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COMPARING FRAMES FROM A PROPOSITIONAL PERSPECTIVE: THE CASE OF SPANISH PRESS AND KOSOVO WAR

Javier García MARÍN, Researcher University of Granada, SPAIN

jgmarin@ugr.es

Adolfo Calatrava GARCIA, Researcher University of Granada. SPAIN

calatravag@hotmail.com

Javier Garcia Marín (Madrid 1976), is graduate in modern history by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Expert in EU policies by the same university, Mph on Security and Defence by UNED and Mph on Peace and Security by Universidad Complutense-CESEDEN. Now is Researcher and member of the executive board of the Centre for Security Analysis in the University of Granada and member of the research group of the Observatory of Geopolitical Security of the Spanish Army. Also is author of several articles and collaborations on books about Media and Conflict Studies and has participated in numerous conferences. Adolfo Calatrava Garcia is graduate in Modern History by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Expert on Latin American’s Politics (UAM) and Mph on Economy and International Relations. He had been researcher in the Faculty of Economics at UAM and now is researcher of the Centre for Security Analysis in the University of Granada, as well as Civil Coordinator of the permanent Observatory of Geopolitical Security of Spanish. Their main subjects are geopolitical security, especially regarding energy issues and the Mediterranean region. Abstract The increasing popularity of the framing concept in media analysis goes hand in hand with significant inconsistency in its application, especially when it comes to quantitative or quantitative-like analysis easily reproducible by other scholars. This paper is especially concerned with frame-building processes, which refers to factors that influence structural qualities of news frames. With these concepts in mind, this paper proposes a new methodology to compare frames in a frame-building environment, setting one of them as independent variable and another as dependent. This methodology, called “propositional analysis” split one discourse into propositions (that may form a schema) and then compare and analyses their presence in the news media (through a content analysis). The result is a complete set of variables that can be correlated each other and analysed separately or jointly. Even more, they can be measured by intensity (number of times referred) or chronology (date of apparition), etc. And it is easily reproducible since a complex analysis is divided in small, simple content analyses. From this perspective, this paper shows that the application of this methodology can help to explain more detailed frame-building processes during conflicts. The Kosovo war has been an example of frame-building process, and a key support to the indexing theory, since there was a strong consensus between major parties favouring NATO actions in Serbia and Spanish direct participation in the war. Although it was a disputable conflict, with no authorization from United Nations Security Council, no war declaration, and no direct threat by Serbia to NATO’s interests; in Spain major newspapers seemed to support the war. In fact, it was the very first time –in recent history- that Spanish army bombs other country. But the population was never favourable to it, an apparently contradictory situation. However, this paper shows that the Spanish press was less supportive than seemed.

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INTRODUCTION This paper responds to an ongoing research project in the University of Granada that tries to explain the relations between three sides of a triangle: government policy, media coverage and public opinion in the case of conflicts. This project born for the concern of two key events: the strong popular opposition to government policy towards Iraq crisis and the terrorist attacks of March 2004 in Madrid. It explores several theories to find the most adequate one to the Spanish case, and this paper is just a brief exhibition of our efforts finding a strong method to do it. So, their main aim is to show to the scientific community not the conclusions, which would be pretentious, but the methods in order to recollect opinions and advices. This is why this paper is more worried about method and not about literature reviews or data, something that has to be done later on. Soon after our research project started become evident that framing-building processes were at the core of our research, something that brought clarification and unity to our research. But, at the same time, looseness since the framing concept lacks unity or other methodological approach other than content analysis as tool to retrieve the information from the texts. Since we had to elaborate several researches to compare different mass media theories our aim was to find one methodological perspective aiming at the reproducibility of the process. Also, if we take Bertollini’s words as valid (1996) our research is concerned with intensity, because we divide the object –a speech- into several propositions, as we shall see below, that can be traduced into variables. The result is a numeric matrix that can be analyzed with the standard tools of the social sciences (correlations, co-occurrences, etc.).

This is not to say that our methodological apparatus is more worried with quatitativeness than qualitativeness, because the origin of the retrieved data has always been a mainly qualitative method: content analysis through a researcher’s point of view.

