Media Spins Reality In Kiryat Shmona, the media and a bus of Israeli teen-agers teamed up to create "truth." LARRY DERFNER ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT t was Day Five of the ; Seven Day War. For the international media in Israel, the main , action had shifted, just for the day, to Jerusalem, where the Demjanjuk decision was being handed down. On this morning in Kiryat Shmona, the Katyusha capital of the north, a Cable News Network crew and a few photographers were hang- ing around, waiting for a story. Their actions were a microcosm of how the media is as much a part of the news as the events them- selves, and how reality is distorted by the camera. The skies were clear — no rockets had fallen since the previous afternoon, and, as it turned out, they wouldn't fall again until the following day. Booms were sounding every minute or so, but they were soft, coming from the distance, from Israeli can- nons on the other side of the mountain in southern Lebanon. On this side of the moun- tain, the best story anybody could come up with was about a bus load of Kiryat Shmona high school stu- dents who were being taken out of their bomb shelters and away from their par- ents for a week-long vaca- tion tour through the coun- try. Most of the youngsters were already on the bus, waiting to go. Two press attaches from the city and the Foreign Ministry were debating with the bus driver what to do — it was danger- ous to keep the boys and girls here, in the middle of the city, exposed to the Katyushas, but the CNN crew had not yet arrived. They held the bus for a couple more minutes, and the CNN team pulled up in their car. But there was another problem — bad "I want to see parents with kids, kissing them goodbye." — A news photographer Prime Minister Rabin inspects rocket - damaged property during a visit to the northern border. visuals. "This looks like they're just going on some field trip," said one of the photog- raphers, pointing to the teen-agers staring out the windows of the bus. "I want to see parents with kids, kissing them goodbye." The press attaches debated among them- selves. Yossi Ben-Dor of the Foreign Ministry told his counterpart from the city, Yoram Even-Tsur, that they had "a very strong message to get across here." The message, Mr. Ben-Dor explained to me, was that Israel only wanted peace, that the South Lebanese weren't the only refugees suffering in this war, and that "the popula- tion of Israel's biggest northern city was being forced to evacuate, and this is very painful for many people." (Only about a quar- ter of Kiryat Shmona's 23,000 residents were still in town; the others had fled south.) With the CNN camera- man and the photographers now on the bus, the tour began. They walked up and down the aisle, aiming their lenses at the teen-agers, who began to go wild. They sang loudly; they cracked up; held up two fingers above each other's heads. "Why are they laughing?" asked the photographer who had wanted to see parents kissing their children. A stop was made at an apartment building to pick up some more boys and girls. People who were still stuck at home, staying inside the fortified "security rooms" of their apartments, watched from their win- dows. A mother taking her daughter to the bus was pulled aside by Mr. Even- Tsur, who told her, "Say "shalom' to your daughter and give her a good hug." The woman did exactly as she was told. The shot was perfect. Up ahead, the bus stopped on the main road leading from Kiryat Shmona, its last stop before heading out to the country. This is where CNN want- ed to get its main footage. The press attaches told stu- dents who could speak some English to get off the bus and talk on camera.- Everybody began piling out on the sidewalk, the teen- agers jumping around and making a big noise. A group of youth coun- cy) C, selors went over to the bus stop, where a psychologist had been waiting to advise '- them on how to treat these = ") youngsters who had just cD spent four days and nights locked inside, while some 20 Katyushas banged into their or MEDIA page 66 0 I C) N- CO