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It's a well-known rule among journalists that truth is the first casualty in war. But wars still need to be reported as best they can. It's only when the fighting is over and the bodies are revealed that the lies buried with them can finally be uncovered.
CBC correspondent Nancy Durham made a name for herself by venturing deep into Kosovo as a one-woman news team and bringing back moving stories about both the dead and the living. Now it turns out that one of her most touching reports -- about an 18-year-old girl who vowed to avenge her sister's death at Serb hands -- is based on a lie.
The sister, as Durham discovered when she made a postwar visit to the girl's home, was alive and well.
It's a journalist's and a TV network's worst nightmare -- to be sucked in by people you trust and to be used as a propaganda tool. Trust and confidence are fundamental to the mission of CBC News, and when The National has been used to advance the Kosovo Liberation Army's cause so successfully, the network's entire credibility is at stake.
That's why CBC is pulling out all the stops today to admit what went wrong and explain how it happened. At the centre of the public broadcaster's mea culpa is Durham's latest report from Kosovo, titled The Truth About Rajmonda: A KLA Soldier Lies for the Cause. Just to make sure that the point gets across, this intimate and revealing story airs three times tonight, at 7 p.m. on Newsworld Reports, at 9:20 on the Newsworld edition of The National Magazine, and at 10:20 on the CBC network broadcast of The Magazine.
Durham has flown in from her London base, and will be interviewed about the pitfalls of reporting from a war zone on The CBC Morning News. On the Sunday edition of Newsworld's Foreign Assignment at 6:30 p.m., she will again have an opportunity to reflect on what she has discovered about the nature of truth. And just to make sure that the dirty linen gets a thorough airing, tonight's edition of counterSpin (Newsworld, 8:30) will scrutinize the way the media is used in times of war.
All this commotion -- part confession, part damage control -- started with the tender stories Durham brought back from Kosovo and a girl's lie that made the stories appear even more affecting. Tonight's report on The National revisits Durham's encounters with the unscrupulous, patriotic Rajmonda. The first encounter, in September, 1998, was with a girl hospitalized for a vague trauma who caught Durham's attention as she was filming a portrait of a heroic Albanian doctor. Rajmonda spoke English -- which made her instantly appealing to the CBC reporter -- and with the cameras rolling she vowed to join the KLA in order to avenge the death of her 6-year-old sister at Serb hands.
Durham works on her own with just a hand-held camera, which makes her kind of reporting both cheap and attractive to the CBC brass on the lookout for stories that no one else will have. She avoids official sources where the media scrum gathers to hear what the spokespeople have to say, and prefers to go off into the wilds where she can discover real people with real stories to tell. The network has encouraged her, and her hand-held video-camera storytelling has created a buzz in media circles where conventional newsgathering is seen as formulaic and unrevealing.
Durham believes that the story of ordinary people is the true story of war, and when the fighting spread in Kosovo, CBC sent her back for an update on Rajmonda. True to her vow, the teenager had turned herself into a KLA fighter wearing U.S. Army castoffs and a Kalashnikov flung over her shoulder. Durham relayed her defiance to the world, and the girl's promise of vengeance for her murdered sister aired not just on CBC but in a dozen other countries, including Britain, the United States and Albania.
Durham now describes this version of Rajmonda as "a KLA poster girl," and she optimistically describes tonight's uncovering of the girl's lie as "a deeper and more intriguing story" than the one she brought back from the war. But like her viewers, who were sucked into believing the previous stories, Durham listens to Rajmonda's explanations and excuses with a battle-hardened sense of skepticism. The real person's true story was a fake. Yes, this is a teenager with a flair for the dramatic, but she is also a master manipulator who excuses her lies by saying that Durham came to Kosovo simply to advance her career.
Truth may be a casualty of war, but cynicism is a great survivor.