As we state below, we have chosen the case of the war over Kosovo for several reasons, among them the rich literature that it originated, the confrontation between scholars, and the fact that main political parties in Spain agreed in the main with the intervention, as well as the main news media. This phenomenon is ideal for our purposes because it unifies the political discourse while there is space enough to several interpretations about the reasons for the conflict (as long as we have not to select any, of course). This way we can challenge political and media views of events. Especially when Spanish public opinion never supported the conflict1, so there is an apparent contradiction of some media and public opinion models like Bennett’s Indexing Theory (1990; 1994), Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent (1988), etc. So it is a perfect lab to deepen analysis and to improve our method, which constitutes the real purpose of this brief research. LITERATURE REVIEW

Generally, frames are heuristic devices used by political, media and public actors to organise the complexity of an issue into meaningful categories. Frames are context-sensitive and subject to change. They can be identified through the means of discourse analysis, which, according to McQuail (1992: 494), “applies to all forms of language use and textual forms, but the essential idea is that communication occurs by way of forms of ʹtext and talkʹ, adapted to particular social locations, topics and kinds of participants”. How discourse is analysed depends on the aims of the research that is carried out. For example, research could be concerned with examinig the use of particular words in specific contexts. Despite its polysemous nature, discourse can be studied systematically, thereby reducing the ʹuncertaintyʹ of the meaning assigned to an issue. The creation of a frame happens in a complex process where many actors intervene, depending on several factors and events. Each frame is unique from this point of view, but the processes can be analyzed and described, though not easily.

1 CIS, 1999 (April). Study number 2324, question n 4.

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Table 1: Frame processes

Source: DeVreese (2005: 7) As we can see in Table1 frame-building processes are related to factors that influence the structural qualities of news frames. Here, factors internal to journalism determine how journalist and media organizations frame different issues (Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Equally important, however, are external factors to journalism. Frame-building processes take place in a continue interaction between journalists and elites (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978) and social movements (Cooper, 2002). The frame-building outputs are frames manifests in media texts. Nevertheless, the vast majority of framing studies, more or less explicitly, apply a broader definition of frames. Conceptually, a broader notion of news frames is indebted to a definition of a frame as “a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue” (Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). Hence, our research is concerned with frame-building processes mainly. In this processes, following DeVreese (2004), we have two main factors affecting the final elaboration of frames: internal factors (as editorial policies) and external factors. It is easy to relate external factors to several ʹpressuresʹ coming from companies, government officials, proprietors, etc. Also, another important external factor can be the availability of sources or images. Of course, public opinion reactions may be as important as other external factors. Entman (2004) has put it all together in a new model called ʹcascadeʹ, that tries to synthesize framing through the steps of a cascade where governmental point of view it is set at the top and public opinion at the bottom. However, what it is interesting in Entmanʹs model is that some steps (like news outlets, public officials, public opinion, etc.) have, to some extent, certain capability of changing governmentʹs story in a feedback process where frames in the news are only a step in the cascade. Perhaps more importantly for our study is the idea of substantive frames as complex devices that “performs two of the following basic functions in covering political events, issues and actors” (2004: 5)1:

• Defining effects or conditions as problematic • Identifying causes • Conveying a moral judgement • Endorsing remedies or improvements

Nevertheless, methodological approaches to frame-building processes have almost always rested on content or discourse analysis difficult to reproduce since each author have a different approach, depending on their need.

1 Please, note that this is a very partial description of Entman’s work since cascade model compromise dozens of other features.

Framing in the newsroom

- Internal factors (editorial policies, news values) - External factors

Frames in the news - Issue-specific frames - Generic frames

Framing effects - Information processing effects - Attitudinal effects - Behavioural effects

Frame-building Frame-setting

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STUDY FRAMEWORK In the present study, a frame analysis of Kosovo war was carried out. This consisted of analysing political and media discourse in terms of five features and seventeen propositions that, together, constitute a fully developed frame. What we call ʹpropositional analysisʹ is just another step in Entmanʹs categories. If Entman divides the frame into well-establish categories, we go further filling these categories with the basic assumptions the author of the speech makes. Hence, e.g. if political discourse establish that ʹthere is a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovoʹ and ʹthere is a genocide in Kosovoʹ, we take them and establish them as proposed cause in Entmanʹs terms. This way we split categories into meaningful sentences, easily recognisable in news texts or other media. Also, we can form different schemas through the use of propositions, because they may be connected through logical connections, for example:

Proposition A: ʹthere is genocide in Kosovoʹ Proposition B: ʹNATO must act on Kosovoʹ A leads to B in the speech.

