Influences of, and on, International Media
University of Social Sciences and Humanities—Warsaw*
The Milošević trial was described in specific, patterned ways by journalists accredited to the Tribunal. Applying the concept of framing used in content analysis, the chapter shows how journalists covering the trial preferred certain details, facts, and opinions to others in an effort to construct coherent narratives from a plethora of diverging and often contradictory information. In part, these efforts, and the dilemmas they presented to journalists covering Milošević, arose from specific external and professional constraints, including the overall political framework in which the trial took place. However, these external constraints played only a minor role in shaping coverage of the trial, because the decisive framing criteria had been already been established and were largely dependent on the political and ideological orientation of the journalist’s media outlet, rather than on the development of the trial itself or the course of events in the courtroom. The longer the trial lasted, the more negative the coverage of the ICTY became. Part of the declining media support for the trial can be attributed to the Tribunal’s reluctant and incoherent media policy, the dominance of the Prosecution in media relations, the late launch of outreach programs, and the Prosecution’s abandonment of an active rather than reactive media policy. The Prosecution and the Tribunal as a whole could have initiated a more favorable media frame for the Milošević trial—one more consistent with the ICTY’s mandate; still, many of the factors that could have influenced media coverage of the trial were far beyond the Tribunal’s reach.
12 February 2002 should have been a day of triumph for international criminal justice and particularly for the ICTY. For years, its prosecutors and judges had been waiting for a big fish to be delivered. During the Tribunal’s early years, they had been fighting against diplomats and politicians who (as Bassiouni argues) saw the ICTY as a stumbling block on the road to a fragile peace in the Balkans, as well as criticisms that the early trials had focused on relatively minor figures, such as Tadić and Dokmanović. Then, the political pendulum had swung: prominent, high-ranking suspects such as Biljana Plavšić and General Radislav Krstić had pled or gone on trial. Now Milošević himself—the most powerful figure ever indicted by the ICTY—had been arrested and transferred to the Tribunal. After several pretrial hearings, he now appeared in court for trial—defiant, self-confident, and belligerent, but there.
So enormous was media interest that the press office of the ICTY issued special accreditations and had tents set up outside the Tribunal premises to accommodate all the journalists and television teams. The majority of them had to watch the proceedings on a huge screen, more or less as they could have done at home using the Tribunal’s webcast. But staying at home was no alternative. In the opinion of most journalists present during those days—including me—history was being made in that place and justice was being done. “Will Milosevic Get His?[,]” Time asked in a report written by four correspondents who had traveled to The Hague:
When case IT-02-54 finally opens at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague this week, it will mark a moment many despaired would never come. The Serb strongman and former president of Yugoslavia, who presided over a decade of mass murder and mayhem across the Balkans seemed untouchable for so long, and then became almost forgotten as the world’s attention fixed on a new global villain. Yet Slobodan Milosevic will now have to sit each day in a well-lit U.N. courtroom, flanked by two guards, to answer to charges of crimes against humanity—even if he does remain as defiant as ever.1
The mixture of satisfaction, glee, and triumph that emerges from Time’s report marked the majority of West European and U.S. media commentary from the start of the Milošević trial. Only rarely was this trend disturbed by voices from Serbia or the small international community of Milošević’s self-appointed defenders, whose inconsistent criticisms of the proceedings hardly ever persuaded anyone outside their own ranks.
For the ICTY’s public image, the Milošević trial was a crucial opportunity. No other trial attracted such crowds of journalists, drew so many citizens of the former Yugoslavia to their TV screens, or aroused so many controversies. But what initially appeared to be a great success quickly turned into a public relations disaster for the Tribunal. Attitudes toward Milošević remained stable across time, but the picture of the ICTY changed, and declined, the longer the trial lasted. With time, even many of the media outlets most in favor of the Tribunal no longer expected a victory for justice or even a fair verdict—at least, they no longer wrote about those things. If they still published articles about the trial at all, they focused on the Prosecution’s inability to present its case convincingly, on Prosecution witnesses who ended up bolstering the case for the Accused, and finally even on conflicts within the Prosecution team.
By the time Milošević’s dead body was found in the Scheveningen detention facility four years later, frustration about the Tribunal’s performance, disillusionment with the length of the proceedings, and despair about the lack of transparency in the Prosecution’s strategy characterized the dominant current in media coverage. By then, the focus of media reports about the “trial of the century”2 had shifted from praise for prosecutors to disdain for overwhelmed judges and a kind of trial fatigue—a disappointment with the lack of any possibility to squeeze a straight narrative out of the opaque debates in Courtroom I.3
By the end, there was nothing left from the triumphant support the Tribunal had enjoyed in 2002. Back then, the largest and most influential German news magazine, Der Spiegel, had published a large report about the “planet of the good people[,]” a Manichean picture contrasting sensitive, hard-working prosecutors and poor, pitiful, but proud and determined witnesses—all presented as victims—on one hand with evil, grinning, and defiant war criminals on the other.4 In January 2005, the same magazine printed a large interview with former ICTY judge Wolfgang Schomburg, who complained about the “errors of the prosecutors, the lack of evidence and unjust verdicts” at the ICTY.5 In other outlets, perplexity and frustration gained ground: The trial had become a “scheduling nightmare” for the Prosecution and “the longest trial before an international court[;].”6 In an interview in November 2005, Misha Glenny emphasized the perverse, counterproductive impact of the Milošević trial on public opinion in Serbia and Croatia.7
Above all, the media lost interest. Although the accreditations and the crowds were back, briefly, to cover Milošević’s death, between summer 2002 and 2006, Courtroom I emptied. Journalists refocused on their other regional briefs—Dutch politics, the Dutroux trial in Belgium, the European Union, and NATO*—or went back to business as usual in their home offices; Time was hardly going to keep four correspondents in The Hague to cover a seemingly endless trial or the institution conducting it. Still, mere neglect—the rush of other events and the pressure of the news cycle—could explain a lack of coverage, but not the shift to negative frames.
