Legitimizing `Humanitarian Intervention'?

This article examines the coverage of NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in March-June 1999 by the global television news organization, the Cable News Network (CNN). The article argues that NATO's precedent-setting action — the first conflict in which the world's most powerful military alliance intervened in the internal affairs of a sovereign state — was reported uncritically and presented by CNN as a humanitarian intervention. Television pictures tended to follow the news agenda set up by the US military. Few alternative views were aired and, most importantly, a fundamental change in the nature of NATO — from a defence alliance to an offensive peace-enforcing organization — was largely ignored. The article then goes on to analyse the international implications of such coverage, arguing that given the global reach and influence of a channel like CNN, this type of framing also shaped the wider view of the crisis in Kosovo.