Page 107 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE MEDIA DURING THE KOSOVO CRISIS
on March 8. This tour was allowed by the Serbian Interior Ministry,
which used the event to trumpet victory over “Drenica terrorists.”
Allowing this tour, however, had the opposite effect of its intention, as
Western journalists focused on the destroyed houses and terrified
16
The final source, which provided the most gruesome
villagers.
pictures, came from journalists who accompanied villagers who went
to identify and claim the bodies of relatives killed. These stark images
of corpses were subsequently put on the Internet. According to a
leading Albanian newspaper publisher, “As soon as we got the pictures
17
of Prekaz . . . we put them on the Internet.” Most of the images that
reached Western audiences originated from Prekaz.
Framing from the Drenica Massacre
The third media criterion essential for a potential CNN effect is sym-
pathetic framing of unexpected and emotive media images that por-
tray a particular party as victims. The following section provides a
summary of Albanian and Serb perspectives regarding the Kosovo
conflict and the Drenica incident. It then reviews the framing of the
massacre on American television for the one-week period (seven days)
after the images from the incident reached viewers.
In the Kosovo civil war, there were two very different interpreta-
tions of history and recent events. To Serbs, Kosovo was the birthplace
of their nation, their holy land, and an internationally recognized part
of the FRY. While Serbs acknowledge that Albanians represented the
majority of Kosovo’s population, they believed that this outcome had
been reached through illegitimate means. 18 Believing it their right to
defend Kosovo from illegal attempts to challenge state authority, Serbs
saw their actions in Drenica as a justified response to a KLA ambush
that was part of a pattern of increasing terrorism over recent months. 19
To the Albanians, the frame of reference was wholly different. They
traced their roots to the Illyrians who inhabited the Balkans centuries
before the Serbs. 20 Although they constituted 90 percent of the pop-
ulation of Kosovo, they had lost virtually all of their political rights
since Milosevic dissolved their autonomous status in 1989, and since
attempts to peacefully resist repression were countered by brutal
tactics. Although Kosovo was officially recognized as part of the FRY,
this was due to a military conquest in 1912, and not to any inherent
right to the land. Furthermore, the fact that other parts of the former
Yugoslavia had successfully separated on demographic grounds, in
what was an artificial and ethnically incoherent state to begin with,
gave Kosovo Albanians hope that they also had a legitimate right to