The harm, or perception of harm, engendered by Milošević outlasted even that long trial. In summer 2008, when Radovan Karadžić, one of the few suspects then still at large, was finally arrested in Belgrade and transferred to the ICTY, the Washington Post’s article neither hailed another victory in the fight against impunity nor a success of the international community in doing justice. Instead, the headline read “Karadzic Case Offers Court a Chance to Repair Its Image.”8 The newspaper quoted unnamed sources calling Karadžić’s arrest “a shot at redemption for the huge and costly international court that will try him[;]” and reminded the reader that the ICTY had already “stumbled in prosecution of Milošević[.]”9 Evidently the Post’s main concern was not if Karadžić would be tried decently; instead, remembering its disenchantment with Milošević, it worried if the ICTY would be able to live up to this new challenge.
Why had coverage of the Milošević trial—originally so positive and hopeful—come to focus on these failings? Journalists have tended to answer this kind of question by claiming that they are simply describing events, persons, and things the way they were; from this perspective, coverage of the Milošević trial turned negative because the trial itself went out of control. However, such an approach presents journalists as totally independent and objective actors, and detaches the processes of reporting, editing, and commenting from wider constraints—societal moods, ideologies, and economic interests—that in fact shape the media and the way they deal with information. No matter how the trial actually unfolded, the media could have chosen to paint a more positive or more negative picture of the ICTY than they actually did.
This chapter identifies the factors that contributed to the deterioration of the ICTY’s public image during the Milošević trial—and to the choices that media outlets, guided by those factors, made. It relies on the concept of framing—an analytical perspective that compares the ways in which specific events are contextualized and interpreted by media outlets. We can identify two dominant frames in the media coverage of Milošević. One, which fundamentally supported international criminal law and its prevalence over municipal law, we will call “pro-ICL.” This frame was deployed by most Western, liberal-democratic media outlets, as well as some in the former Yugoslavia. Opposed to this tendency were frames used by nationalist media from the former Yugoslavia and some radical left-wing outlets from Western Europe, which promoted national sovereignty rather than international law; these we will call “anti-ICL.”*
The rest of the chapter focuses on the frame adopted by pro-ICL media outlets and discusses the reasons for their shift towards negativity and disenchantment, including the strategies different actors employed to influence these media frames and their efficacy in shaping media coverage. By disentangling the structural and legal constraints on the Tribunal’s (and especially the Prosecution’s) media policy from those institutions’ internal shortcomings and decision-making deficiencies, we will see that the ICTY and the Prosecution could have prevented the decline of their image in the media only at the margins. Many factors that influenced the increasingly negative media coverage of the ICTY arose out of institutional constraints within the ICTY, and out of the tension between the Prosecution’s juridical tasks and the expectations of the public.
Consumers of media tend to evaluate news and opinions by asking if they are consistent with established facts and common knowledge—asking, in other words, if they are true. Analysts of the media take a very different approach: Rather than assume that reporting is necessarily derived from (and best measured against) some prior, objective, and univariate reality, they ask why certain media describe things in one way while other media do so in a different way. It is the basic assumption of this approach that every media outlet and every reporter can choose from a multitude of options when they decide to present a specific issue.
Through the very act of writing about an issue, media draw upon and refer to cognitive schemes, called “frames,” which provide categories, order, and chronology; these in turn allow the reader (and author) to organize fragmented information and attribute meaning to it. By emphasizing certain aspects of an event and embedding its description in a conventional format—headlines; pictures; the structure of a page, a film, or a radio program—media instruct us both what to think, and how to think about it.10 Such frames act as patterns of interpretation that affect problem definition, moral evaluation, and causal interpretation, and may even imply particular solutions for the identified problem. Viewed through this lens, journalism appears as a far more discretionary and constructed exercise than the popular or professional image of journalism as merely reporting facts.
Applied to our case, for instance, the event of Milošević’s transfer to the Tribunal could be described as a technical judicial process, an act of abduction of a once popular politician by a ruthless regime, a victory for international justice, a personal satisfaction for Carla Del Ponte, the end of Milošević’s political career, or in many other ways.11 Each of these frames potentially contradicts other frames, though each may also overlap with others. All these frames have features in common: Each is an attempt to tell a story, to attribute meaning to the events and to place them into larger narratives—how Serbia is allegedly subjugated and victimized by the West, say, or how the ICTY manages to enforce its policy in Serbia, or how international criminal justice progresses.
