Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia, was one of the most brutal periods in European post-war history. Dutch media played an important role in creating a rather stereotypical, simplified picture of the Bosnian conflict, and, as a consequence, also of what the international community, the Netherlands in particular, could do to bring it to an end and solve it.”
The reasons why the media created this simplified and stereotypical picture can be found in the phenomenon of ‘journalism of attachment’. Coined by BBC’s former correspondent Martin Bell, ‘journalism of attachment’ agrees that reporters are participants in the conflicts they report, and as a consequence take part in the public debate about the conflict. Using a content analysis of the news coverage about the Bosnian war, we investigated in this study the extent to which the phenomenon of journalism of attachment occurred in Dutch newspapers and the consequences of this phenomenon for the quality of the news in terms of objectivity. We found that journalists covering the Bosnian war played a leading role in the public debate. They violated the Western ideal of journalistic performance. They adopted the role of heroic fighter for the oppressed rather than impartial mediator between the events and the audience. This tendency is especially seen in the news coverage of the left-wing newspaper de Volkskrant, and in a more subtle way, through the use of opportune witnesses, also in the ‘intellectual’ newspaper NRC Handelsblad.