The Objectivity of Media Reporting in the Era of Humanitarian Wars

Abstract

In the years after the end of the Cold War, western countries have been drawn into various military conflicts which took the form of civil wars or ethnic conflicts and resulted in humanitarian disasters. There is a criticism that the western media was not impartial in its description of the conflicts but reported on them with a bias in favour of one of the sides, often following the official interpretations of governments and lobbyists, and thereby the rules of journalistic impartiality were infringed in this case. After an introduction of the general concept of objectivity in the context of media discourse, the current academic dispute about the media coverage of the Kosovo war is presented. In connection with this, the results of an original research devoted to the objectivity of the news coverage of this conflict in the dailies The Guardian and Mladá fronta Dnes are presented as well.

Keywords

• humanitarian wars
• mass media
• journalistic objectivism
• the war in Kosovo
• NATO
• Serbs