The American Reporter Copyright 1999 Joe Shea . All Rights Reserved.

News coming from Kosovo and its adjoining states is coming from schoolgirls, Orthodox monks, political operatives, victims, aggressors and working stiffs such as the security guard who told reporters of damage done to Yugoslavian homes by an errant NATO missile. For the most part, these citizen reports are circling the globe via the World Wide Web because these people in the midst of the crisis have access to a computer and a transmission line.

Like it or not, news from the front will never again depend solely on the craft of the war correspondent. Instead, news must be augmented by reports such as those published at Wired's site written by an Orthodox monk from his Serbian monastery near the Albanian border.

Those who complain of this simple truth, arguing that much of what comes across our computer screens from Yugoslavia and its environs is untrustworthy, need to be reminded that in war, truth is the first casualty. Our ability to sift through reports and extract the truth has never been more taxed and more in need of sharpened critical skills.

That caution, we should note, applies to Pentagon briefings as well as to Internet correspondence from isolated monks.

I may accept NATO's claim that it is attempting to hit only military targets, but I cannot discount an e-mail message from a partisan resident of Pristina expressing anger over the bombing of the city's Liberty Bridge, which he says "was maybe the finest bridge in Yugoslavia."

Wired magazine has been well ahead of the pack in understanding the nature of Internet information in a time of war. Back in March of 1998, the magazine published reports of Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians that were transmitted via the Internet.

In its January 1999 issue, Wired ran a small item under the headline, "Inside the First 'Internet War,'" providing a list of five Web sites keeping track of the Kosovo crisis. One of those provided a disturbing, graphic record of death from a Pristina photographer, Koha Ditore, whose reporters visited American Reporter editor Joe Shea in February and shared the photos with him.

The sites were selected by an ex-patriate Albanian (which, incidentally, should raise flags of caution to those of us attempting to assess the information). Two months later, NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic accelerated the eviction of Albanians in Kosovo, and the debate over the value of Internet reports from an area under siege began. (About this time, NATO also introduced a series of informational Web sites.)

Wired magazine (and its accompanying Web site) has consistently published citizens' Internet reports from the battlefield.

This week, following the capture of three American soldiers by Serbian forces, Newsweek magazine's special report, "Tragedy in Kosovo," devotes 23 dense pages to the news, including a top story -- "The Nightmare" -- to which 13 Newsweek correspondents, working in the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, Belgium and Washington, made contributions.

On its Web site, the magazine provides what it calls "Cyber-reports from the Balkans," in a feature called "Web Witnesses." The special report of the print edition simply notes in a graphic the "Cyberwar" has diverse participants ranging from NATO to pro-Serb extremists, and calls the Web "a vivid mirror of the struggle for Kosovo, a first in war: ..." The Internet, however, is far more than a footnote to the war correspondence from Kosovo.

To be sure, as Newsweek's "Web Dispatches" story notes, the Internet is a powerful propaganda tool, and Serbs apparently used empty e-mail messages to spam NATO's information site (an electronic war within a war), but that does not diminish the Internet's power in opening channels of information that have heretofore been unavailable. It is far more than a vivid mirror; it is a swift, new portal to information.

As an underscoring of this truth, contributing writer Matt Welch provides for the Online Journalism Review a list of 24 Web sites providing news of Kosovo.

To give Internet users some discriminatory tools, Welch divides his list into three categories: sites he calls relatively independent, such as the London-based Institute for War & peace reporting; those he sees as clearly partisan, such as the official site of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA); and sites he labels outside aggregators, an example being the Federation of American Scientists.

The advantage of war information on the Internet, of course, lies in the Web's hyperlink phenomenon: One page leads to another, one site to ten or twenty more. We are literally "bombarded" with information in an Internet war, and our problem becomes one of dodging what is biased trash and absorbing what is unvarnished truth.

The blame for forcing us to make such discriminations, however, should not be placed on the Internet. We face the same task when absorbing reports from television and newspapers.

Many in the media, instead of decrying and criticizing the Internet's role, should take up their responsibility for making sense of its information to listeners and readers.

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Allan R. Andrews can be reached at allan.andrews@reporters.net