AP and AFP on Milosevic’s Funeral

I’m not sure anyone still believes that newspapers — or news services — objectively report the news, but here’s a good example of how different takes on the same event are not only possible but likely. From the AP:

FEW MOURNERS COME TO SEE MILOSEVIC COFFIN

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro – The flag-draped coffin of Slobodan Milosevic went on public display Thursday, but it drew relatively few mourners paying tribute to the former president who died while on trial for genocide and war crimes.

Hundreds of die-hard Milosevic supporters — not the tens of thousands that organizers had predicted — lined up to view his casket in a museum dedicated to the late communist dictator Josip Broz Tito in Belgrade’s plush Dedinje district.

And from the AFP:

THOUSANDS PAY HOMAGE BEFORE MILOSEVIC’S COFFIN

Thousands of supporters paid their final respects to Slobodan Milosevic as the coffin of the former Yugoslav leader went on show before his burial in the grounds of his family home.

Draped in a Serbian flag, the wooden casket carrying the body was laid out in the communist-era Revolution Museum of suburban Belgrade, where up to 1,000 of his followers had already converged.

Some five hours later at 6:30 pm (1730 GMT), there were still almost 2,500 of them there, according to independent B92 TV, although the late strongman’s Socialist Party put the figure much higher.

AFP is reputed to be the more lefty of the two new services — see here, for example — though I’m not sure how overreporting the number of Milosevic’s mourners (if it has) is all that progressive…