Page 111 - 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
Table 5.3 American Television Framing of the Gornje Obrinje
Massacre on Leading Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN):
September 29, 1998–October 5, 1998
Percentage of Coverage
Number of Stories
77
17
Pro-Albanian Framing
0
0
Pro-Serbian Framing
2
Both Perspectives
9
Neutral
3
14
Total
22
100
perspective, growing from 41 percent of media framing to 77 percent,
while all other options had dropped significantly from 59 to 23 percent
of all coverage. This growing sympathetic framing was placing media
coverage in a critical and challenging position in relation to official
policy that had failed to prevent the massacre despite the lapse of over
six months since the Drenica massacre.
Incident 3:The Racak Massacre
The third major unexpected set of televised images came from the
village of Racak on January 15, 1999. After the Gornje Obrinje
massacre, it became clear that the status quo was not working.
The massacre, along with hundreds of thousands of refugees facing an
oncoming winter, in conjunction with a recently passed Security
Council resolution and NATO activation warning, provided Western
leadership with a new zeal to pressure Milosevic. With a more credible
threat of NATO action, Milosevic changed course and curtailed his
offensive, accepting a more rigorous monitoring regime in Kosovo,
led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE). Although the situation calmed down after October and
many refugees returned home, there were still many incidents of vio-
31
lence, often provoked by the KLA. The Serbs, for their part, seemed
all too eager to follow form with heavy-handed reactions.
On January 8, 1999, the KLA ambushed and destroyed an armored
vehicle with an antitank weapon near the village of Suva Reka, 50 km
south of Pristina. In the incident, three Serb policemen were killed,
four other policemen and two civilians were injured, and eight
Yugoslav soldiers were taken hostage. 32 The same day, a second
ambush on a convoy carrying rations to troops resulted in no casual-
ties, but another similar incident on January 10, 1999 resulted in the