Although similar to Entmanʹs categories (i.e. it happens the same if we use A as cause of the problem and B as proposed solution) the analysis is much clearer especially when we find several propositions in the same category -and regarding the same event, person or actor- being much more reproducible by other scholars. Also, with the split of categories come new possibilities and more complex analysis, because we can compare each one with other speeches in a valuation base (negative, positive, ambiguous... and so on). This way we can find some categories only partially challenged by media frames (e.g. one newspaper can accept that ʹNATO must act on Kosovoʹ, but not ʹair war is best suited to our endsʹ as happens with El Mundo in Spain, in spite of both formed part of the same category: proposed solution). Counting propositions-related evaluations in the press -or other media- can help also to establish the intensity of the speech in this specific issue and the chronology. Again, while this is still possible using only categories, it is much easier with propositions and clearer to readers. Propositions can be extracted easily from any speech, since constitutes the main statements one discourse is build upon. Once we have the presence or valuation of propositions in each analysed media, the result is a matrix that can be analysed further to obtain conclusions.

Table 2: Example of data matrix (articles and propositions).

P1 P2 P3 P4 P5

A1 -1 0 -1 A2 0 -1 1 A3 -1 1 A4 -1 -1

Setting propositions as variables and articles as objects is useful to make more analysis with computer programs like SPSS or similar. Finding correlations and co-occurrences between propositions can help in elaborating conclusions and validating hypothesis. Also, propositions can be measured in lines of text or any other measure. Measuring in lines of text that discuss the selected proposition can be helpful for understanding what the issue is about, since the proposition that attracts more attention should be the more polemic, strong or verified, actual, etc. It does not change the matrix substantially because co-occurrence analysis is basically binary (presence-absence) and can be converted in discrete variables -in proportional segments -in order to make other types of analysis. The speeches where the propositions are extracted, thus, are set as independent variable, while others are set as dependent. This is not inflexible because propositions can be extracted from both sets of discourses; e.g. we can compare governmental propositions with

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El País editorial section, and then realize that El País propose new forms of problem solutions. So we can add a new proposition originated by El País and compare it with the political discourse in a two-ways analysis. This leads to establish a chronological start for each proposition, something really useful to check some theories like Bennettʹs Indexing theory or Chomsky and Hernanʹs Manufacturing Consent, if we can demonstrate the origin of a given proposition. As we can see, working with propositions have multiples possibilities and only some of them are exposed here.

