from Bosnia itself, and the other is reporting on diplomatic activities regarding Bosnia. Some American journalists reporting from Bosnia not only did a heroic, professional job under the most dangerous conditions, they also helped to save thousands of lives. Roy Gutman, author of Witness to Genocide and a 1993 Pulitzer Prize winner for his dispatches on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia for Newsday, was among the most deserving of credit. His story on Serbian concentration camps reached the U.S. public when the Bush administration was reluctant to release disturbing documents on large-scale atrocities. Once Gutman's reports on mass executions and rapes, transportation trains and concentration camps were published, and television crews and photographers sent the alarming pictures of camp inmates in Bosnia looking very much like the inmates of the Nazi camps, there was a public outcry. International humanitarian organizations went to Bosnia, helped to secure the release of prisoners and closed most of the camps. Thousands of lives were saved.

Another Pulitzer Prize winner that year, John F. Burns from the New York Times, spent more than a year in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Sharing the terror with Sarajevans, spending many nights of Serbian shelling in cellars and witnessing killings of people in their apartments, in the lines for bread or water or in the city streets, he couldn't be confused--as some of the U.N. high officials were--about who is a victim and who is an aggressor. And Burns, like most of his colleagues who spent some time reporting from Sarajevo, couldn't just simplify events by portraying them as a tribal war of Serbs vs. Muslims vs. Croats. He saw that in Sarajevo all citizens, including tens of thousands of the Serbs who remained in their city, shared the same Serbian terror. Among 10,000 Sarajevans killed in the first three years of the siege, at least 2,000 were Serbs killed by Serbian artillery and sniper fire.

There is a long list of journalists who did fine reporting on the human side of the Bosnian story, on the struggle for the survival of the multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural spirit of Sarajevo, a city that has been targeted by the forces of extreme nationalism and abandoned by the rest of the world: among them were Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Tom Gjelten of NPR and Dave Marash of ABC. In the summer of 1994 Roger Cohen of the New York Times--two years after the height of Serbian ethnic cleansing--was the first to bring attention to one of the most horrifying stories of the summer of 1992: the extermination of almost all of the male population of Vlasenica, some 3,000 men, in the Serbian concentration camp of Susica. In three long articles, talking with a Serb guard from the camp, refugees from Vlasenica, and Serbian authorities, Cohen produced a piece of first-class journalism that also led to one of the first indictments for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Yet there is a gap between reporting from the war zone and reporting from the comfort of the briefing rooms of the White House, the State Department or the U.N. palaces in New York and Geneva. Journalists from Bosnia report on what they see. Those covering diplomatic activities report on what they are told. And the more they accept at face value everything those in power tell them--without asking the right questions--the more they create an embarrassing impression of obedient, manipulated journalism. They are manipulated not only by simply conveying to the public, without challenge, everything they were told, but even more often by failing to insist on information about what they were not told.

It is natural that leaders prefer not to mention stories like Bosnia, sometimes for many months. Pictures from Bosnia make them look weak, and they prefer to look strong in their people's eyes. So it was perfectly understandable that the leaders of the G-7 industrialized nations, meeting in Canada in June 1995 to demonstrate their "unity," issued a warning to "all sides in the war in the Balkans" to get back to the negotiating table. But it was sad to see hundreds of journalists not reminding them--and the public in their own countries--that in a meeting a year ago in Italy these leaders had introduced their "take-it-or-leave-it" peace proposal for Bosnia. When the Bosnian Serbs refused that proposal, all the "unity and resolve" of the world leaders disappeared. Journalists should not have let them get away without at least asking them: "What happened with your 'take-it-or-leave-it' proposal? Why do you put equal pressure on those who accepted and those who refused that plan?"

Similarly, at the United Nations' celebration of the 50th anniversary in San Francisco, journalists presented a great gift to Boutros-Ghali when they allowed him to brush aside criticism of the United Nations' performance in Bosnia by simply saying that it "did not have the mandate to impose but only to keep the peace" and didn't insist that there was a clear mandate to protect civilians in the "safe zones," to secure an "exclusion zone" for heavy weapons around Sarajevo and a "no-fly zone" over Bosnia, and that all those tasks were simply abandoned. And what kind of peace were they to "keep" in Bosnia, anyway?

"Larry King Live," at the end of 1994, provided CNN viewers with a rare opportunity to hear the firsthand Serbian side of the story. The guest was the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic. Even though Larry King invited a few senior diplomatic correspondents to join him in talking with Milosevic, they all failed to ask him some of the most obvious questions. When Milosevic said that "this war was caused by nationalism that doesn't have anything to do with the end of the century," they didn't remind him that he was the one who ignited Serbian ultranationalism when he declared--in a speech at Kosovo Polje on June 28, 1989-- "even the armed struggle is not excluded" in the fight for Serbian national goals. Milosevic said that the Serbian people have always wanted peace and that "the war was imposed on us." They did not ask him, "How can the war be imposed on Serbia in the territories of neighboring states--Bosnia and Croatia?" He told them that "Bosnia was illegally recognized...after an illegal referendum," and they did not object that Bosnia met the criteria for recognition set by the European Community in a referendum in which 64 percent of Bosnians voted for independence.

Such a lack of understanding in the context of the war in the Balkans characterizes much of the reporting on the diplomatic activities on Bosnia. I recall a television report on Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic–who is neither Bosnian nor Serb nor leader since he was born in Montenegro and no one ever voted for him to represent Bosnian Serbs--meeting international mediators Lord David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg in the "Serb town of Zvornik." No one mentioned that until the Serbian ethnic cleansing in April 1992, Zvornik was 59 percent Muslim and 38 percent Serb. The town became all-Serbian only after all the Muslim population was expelled. (It was in Zvornik on April 8, 1992, that my paper's correspondent, Kjasif Smajlovic, became the first journalist to die in the war in Bosnia when he was killed in Oslobodjenje's office by Serbian paramilitary forces.)

Journalists did not protest enough President Clinton's statements--at a time when he wanted to excuse his inaction--that the war in Bosnia will end "once they get tired of killing each other." As reports by the CIA and others suggest, there is no case of "killing each other" but genocidal crimes of "ethnic cleansing" and a clear case of aggression against a member state of the United Nations.

But with all the eagerness of diplomatic correspondents to accept the confusing language of those involved in the efforts to legalize "new realities" created by force in Bosnia, with all the pro-Serbian apologists using op-ed pages of prestigious papers to justify Serbian conquests and with all the efforts in newsrooms to balance things that are highly unbalanced on the ground, there are still all those courageous and decent reporters who keep the American public well informed on what is really happening in the Balkans. Their work, in its professionalism and accuracy, produces a level of understanding of the Bosnian situation that is unique in the world.

(Kemal Kurspahic is U.S. editor-correspondent for the Bosnian independent daily Oslobodjenje of Sarajevo and was editor in chief of that paper during the first two years of the siege.)