For this exercise in framing to function, certain conditions must be present. An overarching narrative must be available, into which the respective frame can be embedded; also, the event to be framed must possess certain features that allow journalists to ascribe meaning to it and to interpret it normatively.* Although there is considerable flexibility in relating events to narratives, events that lack these conditions tend to be neglected by journalists. The same is true for events that do not lend themselves to consistent moral judgment.
And here we see the initial problem that confronted media coverage of the Milošević trial, which, even at the outset, was expected to be long. The problem with the Milošević trial—as with any trial—was that it was much easier to impose a clear frame at the start than to follow that frame across four years of hearings. When the trial started, the dominant frame the media used—that is, what we are calling the pro-ICL media, which were the great majority at the time, apart from some segments of the Serbian media and Milošević’s few supporters—was almost uniform: An autocratic ruler from Serbia who had instigated war, atrocities, and crimes was finally brought to the ICTY to face his guilt and to be severely judged and punished by international, impartial, and competent judges. Skepticism was almost absent in early reports and commentary, and the focus of most reporters was on Milošević’s behavior, though in ways that implicitly accepted and reinforced the broader pro-ICL frame: Would he defy the court, would he comply with its rules, would he defend himself or resort to legal counsel, would he conduct a political or legal defense—would he, perhaps, even refuse to take part in the proceedings?12 This general frame was, potentially, consistent with any foreseeable behavior by the Accused: Even if Milošević had complied completely, pled guilty, expressed remorse, and asked for a lenient sentence, the pretrial frame about an autocratic villain facing justice could have been used in order to tell that story—and even develop it as the conversion of a sinner into a remorseful prisoner who admits his guilt.
But soon after the first confrontation between “the iron lady”13 from Switzerland and “the butcher of the Balkans,”14 the trial dove into historical details and procedural controversies, which could hardly be pressed into a clear normative frame. It very much complicated the task of the journalist, as it was less and less possible to convey the trial as a contest between a good Tribunal and an evil Accused. Media interest plummeted immediately after the initial days of the trial:*
The ups and downs leave little room for doubt: After huge interest in the trial, news coverage by the three outlets decreased and remained at a low level throughout 2002, then declined even further in the period between 2003 and 2005. The spike in March 2006 reflected coverage of Milošević’s death, the controversies about the possible causes of his demise, reactions of the Serbian public, and the funeral. There were minor peaks during the intervening four years: for example, coverage in the Washington Post and the New York Times increased in December 2003, when General Wesley Clark appeared as a Prosecution witness; Le Monde dedicated more space to the trial when Paddy Ashdown confronted Milošević; and coverage in Le Monde and Der Spiegel increased when, in May and June 2002, Ibrahim Rugova testified against Milošević and details of the events in Račak were discussed for several weeks.* All four outlets almost totally ignored Milošević’s defense, which started in early 2004.
During the first weeks, the appearance of witnesses testifying about the crime base in Kosovo enabled the remaining journalists—already far fewer in number—to frame the proceeding as a duel between a once powerful and still belligerent, intimidating, and self-confident ruler and poor, often illiterate villager-victims.15 At first, these witnesses provided drama for news reports by adding emotion and anecdote to the detached atmosphere of the procedures behind the bulletproof window that separated the audience from the courtroom. But after several days, repetition deprived their stories of any news value, and increasingly highlighted the inevitable structural tension between the requirements of court procedure and the business of journalism: Lawyers need to go deep into the details and to evaluate them from specific, purposive perspectives, whereas journalists need new developments, sudden changes, and surprises in order to maintain the attention of their readers. A touching story about cruelty and infamy, told by an angry, desperate Kosovar villager persecuted by Serb paramilitaries, is a perfect story for a day; it loses its appeal when analyzed for hours and days in the courtroom, or when told in more or less the same way by an endless number of other witnesses. When Milošević, in turn, engaged in endless disputes about the causes of destruction in Kosovo and whether the damage was a consequence of ethnic cleansing or of NATO bombing—a question of tremendous legal consequence but not a matter even at issue in the dominant frame—journalists turned their back on Courtroom I.
There is a scenario well-known to any freelancer, stringer, or foreign correspondent who finds himself in a situation that is suddenly the focus of events of high political salience. Large media corporations and wealthy editorial offices immediately send out their star reporters and teams of investigators and writers, who—if only for a short period—totally dominate reporting from the site, marginalizing correspondents already on the scene who may have been reporting on that country or situation for years. This mechanism has important consequences for media framing, because there are patterned differences of perspective and interest between special envoys—sometimes known in the trade as “parachutists”—and permanent correspondents.
The same happened when the Milošević trial started: Many long-time observers at the ICTY were sidelined by colleagues who were sent by their home office. During the initial phase of the trial, therefore, the narrative framing was dominated by journalists who had come to The Hague just for the opening and who left after a few days or weeks. These short-term reporters—often prominent or well-known correspondents—were perfectly able to present the story of the trial in dramatic and moral terms, fit to a frame that, necessarily, they had brought with them, ready to use, and which there was in practice little time or opportunity to test against the realities of the trial.16 During the months that followed, however, these initial frames were slowly but steadily changed by the contributions of long-term correspondents—news agency reporters, stringers for the big magazines and dailies, and correspondents based in The Hague—who were responsible for the follow-up, and who in effect determined and eventually shifted the ICTY’s public image after the crowds had left.
