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44. Boyer, Kirk, and Young, War in Europe.
45. Ibid.
46. McAuliffe and Bartlett, The Road to Racak.
47. CNN News, “New Fighting near Scene of Kosovo Massacre,”
CNN.com, January 17, 1999, via http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/
europe/9901/17/kosovo.02/index.html.
48. Renaud Girard, a French journalist who was one of the few Western
journalists to support the Serb position, wondered whether the KLA
had sought to turn a military defeat into a political victory? According
to Girard, two Associated Press TV journalists had accompanied the
Yugoslav forces all day during the assault on Racak and their video
supported the government version of events. Also, a French journalist
and OSCE monitors were in the village on the evening that the mas-
sacre allegedly occurred and after the Yugoslav forces left. Apparently,
nothing out of the ordinary happened, as the officials were talking to
the villagers and later only took several wounded people away. See
Girard, “Kosovo: Obscure Areas.”
49. Although the vague nature of comments by Dr. Helena Ranta, the
Finnish pathologist who led the team, has led some to question the
official interpretation of her findings by the West. See Peter
Worthington, “The Hoax That Started a War: How the U.S. NATO
and the Western Media Were Conned in Kosovo,” The Toronto Sun,
April 1, 2001, C6. NOTES 207
50. Intercoder reliability 1.0 (21/21).
51. There was an estimated 40,425 minutes of television news coverage over
this period. (One hour on CNN and 30 minutes each on ABC, CBS,
and NBC. This equals two hours and 30 minutes or 150 minutes per
day. Less 30 percent for commercials, this equals 105 minutes of actual
programming. 105 times 385 days that constitutes this 55-week period
equals 40,425.) If this number is then divided by the 1,061 minutes and
50 seconds devoted to the Kosovo civil war, an estimated three percent
of all American news coverage over this period was devoted to the issue.
52. Out of 105 total minutes of total news content per day.
53. U.S. Department of Defense, Press Statement, “Kosovo Albanians
Agree to Accord; Serbs Still Holdouts,” February 25, 1999.
54. Seventy-five Kosovo Albanians were killed in the Drenica massacre of
February 28 to March 6, 1998; 36 were killed in the massacre of
Gornje Obrinje and surrounding villages on September 26, 1998; and
45 were killed in the Racak massacre of January 15, 1999. It should
be noted that there is some discrepancy in the number of deaths in
these incidents. The figures presented here are those most commonly
cited in media reports.
55. In Robinson’s Policy-Media Interaction Model, for example, a strong
CNN effect requires television news coverage within the first ten minutes
of the evening news for at least three consecutive days. Robinson, The
CNN Effect: The Myth of News, 38.