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This Just In: Media

Steven Brill's bullet-stained dress

By Dan Kennedy

One might have hoped that Clinton-Gore campaign contributor Steven Brill would have marked the first anniversary of Brill's Content by apologizing to ABC reporter Jackie Judd. In his "Pressgate" screed on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair last June, Brill smeared Judd as someone whose "every utterance is infected with the clear assumption that the president is guilty at a time when no reporter can know that." To summarize: Clinton was guilty; Judd knew it; Brill was wrong.

But no. In fact, the latest issue of Content even features a cover photo of a navy-blue Gap dress of the very sort that Brill had brazenly and mistakenly asserted that Judd couldn't possibly know was stained with presidential semen. The photo, though, is an act of neither contrition nor irony on Brill's part. Instead, it illustrates his latest effort -- war gets the monica treatment -- and is thus decorated not with Bill Clinton's precious bodily fluids but, rather, 14 bullet holes.

Now, given that virtually every mainstream news organization either unquestioningly cheered NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia or lamented that the West wouldn't also send in ground troops, a critical assessment is certainly in order. Brill, though, doesn't question the lack of dissent. Instead, he dedicates 12 ad-free pages to the proposition that the media provided aid and comfort to Slobodan Milosevic by means of a) an inaccurate headline and lead in the Washington Post and b) a mangled quote in the New York Times.

Let's grant the possibility that Brill got his facts right this time. There's still the matter of forests and trees, and how to tell one from the other.

Perhaps Elaine Lafferty, a correspondent for the Irish Times and Time magazine, would be willing to teach him. Lafferty reports in the current Nation on a boy who lost both legs and an arm after playing with a NATO cluster bomb, and on a pasture filled with dead cows -- felled, she fears, by environmental poisoning caused by the US's depleted-uranium shells. Such, she observes, are the limits of destroying a country in order to save it.