The permanent correspondents at the ICTY usually had deeper insight into and more detailed knowledge of the ICTY’s work than colleagues sent in on short-term assignment. This is not to say that greater knowledge necessarily correlated with a critical view—indeed, as we will see later, the permanent correspondents were in fact quite isolated from the Prosecution’s inner workings—but instead, this matters in how it relates to the preexisting pro-ICL frame. Because of their sustained interaction with the trial and Tribunal, the permanent correspondents were challenged to confront the relationship between their detailed observations and the broader narratives about the ICTY, Milošević, and the trial over time in a way the parachutists were not.* Permanent correspondents often—though not always—had difficulties matching their own observations at the ICTY with broader claims about justice and truth, and concluded that large parts of the court proceedings did not comply with these claims.
Permanence had another effect on the nature of reporting: Correspondents whose principal work was occupied with the Tribunal began to report about other trials that ran parallel to the Milošević sessions; others started to look into the legal and procedural details of the trial process. During the months and years after February 2002, many of these remaining journalists started to analyze the legal and diplomatic framework in which the Tribunal operated; some even managed to get access to insider knowledge.
In general, the permanent correspondents’ views on the ICTY were more critical than those of the parachutists. The differences between their institutional positions, and the mechanisms that regulated their different levels of participation in reporting on the trial, go some way in explaining the shift in the coverage of the ICTY after the initial phase of the Milošević trial. The special envoys’ media frames were generally more positive for the ICTY than the picture permanent correspondents drew, and so long as the envoys were on the scene, their views dominated, but these could not be sustained in the absence of ongoing reporting, and after several days were replaced again by the less emphatic frames of the permanent correspondents.
Over time, these changes became apparent in published reporting, but there was a lag. Private debates among the permanent correspondents often reflected these doubts much more than the articles and reports they were publishing at the time. This may have been due to the interference of their central offices or correspondents’ ex ante compliance with perceived expectations about what the central office would accept. A permanent correspondent acts as the agent of his principal in the home office, but also wields some power to set the reporting agenda: A correspondent can (and often is expected to) propose topics. This agenda-setting power is constrained: When many other media (especially competitors) pick up a specific topic, the correspondent has to pick it up, too; the same is true when his home office decides that a certain topic should be dealt with because of its salience for readers or the particular preferences and interests of the editor or publisher—and home office editors can reject correspondents’ proposals for stories. The abilities of correspondent and home offices to set agendas are also exposed to different influences and constituencies; the correspondent has to anticipate the expectations of his home office and readership, but also the reactions of his local interlocutors and peers, and this may lead him to make different choices about what to write.*
During the Milošević trial, this led to differences between frames used by permanent correspondents from pro-ICL media—which often exposed details about trial procedures and incidents surrounding the trial that were potentially disadvantageous for the ICTY’s public image—and those used by occasional visitors from the home desk and desk officers writing comments back home, which mostly neglected details and emphasized the ICTY’s noble mission of doing justice. For many of the correspondents dealing with the everyday troubles and problems of the ICTY, what was most important was how justice was being done; for the desk writers in the home offices, these were details, which could not blur the main message that justice was being done.
This critical shift was not occurring in isolation: The aspects of the trial that increasingly evoked journalists’ suspicion did not differ very much from the substantive legal controversies that began to appear in specialist journals and that were sometimes expressed in interviews by defense counselors, amici curiae, and legal experts in the ICL and human rights communities.17 Would the Prosecution be able to link Milošević to crimes committed by forces acting beyond the scope of his constitutional powers? Was its reliance on a JCE a risky, even improper, attempt to criminalize the political objective of a Greater Serbia? Had the Prosecution included so many counts in the indictment in order to “shoot game with a machine gun,” hoping that a least some bullets would hit?18 Had it failed to produce a legally compelling case on the politically and emotionally charged genocide counts? Had the Chamber given Milošević too much control over the trial, or made a mistake in letting him represent himself?*
In some sense, we might suppose that increasingly negative coverage was simply a function of these problems—an example of just reporting the facts. Yet these problems had not appeared for the first time in this case, and it would be simplistic to blame bad trial management alone for shifting perceptions of Milošević and the deterioration in the ICTY’s public image. It is hardly contested that the trial process had serious defects, but even this would not have necessarily prevented journalists from framing the trial as a fight between righteous prosecutors and truth-seeking judges on the one hand, and an arrogant, defiant perpetrator on the other.
Nor did the media’s increasingly negative attitude toward the Tribunal spring from an improved opinion of Milošević. The picture the media painted of the former head of state had been fixed long before, and the trial did little to change it: Milošević was an evildoer, and it was impossible to dissociate his political responsibility from his formal criminal liability without obscuring the clarity of that frame. This was a general tendency; as one veteran journalist noted, “Many reports flatly call detainees war criminals.”19 Surprise about Milošević’s unexpected ability to manipulate proceedings, intimidate witnesses, delay the trial, and turn Prosecution witnesses to his advantage was probably the only grudgingly positive element of his image during the trial, and even that faded away with his death.
