When one thinks of a blog, arguably a few characteristics come to mind: colloquial, opinionated and emotional. Contrarily, when one thinks of a mainstream news source, a different set of qualities are associated: formal, unbiased and detached.
In light of this, it is interesting to analyze the "Srebrenica Genocide Blog." The blog is an almost database-style account of Serbian war crimes committed during the early 1990's in Yugoslavia. The commentary is implicit (unlike the stereotype of a blog), but glaring.
At the end of 2005, the blog wrote an account of the arrest of Momcilo Perisic, a former Serbian general currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. Rather than celebrating the arrest with passionate words about the horrors committed by Perisic, the blog breaks down the statistics like a score card: "Born," "Indictment," "Charges," "Trial" and a breakdown of the parties involved: Judges, Prosecutors, etc.
The closest the blog comes to condemning Perisic, are the following decidedly-benign statements: "These unlawful attacks caused death of at least seven civilians and at least 194 civilians were wounded" and "Perisic failed to initiate an inquiry into what role members of the 30th Personnel Centre of the VJ General Staff may have played in the commission of these crimes."
On its english website, Al Jazeera News, a mainstream source run out of the Middle East (Doha, Qatar), published a fairly typical news story about Momcilo Perisic's trial. The article appeared recently, on October 2, 2008, and could be considered an addendum to the blog's story. As expected, Al Jazeera's language is straightforward and unbiased. The significance of the story, Al Jazeera explains, is that Perisic's trial is possibly the strongest link that the ICTY has discovered between the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and the crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia during the war.
Interestingly, though the blog's language is fairly tame, it's positions become clear through the statistics it claims: The Srebrenica massacre resulted "in summary executions of at least 8,372 men, children, and elderly Bosniaks, and UN-assisted ethnic cleansing of approximately 20,000 women." Al Jazeera, on the other hand, states that the Bosnian Serb forces killed "8,000 Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected region of Srebrenica in July 1995." The difference in language is significant, the blog insinuating that there were more deaths than 8,372 and that the United Nations was somehow complicit (a frequent charge.)
Nonetheless, the differences between the two stories are notable because it shows that, while a blog may present itself as a list of facts, it may have an agenda that shapes it in subtle ways. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, could probably not get away with the same claims. This illustrates how blogs, because they are accountable to no one but the author, may take advantage of this freedom.
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