If there is anyone who can open his mouth, say nothing and yet sound important saying it better than a network anchorman it's a general. Better yet, a retired general.

And the retired generals were back on the airwaves yesterday side by side with the anchormen chattering away full of bromide and cliche and signifying almost nothing as television news divisions struggled to cover an air campaign in Kosovo with very little real information.

"General Smith, tell me, did we miss an opportunity somewhere to support a democratic uprising against [Slobodan] Milosevic that could have headed off this situation?"

"I don't see that in the cards," said Perry Smith, a retired major general from the Air Force, talking about the future rather than the past which Gibson had asked him about.

"I do think we've played the diplomatic game very poorly," Smith continued, at least addressing the past if not yet answering the question. "But I don't see that kind of operation taking place. What we have here is an attempt to use air power to get Milosevic to stop doing some very bad stuff."

Trailing their rival

Smith also announced about 6: 05 p.m. that NATO forces had shot down two Serbian MIG fighters.

"General Smith, I think you made some news. You said two planes, not one, is that right? OK, NBC News is now reporting courtesy of General Smith that two planes were shot down."

Some exclusive for NBC News. They could have gone to CBS News' Web site and found the report of two MiGs shot down posted there an hour earlier by David Martin, the CBS News Pentagon correspondent.

That's the expertise and inside information Smith brought to NBC last night.

But it was pretty much that way on all the network and cable channels yesterday.

At ABC News, Tony Cordesman was back, aiming his pointer at little stick figures on a board. When anchorman Peter Jennings asked him where the attack was going to be focused in the early going, he listed sites covering virtually all of Sebia.

"Well. We're not going to be doing all of that in the first night, are we?" Jennings asked, seeming to irritate Cordesman just a bit by drawing attention to the lack of specificity in his answer.

Contradicting himself

Buster Glosson, the retired lieutenant general who is military consultant on CBS, told anchorman Dan Rather in the morning that military commanders would rightfully be unhappy with a campaign that went more than two or three days. But, during the evenings, he said the campaign should go two or three weeks and deliver a knockout punch to Milosevic.

And, then there was Richard Neal, the retired Marine general on CNN, who combines military-speak with a talent for being hopelessly vague.

When asked for a sense of how the first day went, he said, "They'll [the active generals] be able by intersteps to know what their success is, though, it's going to be difficult to measure 'degrading.' So, it's going to be interesting to watch how this all sorts out."

Interviewing reporter

But, as bad as the generals were yesterday, the low point came on the Fox cable news channel with anchorman Jon Scott interviewing Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift about Kosovo. As if that wasn't strange and irrelevant enough, they went to viewer call-in, with Scott telling viewers, "You've heard the latest reports. How do you feel about this?"

The first caller, Scott told us, was "Clifford from Washington."

But Clifford wasn't there. So, they brought Connie from Denver onto the line. Connie seemed a little confused, so Scott helped her out.

"Hey, they're dropping some bombs over there, Connie. So, how do ya feel about that?" Scott said.

It was almost enough to make you switch back to generals.

Pub Date: 3/25/99