BANJA LUKA, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Aug. 25 - The signal went dead in the middle of today’s episode of the Venezuelan soap opera "Kassandra," the most popular program in this Bosnian Serb enclave.

"It was done to frustrate our viewers," said Marinko Ucur, the news editor at the television station here. "It was a message that we are on our own."

The signal was being sent, as it had been on previous days, from the main Serbian broadcast outlet in Bosnia, in Pale, for relay by the station here in Banja Luka.

But last weekend, in a reflecrion of a growing power struggle between Bosnian Serb leaders in Pale and Banja Luka in the self ruled Serb republic, television reporters in Banja Luka said they would no longer work under the direction of the hard-liners in Pale, a -suburb of Sarajevo. And today’s break in the signal from pale, in the eastern half of the Serb republic was taken here as a sign that Pale had now severed all links with its former partners here.

The political struggle pits supporters in Pale of Radovan Karadzic, the former Serbian leader who has been indicted for war crimes by the international tribunal in the Hague, against Birjana Plavcic, the Bosnian Serb President and his onetime aide.

One result of the split is that a fierce propaganda war has broken out on the airwaves wirh the two rival stations pumping out the kind of hate messages and distorted reporting they once reserved for muslims, Croats and foreigners.

On the second floor of the city hall in Banja Luka, where Ms. Plavsic has her office, the station’s news staff today prepared the evening report. It comprised a half hour of glowing tributes to Ms.Plavsic and was foIlowed bv a rebroadcast of her afternoon news conference.

The second halt of the news was taken up by a report from the city of Mrkonic Grad, 25 miles south of Banja Luka, where the police chief, Brane Pecanac, urged Serbs to foIlow "the honest and holy path tread by President Biljana Plavsic."

Ms. Plavsic has accused Dr. Karadzic and his followers of stealing millions of dollars in state revenues and jeopardizing the viability of the inpoverished Serb republic. Her criticisms last month, which were never broadcast by Pale, grew into an open confrontation when she tried in vain to dissolve the Bosnian Serb Parliament, which meets in Pale.

"Pale called up and told us to get street interviews about President Plavsic," said Mr. Ucur. "We sent them feed after feed of people praising the President. Our chiefs in Pale said they wanted other opinions about her. We calIed back and told them that in Banja Luka there were no other opinions."

The news broadcasts Sunday and monday night, the first by the renegade reporters and editors, looked in form, if not in content, exactly like their rival station’s in Pale. And while everyone at the station said they had split with Pale to build "a free and independent media," nobody among them who was interviewed today could think of any report on Pale television before the current power struggle that they had disagreed with.

In fact, Nikola Deretic, one of the senior editors, made it clear thar the political struggle between Pale and Banja Luka does not include a difference in point of view about the Bosnian Serb cause in general.

"We have no trust in the foreign media," said the editor. "We have lived through this war watching outsiders tell monstrous lies, such as the reports made about our so-called concentration camps. We remain proud of what we accomplished in the war, about our protection of the Serb people and Serb land. It is we who are the real defenders of the unified and independent Serb state, not Pale. We are fighting over who are better equipped to defend the interests of the Serb people." As for Dr. Karadzic, the editor said the leader in Pale "may be against us now, but he is not a war criminal and should not go to The Hague." He added, "There is not a Serb here who supports his extradirion."

Strident reports, many of which turned our to be wildly exaggerated or fabricated, have been a staple at the radio and television stations taken over by Serb nationalists.

During the war the so-called ethnic cleansing campaign by the Bosnian Serb army, in which more than 200,000 people were killed and more than a million people were driven from their homes, was ignored by the Bosnian Serb media. Instead those reporters insisted that Muslims in Sarajevo, who wvere being shelled daily by heavy Serb guns, were killing their own people to gain international sympathy.

They also reported that no unarmed muslims were killed in 1995 in Srebrénica, despite evidence gathered by the United Nations that as many as 8,000 people may have been rounded up, executed and buried in mass graves.