Indeed, if anything, the termination of the trial changed the media’s presentation of Milošević for the worse. Some media outlets had chosen to present the trial with a certain distance, semantically maintaining the presumption of innocence through neutral terms such as “the accused” or by adding “allegedly” when describing the counts of the indictment. With Milošević’s death, however, many media outlets effectively abandoned the pretense of a presumption, reverting to a nonlegal frame of moral certainty. The BBC’s Belgrade correspondent, Alan Little, evidently felt released from legalist constraints when he introduced his report on Milošević’s death:
Slobodan Milošević is like a character written by Goethe. The arc of his life, his rise and fall, is Faustian. He made a pact with the twin demons of Balkan nationalism and war. The demons propelled him to power and, for a while, kept him there. But he lost control of them, and they destroyed him in the end.20
Australia’s The Mercury was more prosaic and much more accusatory; in an article titled “Butcher’s Bailout. Slobodan Milošević Dies as Trial Nears End[;]” the newspaper’s editors deplored that, by dying, “‘the butcher of the Balkans’ had escaped justice.”21 Even The Economist, which had consistently adopted the presumption of innocence in its articles about the trial, was now similarly blatant: “The ‘Butcher of Belgrade’ cheats justice through death.”22
What had changed was not pro-ICL journalists’ attitude toward Milošević—whom they still framed as a bullying, overconfident tyrant who was morally and factually culpable—but toward the ICTY itself. What had been a frame about a good Tribunal, brave and courageous prosecutors, and neutral, severe, and rigorous judges now had become a much more complex narrative about ill-advised, confused prosecutors and overwhelmed, helpless judges, who were manipulated by a skilled but ruthless Accused. What remained was the impression that the “trial of the century,” which had been awaited for such a long time by the ICTY, had produced a legal and procedural quagmire that left the question of guilt—so obvious in fact—unanswered in law.
These differences in interest and perspective between permanent correspondents, special envoys, and home offices were also relevant for the media from the former Yugoslavia—which we will also call “Yugoslav media” for convenience—that covered the Milošević trial, whether they adopted a pro- or anti-ICL frame. But due to the specific obstacles that these reporters faced in The Hague, this asymmetry between agents’ and principals’ expectations had different consequences for the ICTY’s public image in Yugoslav media than it had in Western media. Due to the visa and residency restrictions imposed by the Dutch authorities, and the high relative cost, after the initial days of the Milošević trial most anti-ICL media from the former Yugoslavia covered the trial from their desks or from offices in Brussels.* This gap in wealth and access dividing Western and Yugoslav media meant, perversely, that those with the highest interest in the trial were relatively less able to cover it in a comprehensive and sustained manner.
This absence, in turn, had a knock-on effect, because one of the most important influences on reporting comes from group pressures within the professional community of journalists. Journalists working in the same editorial office tend to develop strong group identities, but this is also true—indeed, even more so—for journalists working as permanent correspondents: Whereas the influence of the home office will usually leave a weaker impact, the identification with other journalists whom a correspondent meets during his daily work is often quite strong.23
This peer effect was, potentially, especially strong for journalists from the former Yugoslavia who worked for anti-ICL outlets. The journalists from the former Yugoslavia exhibited considerable diversity in their attitudes toward the Tribunal, but worked among Western colleagues who were primarily pro-ICL. Thus pro-ICL journalists from the former Yugoslavia received reinforcing messages from the other foreign correspondents at the ICTY, whereas anti-ICL journalists from the region were exposed to conflicting pressure, as their home office expected them to take an anti-ICL stance but their immediate peers were pro-ICL.
If we consider the effects of peer influence from the perspective of the Tribunal, it would have been much more preferable to be criticized by anti-ICL outlets whose correspondents were working in The Hague. The majority—though by no means all—of media outlets from Serbia and the RS evinced an anti-ICL frame and were quite negative about the trial and the ICTY. Journalists working for these outlets would have felt pressure from their editors to frame the trial negatively (a view they might themselves share), but those based in The Hague would have interacted with their pro-ICL Western colleagues, who would have introduced a countervailing and moderating pressure—at least as long as the dominant pro-ICL view prevailed. Indeed, by multiplying obstacles for journalists from the former Yugoslavia,* the Dutch government—itself strongly pro-ICL†—unintentionally strengthened anti-ICL media frames by isolating anti-ICL Yugoslav media from the mitigating influence of the community of correspondents in The Hague.‡
Certainly, the differences between frames adopted by various media in the former Yugoslavia were dramatic: Whereas the frames used by pro-ICL media did not differ very much from the Western frames, anti-ICL outlets from the region mostly saw the ICTY “as the place where national heroes were harassed by a biased prosecutor[.]”24 Indeed, one of the main differences between pro-ICL and anti-ICL media from the region consisted in the role that heroes, rather than victims, played in their frames. Anti-ICL journalists from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo tended to report on a standoff between prosecutors and defendants from the reporters’ ethnic constituency, but often ignored court sessions during which victim testimony was being heard. Surprisingly, they not only ignored victims from other ethnic groups, but also from their own constituency.§ Contrary to the dominant trend in Western pro-ICL media frames, victimhood as such was a non-issue for anti-ICL media from the former Yugoslavia. Ethnic solidarity concentrated on the heroes, not on the victims.
