"Good versus Evil" after the Cold War: Kosovo and the moralisation of war reporting

Focusing on coverage of the 1999 Kosovo conflict, this paper examines the t rend towards framing contemporary wars and interventions in moral terms, an d highlights the threat this poses to accurate and informative reporting. K osovo represented the latest stage in a process of re-framing international relations in the post-Cold War era, and drew on three different news frame s developed in earlier Western reporting of Yugoslavia during the 1990s, wh ich portrayed the breakup of the country as a continuation of the Cold War, as the product of "ethnic" hatred, and as a repeat of the Holocaust. The s ignificance of today's moralised framework is that the "moral imperative" t o intervene can override all other considerations, including national sover eignty and international law. In practice the supposedly "universal" discou rse of human rights and humanitarianism becomes an apology for an elitist d ivision of the world into (morally) superior and inferior peoples and state s. Journalists have played an important and active role in developing and d isseminating influential interpretations of the post-Cold War world. The rh etoric of "Good versus Evil" deployed by Nato leaders in Kosovo drew on exp lanatory frameworks which liberal journalists. commentators and intellectua ls had helped to elaborate during the Bosnian conflict.