The first thing American students majoring in journalism learn is the old rule originated with William Randolph Hearst at the end of the last century. Hearst believed "that when great events are placed before the public, its mind was much more readily engaged, its emotion much more intensely involved, if those events and issues were concretized through personification." To make it simple: the trick is to find personal stories about real people whose good or bad fortune can dramatically summarize an event and apply it on
a much larger scale.

The American journalists have learned their lesson well, and that is why those that were dispatched to the muddy provincial border towns that outline the province of Kosovo are sending back stories that can all be reduced to three typical examples:

1. With clenched fists and barely able to hold back tears, little Azem Kelmendi was standing on the Macedonian side of the border while looking at the thick cloud of black smoke rising from his village over there on the Yugoslavian side. Five minutes later, when the compound with the houses where his proud ancestors lived for two hundred and seventy generations was reduced to a small pile of smoldering ashes, he run to the local KLM commandeer and his CIA contact and begged them to give him arms so that he can exact a just revenge on the treacherous and murderous Serbian thugs. The grown ups were both sympathetic to his plea, but couldn't grant his request. At least for now. Azem is only six years old....

2. As the fifty two miles long column of Albanian refugees was entering Montenegro, stopping only long enough to inform the reporters about the horrible atrocities and mass executions that the treacherous and murderous Serbs have committed before letting the Albanians go to tell the story a barefooted Adema Vlasi was approaching those arriving on foot asking them if they saw her sister Zherhxe. People were turning their heads away from Adema, nobody wanted to break the sad news to her, although everyone knew too well that Zherxhe was taken aside from the column of people by the Serb soldiers and executed together with ? of a million Albanian patriots, freedom fighters, intellectuals, nuclear scientists, lyric poets, musicians, human rights advocates, bird watchers, and others. All of the executed had two things in common: they were freedom loving Albanians, and none of them would kill a fly.

3. Captain Frank Yagger, aerial surveillance analyst at the NSA HQ's in Fort George, Maryland shared with this reporter some of his observations. "We're lucky that Serbs are the target of our surveillance and not the Albanians," he said. "It's easy to see what the Serbs are up to. Their houses have yards and open spaces around them. And, weather permitting, they do everything, including the ethnic cleansing, out in the open. Albanians, on the other hand, live in compounds surrounded by high walls, so that outsiders can't see their women. Lately they've even resorted to covering their yards with canvas because they've learned about the satellites. Frankly, I do respect their religion and their wish to keep their women hidden, but I must ad that the danger of our staff ogling over the photos of their female folk is pretty slim. For decades now they've had this policy of forcing their wives to have as many babies as possible in order to outnumber the Serbs in the province. The policy succeeded but not without a cost to the poor women who all look, again with all due respect, as mother Teresa. No wonder, because she was of Albanian origin herself, and she run all the way to Calcutta to live in a leper colony, but in this case I will keep my comment to myself.

Anyway, I am proud of my country and my work and the contribution I am making in chasing away the treacherous and murderous Serbian thugs, so that our Albanian friends can go back to enjoying freedom, democracy and the American way of life.