When the bombing of Yugoslavia began, the images of Nato planes taking off from their Italian airfield became as familiar as the military men and civilian briefers in London and Washington, and the reporters signing in from the field. Another CNN war was with us.
Each day brought a new verbal escalation from the briefers - the Serbs became merchants of genocide akin to the Khmer Rouge. In London, spin doctors told the tabloid press that President Slobodan Milosevic was sitting in a darkened room downing two bottles of spirits a day.
With reporters banished from Kosovo and very few of them still operating in Belgrade, actual hard news of what was happening on the ground was thin, so the briefers had the field largely to themselves.
But then came the refugees, and, with them, the nature of the story changed dramatically. Now, the way in which their plight is being brought to the world may fundamentally change the way in which this war is perceived by viewers who, as President Bill Clinton said, had not heard of Kosovo until they saw the story on CNN.
The spectacle of the great mass of refugees is bad enough in itself. Even more dramatic are the stories they have brought of mass murders of men, of towns and villages being emptied of their ethnic Albanian inhabitants.
At the weekend, British and US television showed a videotape brought out by a refugee of bodies sprawled in the fields round his village; he said 100 men had died. Another clip from the Kosovo capital of Pristina evoked memories of Nazi clearances of Jewish ghettos. People stood shoulder-to-shoulder, 20 to 30 deep on a broad boulevard, children in their arms. By Saturday night, the city of 200,000 people had been cleared of its ethnic Albanian population while Serbs jeered their departure.
All the cruise missiles in the world could not prevent that, or help them as they wait by the border with Macedonia, which will not admit them, or plod through the hills towards other frontiers.