THE WAR ON KOSOVO: COMPARING POLITICAL AND NEWSPAPER FRAMES

Kosovo crisis aroused, internationally speaking, in February 19981, when clashes between KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and Yugoslavian militaries and paramilitaries reached dimension enough to worried Western governments. Long considered to be one of the Balkans’ most dangerous flashpoints, Serbia’s Albanian-majority province has for many years defied the odds and managed to avoid the kind of conflagration that has devastated regions to its north. A combination of repressive measures by Belgrade and a campaign of non-violent resistance by the Kosovar Albanian leadership kept a lid on unrest for nearly eight years since the break-up of Yugoslavia. That delicate balance was severely upset, however, when on 28 February the Serbian authorities launched the first in a series of large-scale offensives against the ethnic Albanian population-ostensibly directed at militant separatists-which by mid-July had left some 400 dead and had forced tens of thousands more to flee their homes and villages. Kosovo’s Serbs, in turn, have increasingly come under attack by Albanian irregular forces (Caplan, 1998). Alter Raçak massacre in 15 January 1999, international pressure over Milosevic grew fantastically, and the result was the big conference at Rambouillet. According with some scholars, no one never thought of a failure of western diplomacy at Rambouillet, and really no one wanted another war in the Balkans. However, Rambouillet talks did not succeed and NATO had to start an operation which everybody thought, at that time, would be short and helpful for Milosevic in order to accept the agreement and to save his seat as president of Serbia (Ignatieff, 2001). Nevertheless, the war was not short and was characterized by two main elements: the absence of ground troops and the emergence of a humanitarian disaster over the refugees that flee from Kosovo to neighbouring countries, mainly Albania. This humanitarian dimension of the conflict was at the very centre of the debate over the responsibility of it: while NATO and Western countries –and a majority of scholars- said that it was a planned operation of ethnic cleansing by the Yugoslav authorities (codenamed operation Horseshoe by NATO), others view the result of the bombardment. Whatever the truth, it is clear that there was more than one way of reporting the story. Indisputably, the NATO intervention through its bombing campaign violated he United Nations Charter and international law. As a result, the intervention risked destabilizing the international rule of law that prohibits a state or group of states from intervening by the use of force in another state, absent authorization by the UN Security Council or a situation of self-defense (Charney, 1999: 834-835). And follows: The extent of the human rights violations in Kosovo prior to the withdrawal of the OSCE’s observer force was not massive and widespread. In fact, the Security Council had authorized the deployment of the verification mission; which had effectively prevented the commission of widespread atrocities. The FRY’s behaviour changed only after NATO forced the withdrawal of the OSCE observers (839-840). According to some authors, the main underlying explanation for the willingness of NATO’s 19 member states to take action over Kosovo is not their interpretations of particular events,

1 However, the origin of the conflict is usually established in 1987, when Milosevic, then President of Yugoslavia, cancelled Kosovo’s autonomy (Judah, 1999).

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such as the failure of the negotiations over the province at Rambouillet and Paris in February and March 1999. Nor was it a shared vision as to what the future of the province should be. Rather, the NATO states were united by a sense of shame that, in the first four years of atrocious wars in the former Yugoslavia (1991-95), they had failed, individually and collectively, to devise coherent policies and to engage in decisive actions (Roberts, 1999). In Spain, from the very start, in early 1998, there was a complete agreement about doing something to solve the situation. Later on, with the possibility of going to war, leftist parties like Izquierda Unida and Bloque Nacionalista Galego showed their disagreement with the general tone, fact that make them a regular objective for criticism from other parties. But, the truth was that the general frame, mostly build about the idea of genocide –before the war, but we can fount it later too-, and deportations was widely accepted by the parties and the media almost as they were one block. Well after the conflict ended, had appeared new visions that contradict that vision and other ones that follow the same line, but much softer (Drezov et al. 1999; Vuksanovic et al. 2001). We have not chosen any version of war motives, but we want only to state that there was another way of portraying the events than the genocide-humanitarian frame. METHOD To reach valid conclusions we have tried to show press policy through content analysis (Krippendorff, 1990 [1980]) of the “editorial” section of each analysed newspaper. In this case, we have chosen to analyse these newspapers: El País and El Mundo1. Each one is a good example of national newspaper with a big circulation and constitutes a different way of making journalism (Canel: 1999), with equally different ideological lines. We have chosen to analyse editorial section because the articles are not signed and represent each newspaper’s policy (Santamaría, 1990: 65; Szmolka, 2005). Hence, they fit neatly in our idea of exploring those policies towards government actions. We have analyzed 131 editorial articles for the case of Kosovo (El País: 41 and El Mundo: 63). These numbers constitutes all non-signed articles between January 1st 1999 and June 5th 1999. The dates that were chosen cover the whole period of the war and a period before, but not after. This is so because we are interested in the possibility of building public support for government’s actions, and not the consequences. The speech at the political level has been extracted from the Parliament debates, publicly available via Internet. There were eleven interventions in the Spanish Congress2 during that period, of variable length, treated with a content analysis. The method has been to split the government frame into categories, much like Entman does. The categories are: Problem definition, Cause, Remedy and Moral judgement. Plus another one necessary from our point of view: Legitimacy. Legitimacy is seen as a procedural frame by Entman (2004: 6), but we have chosen to make it substantive since it brings more coherence to our research because contains propositions in the same way other propositions have. Then, we have divided each category into propositions, which constitutes the basic statements of political discourse. We show here only the propositions with some significance, since others, analysed too, were not discuss by newspapers (in a positive or negative way, there are just not articles related to them, which is meaningful but useless for this paper). We can see the final result in Table 3. 1 El Mundo has an average daily circulation of 400.297 issues and El País of 588.183. Data from http://www.ojd.es (official source). 2 Those were: CO611 (February, 10), CO660 (March, 26), PL226 (March, 30), PL147 (April, 1), CO662 (April, 6), PL228 (April, 14), PL231 (April, 21), PL236 (May 4), CO697 (May, 19), PL241 (May, 19) and CO722 (June, 24). All are available through http://congreso.es.

