Page 43 - 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
news are a primary example of the diverse ways in which different
cultures interpret the same events. During the 1999 Kosovo war, for
example, the same images often appeared on televisions in New York,
Beijing, and Belgrade, yet audiences in each location often perceived
images in diverse ways. A massacre in one place was a fight against ter-
rorists in another, and what was unavoidable collateral damage from
one perspective was a war crime from a different angle. This is because
the media is rarely objective, despite the claims of some of its propo-
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In fact, many consider the notion of the media as a check on
nents.
government excesses and a promoter of democracy, in relation to
international affairs, to be wholly fictional.
News reports are almost always subject to framing, which is the
attempt to simplify, prioritize, and structure events into interpretive
frameworks. By prioritizing certain facts and images over others, jour-
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nalists promote particular interpretations of events over others. The
framing of political conflicts can often be identified by the words and
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images that stimulate support or opposition for a particular position.
Framing occurs due to a number of reasons, including both
economic and cultural factors. In terms of its economics, a competitive
business environment, combined with a limited audience attention
span, means that media organizations cannot provide extensive
backgrounds on the stories they present. This is particularly true for
television—perhaps the most superficial news delivery medium in
which complicated stories have to be contained within relatively
short packages. 72 Framing is also influenced by culture. The media,
after all, is not a monolith, but is made up of a number of public and
private organizations that often originate from a dominant culture that
influence the way events are understood. The presence of the cultural
factor in framing is most evident in cases where cultures have had signif-
icantly different historical experiences over an issue. A comparative
framing study on the 2001–2002 U.S. war in Afghanistan between
CNN and Al-Jazeera, for example, found notable differences in the
way the conflict was covered. While CNN focused on strategy, techno-
logical precision, and a euphemistic description of events, similar to its
coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, Al-Jazeera placed greater emphasis on
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the human consequences of the war. Research on the Soviet downing
of KAL flight 007 found that the framing of the incident by 19 differ-
ent newspapers could be explained in part by the political orientation
of their home countries. 74 According to Gadi Wolfsfeld, “Whatever
their beliefs about the need for objectivity when it comes to internal
disputes, journalists inevitably interpret the world from a national—or