This partly explains why the Prosecution’s objective “to give victims a voice[,]” to which Del Ponte frequently referred in public,25 could only be accomplished in pro-ICL media, but largely missed its mark in the former Yugoslavia, where anti-ICL frames prevailed. As Bieber’s chapter, among others, shows, the publics in the former Yugoslavia were not only ignorant of other ethnic groups’ victims, they were not interested in victims at all. For them, the ICTY did not bring justice to their victims, but injustice to their war heroes on trial.
One of those heroes, for some Serb media outlets, was Milošević himself. Mirroring the pro-ICL’s inability to channel the legal presumption of innocence, neutrality also seemed to be beyond the reach of nationalist Serb media—or of Milošević’s few, scattered defenders abroad—for whom the bare possibility of legal guilt was foreclosed: For them, the former President of Serbia and the FRY was innocent and the whole trial biased, no matter what evidence might come up. Indeed, the general underlying tendency of their reports changed less over time than that of Western media outlets.26 Milošević’s death only provided another element to their frame, one which fit perfectly into the existing narrative: After harassing him for years, his persecutors finally had him killed, to cover up their obviously inadequate and falsified case.27
Compared to these other external activities, the media activities of the ICTY itself were surprisingly modest. There were press conferences, and, roughly at the same time as the Milošević trial began, the Tribunal also began a belated outreach effort. Beyond this, however, the ICTY’s efforts to engage the media and shape their reporting were minimal, failed to address or correct the deterioration in the Tribunal’s image, or were even counterproductive.
In its early years, the Tribunal had no coherent public relations strategy; the final establishment of the ICTY’s outreach program in September 1999 came too late and was not ambitious enough, as its regional bureaus were understaffed, ill-equipped, and dependent on external funding.28 But the biggest failures occurred in areas in which no or almost no additional funding was needed and a few improvements could have led to disproportionally good results, such as making regular efforts to present the Prosecution’s preferred framing of its trials to the media and to elaborate a coherent public relations strategy aimed at maintaining and enlarging the initial support of pro-ICL media for the ICTY. Del Ponte often gave interviews, made speeches, and answered questions (for example in the European Parliament), and used the media to pressure hesitant and obstructive governments. But she rarely did so in The Hague or to the press corps of the ICTY that was actually reporting on the trials;* when she did, she hardly ever disclosed anything that could be seen as a trial strategy. Almost none of the Prosecution team members for the Milošević trial were available for regular background talks or interviews, as Del Ponte’s spokeswoman, Florence Hartmann, centralized the official public relations work.
The weekly press conferences were little better. The Tribunal’s press office sent out invitations for the weekly conference conducted by Hartmann. They usually were rather technical, serving as an opportunity to distribute legal documents, deal with accreditation processes and the trial schedule, or announce visits of judges and prosecutors abroad or of prominent foreign guests to the ICTY. Substantive questions about opinions, interpretations, or intentions of members of the Prosecution team were left unanswered, or were dealt with in a cursory, superficial manner.29 Neither the Prosecution’s nor the Tribunal’s press teams actively sought to shape or influence the media debate about the ICTY.
From the point of view of the Prosecution, this policy had certain positive aspects: It prevented leaks to the media to a large extent, enhanced the security of protected witnesses, and prevented conflicts with the Trial Chambers about media appearances by members of the Prosecution. In other words, it shielded the Prosecution from conflicts such as the one the Amicus Wladimiroff’s interviews had created, and for a long time it prevented internal conflicts within the Prosecution from leaking out.*
There were also, of course, huge disadvantages and costs to the institution. Most journalists actually in The Hague were, or could have been, natural allies of the Prosecution owing to the pro-ICL position of their outlets. But because they were kept at maximum distance, cut off from even informal contacts with prosecutors and investigators, these journalists began to live and work in a separate world in which lack of understanding of the Prosecution shaped their attitudes. Time and again, Del Ponte’s spokeswoman—herself a former journalist (and author in this book)—treated journalists with suspicion, and many journalists saw her as an obstacle to their work rather than as an aid or source of information.
The splendid isolation of the Prosecution had unexpected consequences detrimental to the image of the whole ICTY. With few informal, reliable contacts with journalists, the Prosecution had little possibility to resort to controlled leaks that could have facilitated its work and improved its image.† And, given the absence of direct information from the Prosecution, journalists had to resort to other sources—defense lawyers, external experts, politicians, and diplomats—some of whom were quite critical of the Tribunal, the Prosecution, or Del Ponte and her trial strategy. Reporters in The Hague frequently obtained earlier and better information about prominent upcoming witnesses and the contents of their statements from their home offices than they were given by the Prosecution, whose spokespeople usually vigorously declined any comments about such issues.‡ By doing so, they left the initiative to shape the news to the correspondents’ home offices and the witnesses and lost any possibility to frame the news coverage. Additionally, this reinforced the image of the ICTY as a secretive and hermetic institution, hostile to the media.
