Page 22 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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Introduction
In 1998 and 1999, television images of human suffering from Kosovo
shocked the Western world. At the time, the story presented in main-
stream Western media seemed relatively straightforward. An ultrana-
tionalist government in Belgrade, led by Slobodan Milosevic, had
used brutal force to suppress the Albanian majority in Kosovo, a rump
province of the fragmenting former Yugoslavia. This perspective was
supported by images of massacres that were widely displayed and con-
demned on television screens throughout the West. In subsequent
years, speculation emerged regarding the nature of the massacres,
which many saw as a potent force in galvanizing Western support
against the Serbian side. Although the Albanian community of
Kosovo experienced much suffering, some observers questioned
whether the images of carnage were part of a deliberate strategy by an
insurgency group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to gain
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the West’s attention and sympathies for its independence cause. If
true, these sacrifices appeared to have garnered their desired outcome
by the spring of 1999 when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) initiated an air campaign against the Federal Republic of
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Yugoslavia (FRY) over the Kosovo issue, in tacit alliance with the
KLA. This was, in some ways, a surprising policy reversal. Only 13
months before the first bombs fell, the West had been making conces-
sions in order to bring the FRY back into the international commu-
nity and openly referring to the KLA as a terrorist organization.
So what happened? Were the governments of the world’s greatest
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military alliance really pushed into war by the CNN effect? This is the
central question that this book attempts to answer. Its primary
method of addressing this question is through a case study of Kosovo-
related Western media coverage and foreign policy during the Kosovo
civil war—the period from February 1998 to March 1999 in which
significant clashes took place between forces from the Serbian
Ministry of Interior (MUP) and Yugoslav Army (VJ) and the KLA. 4
The employment of this particular case study also opens up two other
areas of potential insight. The first concerns foreign policy and how