Page 96 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE KOSOVO CRISIS
the world’s media increasingly became interested in Kosovo once the
killing started, adding weight to the adage “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Macro Influences
The Kosovo conflict of 1998 and 1999, perhaps like all wars,
occurred under unique circumstances. Accounting for the macro
influences is important in understanding the potential impact of,
and limitations on, the CNN effect. If the events of Kosovo had
occurred in a different time, place, and political environment, the role
and result of the CNN effect might have been very different. Before
conducting the case study on the CNN effect during the prelude to
the Kosovo intervention, the following section reviews the political
culture, costs, and context in relation to the Kosovo crisis and a
potential military intervention.
Western Political Culture
The West’s appetite for intervention would likely have been very dif-
ferent had it not been in Kosovo and in 1998–1999. In terms of its
location, Kosovo was part of the former Yugoslavia—a place that had
over the 1990s become familiar to Westerners for the kind of out-
rages, such as ethnic cleansing, that had supposedly disappeared from
Europe decades before. Between 1991 and 1995, Western observers
and television audiences witnessed two brutal wars, ethnic cleansing,
and the worst massacre in Europe since World War II in Srebrenica. As
the Balkan wars persisted, the Serbian side was increasingly presented
as the bellicose aggressor. The primary motive assigned to it—the cre-
ation of a Greater Serbia at the expense of others—was considered
archaic and out of touch with the wider pan-European trends toward
unity and cooperation. By 1995, villains in Yugoslavia were clearly
established in Western minds and media frameworks. After the Bosnia
conflict, notions of good and evil were further reinforced as the full
scale of the devastation that had taken place in Srebrenica unfolded.
This led to a kind of collective guilt and shame in much of the West. 14
Many wondered how almost 8,000 men could have been slaughtered
in the middle of Europe in a place relatively close to the borders of the
European Union (EU) and, supposedly, a UN “safe haven.” By March
1998 when the Kosovo civil war began and the first news of a mas-
sacre emerged, it did not take much time for many in the West to
determine who was at fault. The Kosovo conflict was almost like the