There is one particularly striking example, which arose during the Milošević trial, of the detrimental consequences this mutual isolation had for the Prosecution public image. It was widely supposed, and reported, that the Prosecution’s case for genocide in Bosnia was not going well.30 At the same time, however, after protracted negotiations, the Prosecution had managed to obtain the minutes of the VSO from Serbia, documents the Prosecution regarded as crucial evidence for the genocide count.* The minutes were protected by two confidentiality orders—themselves confidential31—which prevented the ICTY from publicly disclosing them or transmitting them to the ICJ, where the Bosnian Genocide case against Serbia was pending.32
Although these documents were introduced during in camera sessions at the Tribunal, the wider public was still convinced that the Prosecution had been unable to produce any significant evidence linking Milošević to Srebrenica and proving his mens rea in the genocide case.33 Under conditions of mutual trust, information about the content of the minutes might have sufficed to incline pro-ICL media to reassess their opinion about the genocide count in the Bosnia indictment, even if those journalists had kept the information confidential (which is admittedly unlikely). The information about the existence of the minutes and their transfer from Belgrade to the Prosecution leaked out anyway in early 2004,34 but fuller information on the content of the minutes was not disclosed until after Milošević’s death, when it could no longer have any effect on the outcome of his trial.†
The mutual mistrust is even more astonishing if one considers that the ICTY’s courtrooms were largely empty of the sort of journalists whom the Prosecution had reason to mistrust. As we have seen, the overwhelming majority of anti-ICL journalists from Serbia and the RS never came to The Hague, instead commenting on the trial from their home desks. Journalists who actually sat behind the bulletproof window of Courtroom I were almost entirely pro-ICL, potential allies in the Prosecution’s struggle against impunity. Ignoring them and starving them of information deprived prosecutors of channels through which they could have explained the actual significance, coherence, and importance of their overall strategy, the genocide count in the Bosnia indictment, the expected influence of crucial witnesses, or other elements of their strategy, which were often misrepresented by the media.‡
It is obvious that the Chambers and Registry could not engage in informal contacts with journalists without arousing suspicion of bias,* yet the Prosecution—which, although subject to some ethical restrictions, did not have the same obligations of neutrality†—was even more hermetically sealed than the press service of the Tribunal, whose duty it was to represent the Chambers, the ICTY President, and the Registry. ICTY spokesman Jim Landale and his staff were often more outspoken and more at ease with journalists than was Hartmann for the Prosecution. However, as Landale took the floor less frequently than Hartmann, it was ultimately she who had the greater influence over the ICTY’s public image. Still, although the Prosecution bore much of the responsibility for the poor relations with journalists and for foregone opportunities to influence reporting, in the end, when the dominant pro-ICL frame turned more skeptical, media criticism was targeted at the whole Tribunal, not only the Prosecution.
Journalists are more accepting of external influences that they perceive as coming in the form of information, rather than instruction or direct pressure. Facts and events that comport with the preexisting frame are more likely to be treated as reliable and useful information in the first place. For those covering the Milošević trial, there were principally three sources that provided frames and interpretations in order to influence the media frames concerning Milošević. Each of them applied a different strategy and tried to achieve a different objective.
First, from time to time the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević‡ would organize press conferences in the Dorint Hotel opposite the ICTY. These conferences were usually suffused with radical rhetoric mixing conspiracy theories, alterglobalism, communist and Serbian nationalist propaganda, and anti-Americanism, as well as negationist or denialist claims about the charges leveled by the Prosecution. Because the frame and rhetoric of these press conferences diverged radically from the frames used by mainstream media, their influence was rather limited and the number of journalists attending these conferences steadily declined.*
This was in marked contrast to the conferences held by Human Rights Watch, which had strongly supported the creation of the ICTY and welcomed the Milošević trial as a triumph of justice over impunity. HRW’s media strategy was very active, trying to capture journalists’ attention with issues that went beyond their everyday business and delivering printable quotes whose style and contents positively contrasted with the legal terminology of the judges, prosecutors, and spokespeople. Richard Dicker, director of HRW’s International Justice Program, frequently flew in to meet journalists, organize press conferences, give interviews, and provide background information, which was difficult for most journalists to obtain directly from Tribunal sources.35 HRW conferences were usually crowded, the more so as HRW sent out invitations, briefs, and reports by e-mail.
But HRW’s interventions were not frequent enough to affect the daily news coverage of agency journalists and correspondents. They had to write reports every day, whereas HRW’s press conferences and releases reached them on average once in a month. HRW was to a large part successful in dissuading journalists from challenging basics, such as the legitimacy of the ICTY and the fairness of the trial, but it is doubtful if the majority of journalists, already positively inclined to the Tribunal, would have initially questioned these anyway.
