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It has been said that the first casu­alty in war is truth. This pro­gram doc­u­ments that sad fact. Recorded as NATO inten­si­fied its bom­bard­ment of Yugoslavia, the broad­cast begins with for­mer CNN pro­ducer April Oliver’s account of her dis­missal and offi­cial dis­cred­it­ing as a result of her work on “Oper­a­tion Tail­wind.” The lat­ter was a code-name for an alleged use of nerve gas by Amer­i­can com­man­dos dur­ing the Viet­nam War. Allegedly using sarin nerve gas to kill “defec­tors” and to escape an encir­cling enemy, the com­man­dos were serv­ing with the elite Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Group (a group deeply involved with covert oper­a­tions in South­east Asia dur­ing the war.) Despite the fact that per­son­nel allegedly involved in the mis­sion tes­ti­fied in detail on cam­era, CNN’s man­age­ment dis­owned the broad­cast after the pro­gram aired. Man­age­ment had been aware of the pro­gram and approved it. Ms. Oliver and her co-producer had received emphatic approval for the program’s con­tent from, among oth­ers, a for­mer Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ms. Oliver opines that CNN man­age­ment dis­owned the pro­gram and fired her and co-producer Jack Smith because the com­pany needed Pen­ta­gon coop­er­a­tion in order to cover future wars. In addi­tion to “Tail­wind,” the pro­gram tack­les an edi­to­r­ial dis­crep­ancy between two edi­tions of the San Fran­cisco Exam­iner of 4/15/99. Iden­ti­cal in length and page posi­tion, the two sto­ries about Gulf War Syn­drome dif­fer fun­da­men­tally. The one-star edi­tion focused on the work of Drs. Garth and Nancy Nicol­son on the role played in GWS by an appar­ently genet­i­cally engi­neered micro-organism known as mycoplasma. The mycoplasma stud­ied by the Drs. Nicol­son appears to have had a gene from HIV (the AIDS virus) added to it. The four-star edi­tion of the Exam­iner car­ried a GWS story from the same wire-service that omit­ted all men­tion of the mycoplasma and Dr. Garth Nicol­son. The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the media’s power to both deceive and con­cretely effect pol­icy. In the war in Bosnia, a tele­vised image of what was thought to be a Serb-run con­cen­tra­tion camp for Bosn­ian Mus­lims trig­gered inter­na­tional out­rage and, ulti­mately mil­i­tary, polit­i­cal and eco­nomic inter­ven­tion against the Serbs. In fact, the pic­ture had been taken from inside the barbed wire (erected around indus­trial machin­ery for secu­rity pur­poses). The Mus­lim “inmates” were look­ing in at the cam­era — there was no con­cen­tra­tion camp! Nonethe­less, sta­tions around the world (par­tic­u­larly in the United States) ran the pic­tures as proof of Serb “atroc­i­ties” and the need for inter­na­tional inter­ven­tion. (Recorded on 4/18/99.)