Spun? The Military, Politicans and Media Report Nato's Kosovo Campaign

Al Qaeda bombers have cited UK and US foreign policy and the western media''s Islamaphobia as excuses for their bombing attacks in the twenty-first century, but in 1999 the UK and US launched an air offensive to protect Muslim ethnic-Albanians from Orthodox Christian Serbs in Kosovo. The British media seemed to overwhelmingly support the war, with many reports prior to the NATO campaign calling for something to be done to stop the civil war that had been raging since the previous year. New Labour presented NATO''s Kosovo campaign as Britain''s first war fought for purely humanitarian reasons, and this framing of the NATO campaign seemed to become the dominant image of the conflict in the British media. This study uses a framing conceptual framework incorporating hegemony and indexing theories to investigate the independence of British newspaper coverage and opinion. The American military was also involved in NATO''s Kosovo operation, so the British newspaper coverage was comparedto the New York Times. Most of the theoretical background was also developed in the USA, with studies by Hallin, Bennett and Chomsky highly cited and influential.