and involved attitude toward Bosnia. Overall, critical and empathy
media coverage can effectively push those policymakers to advocate
intervention when there is no decided policy, as approximating images
and frames of grief, fatalities and criticism of the government’s policy of
non-intervention may greatly put pressure on the government, allegedly,
a strong CNN effect exists in this case.
Kosovo
This section will look at the 1999 air campaign in Kosovo, especially
the action called Operation Allied Force was a major theme for the
International media (Balabanova, 2004, p. 278), which aimed to impose
Serbian President Milosevic to compromise. It is thus an example of
how widespread coverage of humanitarian crises in the news media
coincided with policymakers’ failure to respond to critical reporting.
As Robinson (2002) identified, as the air campaign proceeded, Milosevic
accelerated the expulsion of Kosovo Albanians, triggering a massive
refugee crisis. Subsequently, a debate unfolded regarding whether
airstrikes were enough to reverse such tragedy, or whether a ground
combat would be necessitated. Media reporting concerning Operation
Allied Force was massive. Based on the coverage of Devroy and Debbs
(1995), during April 1st and May 26th, the New York Times and the
Washington Post ran more than 1,000 articles on Kosovo. It is equivalent
to more than nine articles a day on Kosovo per newspaper. By devoting
extensive reporting, the media evidently identified humanitarian crisis
in Kosovo as an attention of unprecedented importance. Moreover, as
the graph about descriptions of Kosovo war synthesized by Robinson
(2002, p.79) reveals, the daunting descriptions of miserable refugees
and devastated homes, such as ‘mother died in childbirth’, ‘charred
bodies’, and ‘rape, torture and executions’, can be ubiquitously
discovered in media coverage. Meanwhile, the graph (p.101) presents
failure framing about the policy debate centered on whether the West
would fail or succeed in Kosovo, ‘totally unprepared’, ‘stop making vague
pronouncements’, and ‘shameful miscalculations’ precisely criticize the
ambiguous and ineffective policy decisions made by western leaders
in this humanitarian crisis. Contrariwise, the coverage from CNN was
generally supportive and positive of the air campaign. In enthusiastic
tones, CNN reporting praised the efficiency and accuracy of the
weaponry and validated the justice of this air campaign (Thussu, 2000).
More specifically, the CNN coverage seemed to oversimplify the intricate
situation in Kosovo by mainly focusing on the military achievement of
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