Visual Framing of the 1999 Kosovo War in British and Serbian TV News

This thesis investigates the visual representation of the 1999 Kosovo War, comparing television coverage from the BBC and Radio Television of Serbia (RTS). While there is an extensive scholarly literature on the media and the Kosovo conflict, this is the one of the few studies to examine television coverage, and the first to do so in comparative perspective. The research consists of a visual framing analysis of the main evening news bulletins of each broadcaster over four sample periods from April and May 1999, focusing on two key aspects of coverage: the NATO bombing campaign and the refugee crisis. A preliminary quantitative analysis showed that these were the two most frequent story topics in BBC coverage, and the literature indicated that these were also the topics on which the perspectives of the two broadcasters were most likely to diverge. Regarding both topics, visual framing as manifest in shot selection and scene composition was analysed in relation to story framing. The findings revealed that although the two broadcasters covered many of the same events, their audiences saw two quite different wars. Regarding the bombing campaign, the BBC primarily visualised it from the air, from a distance, often as the destruction of objects. In cases of “collateral damage” or accidental bombing of unintended targets, the BBC tended to enact the conventions of objective journalism while nevertheless adopting the perspective of NATO. RTS, in contrast, primarily saw the bombing from the ground. This rarely involved showing explicit imagery of death and injury, but it did entail extensive documentation of the destruction of buildings and infrastructure, often including interior shots of damage to civilian houses. RTS iv usually interpreted collateral damage as intentional, and exploited incidents such as NATO’s accidental bombing of refugees as opportunities to counter-frame the war. The two broadcasters also framed the refugee crisis in markedly different ways. For the BBC, the refugees were being driven out by actual or potential atrocities, while RTS presented them as having fled NATO bombing and as wishing to return. Each broadcaster sought to present its version of the refugee crisis through individual stories and testimonies. The BBC’s visual framing supported the foregrounding of empathetic coverage of the refugees’ plight, and sometimes of a seemingly rigorous investigation of its causes. RTS coverage featured strong rhetorical counter-framing but visually tended to be one-dimensional and formulaic. Overall, the visual framing of each broadcaster supported, with varying degrees of success, its broader story framing, which understood the bombing as “humanitarian intervention”, or as “illegal aggression”. For RTS, this entailed openly adopting the perspective of its country’s government and a partisan style of journalism which frequently sought to counter and critique NATO claims. For the BBC, the journalistic style was ostensibly more objective but nonetheless aligned with the perspective of NATO.