IN the TV news business these days, you’re either in Belgrade – or you’re nowhere.
The capital of Yugoslavia is ground-zero for reporters in the bloody Kosovo conflict.
And right now, only three American TV news organizations – NBC, CNN and Britain’s satellite TV for Fox News Channel – have reporters still stationed there airing live reports.
In the TV news business, that’s as good as Super Bowl tickets at the 50-yard line.
ABC, CBS and others are trying desperately to get their reporters back into Yugoslavia after Serbian officials expelled them from the country last week.
Depending on your point of view, the reporters who were forced to set up camp in bordering Albania and Macedonia might be the lucky ones.
Belgrade has declared open war on journalists – especially those working for CNN.
Serbian officials have made personal threats against CNN reporters Chris Burns and Brent Sadler and confiscated, looted or burned more than $500,000 worth of CNN broadcast equipment, the news network says.
“The Serb hardline media machine has decided to declare war on CNN,” said Eason Jordan, CNN’s president of global newsgathering. “That has only heightened the hostility that our people on the ground face.
“It’s hard enough to cover a war, but to find your own news organization targeted in the conflict is especially difficult for us.”
Last Tuesday, before the bombing had even begun, Serbian TV called CNN “a factory of lies” and aired a picture of Burns. Fearing for his life, Burns escaped over the border to Macedonia.
He was replaced by Sadler who was threatened by a Serbian soldier who showed him two bullets and said, “these are for you.”
Meanwhile, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour – who earned a reputation for fearlessness – fled Belgrade after being threatened by the Serbian officials.
CBS’ veteran war reporter Mark Phillips – who had been in Belgrade for just two days – was taken from his hotel room at 3:30 a.m. last Thursday and held for about 12 hours at Serbian security headquarters, interrogated and then driven to Croatia.
It’s also been rough for NBC News correspondents Ron Allen and Jim Maceda and Britain’s BSkyB reporter Tim Marshall, who is filing reports out of Belgrade for Fox News Channel. Both are owned by News Corp, which is also the parent company of The Post.
That doesn’t stop others from being envious.
“At some point you suffer as a news organization if you don’t have your own eyes and ears to analyze the information,” said ABC News exec Bob Murphy. “We need to have our own person in there for our own piece of mind.”
“In a perfect world we’d be there, but they’re not letting us back in yet,” a CBS News spokeswoman said.
Said ABC’s Murphy: “You never want to be in a situation where your competitors have an advantage over you for that amount of time.”
At this point, no TV organizations are in Kosovo, where the ethnic cleansing is going on.
Getting people into Yugoslavia is one problem. Making sure they aren’t killed there is another.
“It’s like a chess game – you have to figure out where to put the correspondents and where they will be most effective,” said Janet Alshouse, news director for Fox News Channel. “But Tim [Marshall] was determined to get back into Yugoslavia by hook or by crook.”
“We never force anyone into a war zone; we leave it to the folks on the ground who are better able to assess the situation,” said NBC News vice president Cheryl Gould.
“In the case of Ron and Jim,” she said, “they both said they were OK with everything. We always reserve the right to overrule anyone if they say they feel fine and we feel they should come out.”