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Table 3: Governmental frame about Kosovo intervention.

Category Governmental basic assumptions Propositions

Problem Definition A conflict in Kosovo can destabilize regional security (EU’s). K7, K12

Cause Ethnic cleansing K4, K5, K15 Remedy Military pressure (and autonomy for Kosovo) K9, K10 K11, K13, K14 Moral Judgement Milosevic is a murderous dictator K6, K8 Legitimacy Anticipatory humanitarian intervention. K1, K2, K3, K16

K1 Conflict is legitimate K2 International community’s consensus K3 Milosevic’s blame of the war K4 Genocide or ethnic cleansing against Kosovars (Albanians) K5 Massive and forced deportations. K6 Demonization: Milosevic is a murderous dictator K7 Milosevic threats international security K8 This is a humanitarian conflict. K9 Air war right to stop genocide. K10 Public opinion wants to act K11 War tries to minimize civilian victims. K12 It is a conflict between Serbs and Kosovars K13 NATO must act to stop the conflict in Kosovo K14 Kosovo must not be independent or join Albania. K15 KLA is part of the problem. K16 NATO has not provoked a humanitarian disaster. K17 Milosevic does not want to negotiate.

Finally, we have analyzed newspapers policy towards each proposition in each editorial article valuing it on a basis of three possible values: 1, positive or favourable towards that proposition; 0, ambiguous towards that proposition; and -1 negative or contrary to that proposition. We have chosen a simplified three-value scale since we are interested in the general policy of each newspaper and considering that this way is much simpler and enough for our proposal, especially towards the validation of our analysis. However, it is planned to widen this analysis to a five-scale analysis in the hope of reaching more conclusions establishing tendencies. FINDINGS Political Discourse During the period analyzed, we can observe two main political speeches depending on the diplomatic stage in the international scene. Thus, if at the very start of this period politicians speak about a conflict (asymmetric) between KLA and Serbian troops, where the Serbian were responsible for oppression as a weapon against civil supporters of KLA, soon after what was called “the Massacre of Racak”, the speech hardened against the Serbs. With the starts of the Rambouillet talks, political discourse softened once again, maybe waiting a diplomatic solution to the conflict, without disappearing the war as possible outcome. Once

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the war started speech changed again, hardened much more and a new schema –following Scheufele (2000)- was formed, as we can see in Diagram1. The conflict definition always was the threat that the deterioration of the situation possessed for the international security in the Balkan’s region, and by extension in Europe. This situation was provoked by the oppression Albanian-Kosovars suffered, sometimes called genocide, deportations or simply ethnic cleansing. Of course, this situation of the Kosovar people leaded to the demonization of Milosevic (and to some extent the Serbs) that helped to build the legal frame to overrule the UN’s Security Council permission for the attack.

Diagram 1: Political Schema (simplified).

The respond to this situation was the polemic aerial bombardment that invoked “anticipatory humanitarian intervention” However, faced with the fact of a long war that no one wanted (Ignatieff, 2001) the conflict definition was progressively abandoned in favour of the causes of the conflict: the genocide, in a circular speech, sometimes incongruent, that put the air war as the best mean to stop human right abuses on the basis of protecting NATO pilots’ lives. From a generic frame perspective, we can state that politicians tried to frame the conflict as a humanitarian issue. Newspapers Speech El Mundo speech was very close to the political one, calling for action from the very start of the conflict in 1998 and especially in the period covered by this paper. Their criticism of NATO actions only started once NATO performed some mistakes that caused several civilian deaths. However this criticism served the paper for asking for a mayor commitment, meaning a ground war. Several issues were never deeply criticizes, especially the legitimacy of the war.

