Page 114 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
stiff resistance from the KLA. To Serbs, Racak was not a massacre,
but an attempt by the KLA, who had retaken the town after the
Serb’s departure, to frame a massacre scene and create international
outrage. What the world saw the following day involved the gathering
of fallen KLA fighters from the day’s battle, subsequently dressed in
civilian clothing and placed in a fashion that depicted a massacre.
According to Serbian accounts, this was done at night so that, by the
next morning, international journalists and monitors could record
the event as an atrocity, not a battle.
offended with the behavior and comments of William Walker, who
they believed showed bias toward the Albanian side by making
judgments on the incident without a full investigation. Two weeks
after the incident, Serbian authorities believed that they were vindi-
cated by a forensic team’s investigation that concluded that the dead
from Racak were shot from a distance and had evidence of gunpowder
on their hands. The West, however, largely dismissed the forensic
team’s findings as biased due to the Yugoslav and Belorussian com-
position of the team. This conclusion was further refuted several
months later when an EU-sponsored forensic team that had access
to the same corpses referred to the incident as a crime against
humanity. 49 48 The Serbs were particularly
In the week after images from the Drenica massacre first reached
the West, 21 stories were aired on ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN,
collectively, and coded based on the previously used coding scheme. 50
Table 5.4 provides a summary of the framing in the coverage.
The framing from Kosovo in the West continued to become more
sympathetic toward the Albanian position, putting additional pressure
on official Western policy that had again failed to prevent a massacre.
As graph 5.2 demonstrates, American television coverage had clearly
been largely sympathetic toward the Albanian framework throughout
the conflict, becoming more pro Albanian as massacres accumulated
Table 5.4 American Television Framing of the Racak Massacre on Leading
Networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN): January 16, 1999–January 22, 1999
Number of Stories Percentage of Coverage*
Pro-Albanian Framing 18 86
Pro-Serbian Framing 0 0
Both Perspectives 2 10
Neutral 1 5
Total 21 100
* Percentage does not add up to 100% due to rounding