Justice League

Dateline: Serbia and Montenegro, September 1993. I’d landed in the first of the “CNN wars” — prequel to Operation Iraqi Freedom’s video game cinematography, to atrocities as media bait, to mass murder via technology “because we can” — set against medieval enmities and Balkan hyperinflation at an impossible level. In the parlance of the day, but before the Facebook-­era neologism “weaponized,” the legal, ethical, and moral equivalencies in the West were often muddled and opaque because of the rise of “advocacy journalism.” (You could count on one hand the number of Serbo-Croatian-speaking foreign journalists on the ground in former Yugoslavia.)

Everybody — every last journalist — was a target for spin. A few weeks later, I came home with a knapsack full of expensively printed propaganda books and two high-quality posters, their production bankrolled by émigré Serb and Croat sponsors. That their subject matter was a genocidal race war against the...