BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Journalists have reported on Kosovo for years. But it's clear now that reporting alone wasn't enough. They should have been campaigning on Kosovo.
Many mainstream media organizations -- at least the ones that attract the attention of Western governments and the concerned public -- have reported on the accelerating drift towards a tragedy in Kosovo for years. Certainly there were enough journalists in the Balkans, enough specialists in think tanks and enough Kosovar and Albanian refugees in the West, so that no one in power could say "We didn't know."
"I am not a Balkan expert," Czech President Vaclav Havel said in a recent interview with Le Monde, "but I have known for twenty years that the situation (in Kosovo) was drifting towards explosion."
How is it, then, that Western governments failed to act until the Kosovo crisis was ready to blow up? Havel's comment raises a fundamental issue about the essence of journalism and the conventional wisdom of what constitutes professionalism and objectivity.
If journalists really want to be the beacons of democracy, fulfill their role as a counterweight to power and be a conduit for citizen participation, they need to worry about more than just the fairness and impartiality of their reporting. They need to think about the intensity of their reporting.
To play a decisive role in foreign affairs, the media needs to invert its current relation with the agenda-setters in governments. Journalists need to establish their own priorities and pursue those priorities constantly and doggedly. Their reporting needs to be loud and strong.
The history of journalism tells us that changes in society or governments are only produced by insistent reporting. It's Upton Sinclair documenting the horrors in Chicago slaughterhouses in the 1910s. It's Albert Londres reporting on the inhuman fate of prisoners in French Guayana in the 1920s. It is Horacio Verbitzky, coming back again and again and again to expose the black files of the military regime in Argentina.
Today's media should again practice this style of campaigning journalism. On vital "civilizational" issues, there needs to be a barrage of investigative pieces, news reports and editorials strong enough to force governments to take action while there's still time. The coverage needs to be so compelling that the public isn't allowed to engage in its proclivity to look elsewhere.
In short, the coverage of developing crisis in Kosovo should have had the same level intensity the media devoted to, say, the release of the film Titanic. There should not have been anyway to avoid the issue.
"Committed journalism" doesn't mean biased reporting or tampering with the facts. It does mean a realization that truth can only be found by shining a much brighter light on issues than the one commonly used by overly cautious diplomats or governments.
Journalism, George Orwell said, sometimes means telling people things they don't want to hear. It means making sure the public can't avoid critical issues by merely changing the television channel with their remote control. The question for the media today is existential: It is a choice between leading or being led; it's a choice between waiting for events to happen or the shaping the public agenda. It is a choice between passive journalism and "committed journalism."
Jean-Paul Marthoz is European Press Editor of Human Rights Watch and the former foreign editor of the daily newspaper Le Soir in Brussels.