The little boy in the yellow jersey sits on the smashed tractor, all that remains of a refugee column hit by NATO bombs, and bursts into tears. Or does he? Look again, at the first second, as the camera switched on, and in that first second you see him still, motionless - apparently until the TV crew tell him the camera is rolling.
Few refugees arrive in Kukes, the Albanian border town that takes most of the Kosovo exodus, crying. They are too tired. But blank expressions won't get your pictures on to the nightly news. Tears will.
And, say the TV crews, it is, after all, poetic licence. The refugees have spent many of the past days crying. Now they stumble over the border all cried out. All the crews are doing is asking that those tear-ducts be turned on again one more time.
Aid volunteers seem to agree. One tear-stained girl raised one million deutschmarks (£403,000) after she appeared on German television. So they cry, and they cry, and they cry, to camera. They also laugh, of course - any trauma doctor will tell you that laughter is as likely a reaction as tears. But that would look silly on the evening news. NATO's propaganda war is much in evidence amid the breathtaking scenery of this mountain town. Earlier this month, two US special forces helicopters thundered past the snow-capped mountains to bring the first air-delivered aid - and a TV crew to film it.
Unfortunately, with the guns on these machines, plus the TV crew and all those commandos, there was little room for the aid. A few boxes of army ration packs and water bottles were dumped on the landing field. On Friday, the British commander of troops in Macedonia appeared on live television with a refugee at his side. Not with a tired old man, but a pretty girl. She was young, fair-haired, articulate.
"They've got a girl, young, speaks good English, even got a Western name, Vanessa," said a photographer colleague. "It's great propaganda, it means the people at home can identify with her."
The media pack, especially television, in Kukes is proof of how packaged journalism has now become. Refugees were "in fashion" for the first two weeks of this story; now, the focus is on the other story in the area, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Thousands of volunteers for this rebel force have made their own way to Albania and have arrived in Kukes. The streets and cafes of this little town are full of them - and of journalists earnestly questioning them about how to be the first reporter to get inside Kosovo.
Along these streets, by day and night, a great tide of swirling humanity continues moving, the huge never-ending exodus of the ethnically cleansed. These reporters ignore this, obsessed only with combing the place for someone who can deliver the glory of being the first to report from "inside".
One French reporter has been wounded this week at the border, but still they try. Everyone tries to keep the details to themselves, so that some evenings at the two journalist watering-holes, Bar America and the Galica hotel, resemble witches' covens, with little knots of untidy journalists earnestly plotting, falling silent as colleagues approach.
Rape is the latest fashion. Yes, there have been rapes, but there is no real evidence of the "rape camps" reported by the British newspaper, the Sun, in which "thousands of terrified women are being herded". At least, so far. Meanwhile, some reporters comb the new arrivals, asking each if they know anyone who has been raped. If not, they move on.
The Sun has had a team in Kukes - sent to find a particular family, who were snapped by a photographer earlier in the crisis. No one knows their name, but they look photogenic and deserving, so the Sun arranged to have a private jet fly them to Britain, and these journalists spent their days flashing the photograph around refugee camps, hoping someone would recognise them Some of the best stories go uncovered. The Albanians, for instance, have surprised Kosovo veterans by their compassion. During the year of war they were circumspect about supporting their ethnic cousins, yet these people have now rallied round.
There is genuine compassion at all levels, from my taxi-driver who stopped to give his spare diesel to a family whose tractor had run out, to the young Christians using their pocket money to make sure refugees each get an apple.
Kukes hospital is a good place for stories. We found a boy, who has survived, and will have little scarring, who had been hit by a bullet that went in one side of his face and out the other. A little girl is also there, in pain, having been burned when a family gas-burner exploded, scalding her thighs. But the incident happened the day before the Serbs cleansed the family, so her suffering has no news value.
Journalists have gripes of our own. Many aid workers won't let us on to their vehicles, the French Air Force won't fly us back to the coast, even on empty helicopters. Yet without us, there would be no aid agencies, no money from telethons to pay their salaries, no air bridge. None of us is immune. Sitting listening to yet one more tale of woe, you can't help but be excited as the story grows worse and worse, knowing that for you, the story is getting better and better.
And why not? A man was brought into the hospital, horribly burned, the only survivor of a massacre when the Serbs machine-gunned villagers, then put straw and petrol on the bodies and set fire to them. Hospital staff tried to push the journalists away, but the man, his voice croaking, his face blackened, urged them forward. He wanted to tell his story.