Page 109 - 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
conflict from the Serbian viewpoint, while one story did not present
either perspective. At this stage, the Kosovo conflict was still new to
many journalists and the public in the West. As such, the majority
took a balanced view of this incident. Nonetheless, pro-Albanian
framing still dominated pro-Serbian by a ratio of nine to one, when-
ever only one perspective was presented, likely due to the collective
memories of previous Serb atrocities in other Balkan wars. Despite the
three years since the end of the Bosnian war, the Milosevic-led regime
was still vilified in the West, and much of the media found close paral-
lels between Kosovo and Bosnia, making it easier to adopt similar
framing. This outcome, of course, is not surprising, given journalistic
practices that attempt to link new conflicts to something familiar by
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asking: “How did we cover this type of conflict in the past?”
Incident 2:The Gornje Obrinje Massacre
The second major set of unexpected and emotive images from Kosovo
came from the village of Gornje Obrinje, which fell victim to a massacre
on September 26, 1998. The Gornje Obrinje incident occurred at the
end of a summer offensive by the MUP and VJ that took back almost
all of the KLA’s gains from the spring and early summer of 1998. In this
attack and several others in nearby villages, 36 civilians including
women, children, and the elderly were brutally killed. The attack
appeared to be carried out in revenge for the killing of 13 Serbian police
officers by the KLA in the days preceding the massacre. 24
Images of the Gornje Obrinje Massacre
After the MUP and VJ left the area, locals who had escaped the attack
returned the next day to find their relatives. On September 29, inter-
national journalists and human rights activists who had heard about
the massacre arrived in the village to document and film the atrocities
and their aftermath. Over the next few days, gruesome images of the
massacre dominated television news in the West. These included
images of burned homes still smoldering; homes damaged by shrapnel,
bullets, and tank fire; cattle that had been shot; hay stacks and food
supplies that had been torched; and, of course, scores of corpses. What
made this incident particularly shocking and emotive was that many of
the dead were amongst the weakest in the village—the very people who
were not fast enough to escape their attackers. These included women,
children, and the elderly. In one example, a 95-year-old invalid man
seemed to have been burned alive as his charred remains were discovered