Reporting ‘Humanitarian’ Warfare: Propaganda, Moralism and Nato’s Kosovo War

British media coverage of the 1999 Nato air campaign against Yugoslavia encountered familiar problems of news management and propaganda, as well as drawing together a number of newer trends, which have been identified as particular to the reporting of post-Cold War conflicts. These trends are: a closer relationship between the media and the military; the ‘journalism of attachment’; the ‘manufacture’ of warfare through the demonisation of enemies; and the mystification of ‘ethnic’ conflict. Their importance lies in allowing Western military intervention to be justified to the public as ‘humanitarian’.