Still, in many regards, it was Human Rights Watch that contributed most to upholding a positive narrative about the trial. For example, although Del Ponte refused to talk about the ethnic aspects of her prosecution strategy—a source of resentment for Serbs—HRW took up the topic, justifying the statistically disproportionate Serb share of indictments by pointing to Serbs preponderance in committing crimes during the wars, and refuting Milošević’s claims about a lack of equality and fairness in the trial.36 In August 2004, when Milošević started to call defense witnesses, HRW decided to counter increasing media criticism of the proceedings. “Perceptions of the trial have been distorted by a dual impatience[,]” HRW explained in a press release,
to see Milosevic convicted quickly and to see Serbia transformed from a hotbed of aggressive nationalism into a functioning democracy. Frustrated by lack of progress on these issues, critics have made a convenient scapegoat out of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.37
Unimpressed by discussions within the epistemic community around the ICTY, HRW continued to circulate legal interpretations consistent with the Prosecution case, while asserting that these interpretations were uncontested among lawyers.38 Consistently, until the end of the trial, HRW put the blame on Milošević himself for delaying the trial, obstructing procedures, and manipulating justice, and refrained from outspoken criticism of the ICTY. The alleged inequality of arms between the Prosecution and the Accused never became an issue for HRW, while doubts about the use of JCE theories were usually dealt with according to the Prosecution interpretation.39
Above all, unlike the Prosecution and the Tribunal more broadly, HRW followed an active, as opposed to reactive, media strategy. Its researchers and activists picked up the main arguments of anti-ICL media in Western Europe and the Balkans and then tried their best to refute them in their releases, comments, and public statements, often addressing a wider audience than the disputed argument had targeted. Indeed, HRW defended the ICTY more actively than the Tribunal did itself.*
Third, many reporters, especially those not permanently based in The Hague, received trial summaries, comments, and reports through news agencies, including specialized agencies such as the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, SENSE News Agency, and the Coalition for International Justice (CIJ),† many of which reported primarily or exclusively on the ICTY. Generalist news agencies such as DPA, EFE, AFP, and Reuters were much more widely used and quoted by print media, broadcasters, and television, but—consistent with their editorial mission—these agencies generally refrained from serving specific narratives. Their texts were mostly constructed so as to fit into any narrative.
By contrast, specialist agencies such as SENSE and IWPR, which were openly pro-ICL, were strongly victim-oriented and provided their own narratives and frames. These agencies had their own direct readership, but also served, similarly to HRW, as a source for other reporters. In terms of quotes, interviews, and other forms of media presence, IWPR surely outperformed any other specialist agency, but even IWPR was unable to persuade anti-ICL media to diametrically change their position or even to reshape their frames; it, like the other specialist agencies, ended up serving as a source for like-minded readers and reporters, rather than as agents of change among suspicious populations in the former Yugoslavia. By exposing the shortcomings of the Milošević trial, it upheld its credibility and reliability among its audience, but at the same time strengthened critique toward the Prosecution and the ICTY.
Given the prominence of the Accused and the obvious opportunities for relating the charges against him to the whole range of conflicts over which the Tribunal sat in judgment, the Milošević trial was a crucial moment in the history of the institution and a key opportunity to actively shape its public image. The ICTY and the Prosecution failed to take advantage of this opportunity—but this does not mean that the way the media framed the trial, and the slow decline in the pro-ICL narrative, depended primarily or directly on the decisions of the ICTY or the Prosecution. Although the Milošević trial furthered the deterioration of the ICTY’s public image, it itself did not cause the dominant media frames to shift from positive to negative. On the contrary, the underlying challenges to that frame were already in place; the length and prominence of the Milošević trial simply directed journalistic attention more sharply towards the tensions between that frame and the Tribunal’s operations.
As we have seen, the basic narratives defining the media frames—both pro- and anti-ICL—about the Milošević trial and the Tribunal had already come into being long before the trial started; indeed, it was the prior existence of these frames that determined the valence of the intense coverage afforded the opening of the trial. So one might suppose that the increasingly critical tendency in media coverage of the Tribunal observable during Milošević simply represented a plausible story about a trial that was in fact not going according to plan. But many of the problems journalists began to report on had already existed before the start of the Milošević trial: Lengthy trials, joinder problems, and disputes about JCE had been difficulties for years.* All these cases had been exposed by news agencies, and coverage of the ICTY had already become more critical even before the Milošević trial started.40 Due to the relatively lesser significance that the media had attributed to these cases, however, they had only a marginal impact on the ICTY’s image.
The Milošević trial contained its own examples of these more general problems, but—precisely because of the publicity attaching to it and its seeming fit with the existing media frames—the trial highlighted and exacerbated these problems, exposing them to a much broader audience. So although Milošević also created some new causes for concern—most prominently the Accused’s (partly self-inflicted) health problems and his decision to defend himself, which led to the trial’s self-representation crisis, as well as the sheer enormity and scope of the charges against him*—the trial was primarily a highly salient example of broader, preexisting trends.
Thus the initial coverage of Milošević actually represented a temporary improvement in the dominant media frame and the ICTY’s public image, which had already begun a gradual decline: The start of a highly mediatized trial put the ICTY in a much brighter light than it had been in before, with the concomitant sidelining of permanent correspondents by parachutists who were not critical of the ICTY and were reluctant to include such elements into stories about the final victory of justice over the butcher of the Balkans. The Tribunal they had hailed in their articles was an abstract concept of justice, detached from the more complex, nuanced day-to-day reality of the real, existing ICTY. When the parachutists left, they took that positive image with them, and the challenges to the easy, uncomplicated narrative—which had already been making their presence felt—reappeared in the reporting.
From this perspective, the Milošević trial worked on the ICTY’s public image like a magnifying lens, illuminating the dark spots even as it dominated the Tribunal’s public image. Things had already begun to go wrong, but after the initial media hype in the first days of the trial, many more media outlets gradually became aware of the ICTY’s shortcomings, structural problems, and legal and political constraints. Years after the Milošević trial, Olga Kavran, a spokeswoman for the Chief Prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, disputed the link between the ICTY’s performance and its now much more negative representation in the media. “The level of work done here has not decreased—quite the contrary[,]” she said in an interview. “But the perception is that the only case we ever handled was Milošević.”41