Table 4: Covered propositions, El Mundo.

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K16 K17 Total

N 3 13 6 30 12 12 5 0 24 9 17 4 5 2 3 6 17 168

% 1,8 7,7 3,6 18 7,1 7,1 3 0 14 5,4 10 2,4 3 1,2 1,8 3,6 10 100%

Milosevic is a murderous dictator

Genocide

Anticipatory Humanitarian Intervention

Threat of Internatio-

nal Security

Conflict Definition Causes Solutions

Air War

Moral Judgement Legitimacy

Why?

Implies Why?

Respond

Invokes

Reason for

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As we can see in Table 4, only four propositions attracted 52% of this paper attention: K4, K9, K11 and K17. I. e. K4 and K17 relates to genocide and Milosevic’s attitude and K9 and K11 to the convenience of the air war and their impact on civilian’s lives, in not a very positive sense as we can see in Table 5.

Table 5: Propositions per valuation, El Mundo.

These two issues –and four propositions- were covered most of the time, but we can find another set of propositions well present at the same time: K2, K5, K6 and K10. Only one of them (K2) relates to conflict legitimacy and only collaterally, about the international consensus in an ambiguous way. K5 and K6, deportations and demonization respectively, incise the causes of the conflict and the moral judgment, while K10 regards to public opinion view of the conflict. This four propositions were covered 27,3% of the total coverage. Others propositions were never treated deeply or extensively, which means that El Mundo centered its attention on the cause and solutions of the conflict. On the other hand, El País had a different behavior on the coverage of the conflict. For them, the conflict is mainly humanitarian and support NATO action with some reserves about legitimacy. Their critics are centered on government lack of information in the Congress. With respect of public opinion, like El Mundo, is less optimistic than political elites, but “governments in democracy cannot ignore their public opinions, but neither to let opinion polls to drive political-military strategy” (26/4/1999). Also, civilian victims are not linked to the correctness of air war, something perhaps related to the traditional pacifist point of view of this paper and the implications of such link would have on the support for a ground operation.

Table 6: Covered propositions, El País.

El País main coverage was about ‘genocide’, ‘deportation’, ‘civilian victims’ and the fact of ‘Milosevic does not want an agreement’ (K5, K6, K11 and K17); that is to say the human side of the conflict. Other treated propositions were K2, K7, K9 and K14: ‘legitimacy’, ‘Threat to regional security’, ‘Air war’ and ‘Kosovo independence’.

Table 7: Propositions per valuation, El País.

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K16 K17 N %

Negatives 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 1 0 1 0 1 1 10 7,14

Positives 0 2 2 19 16 15 4 3 0 0 0 1 3 0 0 1 6 72 51,43

Ambiguous 5 3 0 2 5 2 3 0 5 4 9 3 2 6 0 2 7 58 41,43 As Table 7 shows, El País neve had a negative view of political schema (7,14% of propositions were covered negatively in contrast with 22% of El Mundo), not challenging it in any time. Comparatively, Chart1 shows differences in editorial’s opinion of both papers, stressing the diferences in propositions K5, K6 and K9.

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K16 K17 N %

Negatives 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11 2 12 1 0 0 0 6 5 37 22

Positives 1 2 6 27 12 11 5 0 1 1 1 3 5 0 3 0 3 81 48,2

Ambiguous 2 11 0 3 0 1 0 0 12 6 4 0 0 2 0 0 9 50 29,8

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K16 K17 TotalTotal 5 7 2 21 21 17 7 3 7 4 11 5 5 7 0 4 14 140Percentage 3,6 5 1,4 15 15 12 5 2,1 5 2,9 7,9 3,6 3,6 5 0 2,9 10 100

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From a more deep view of the press attitude during the war we can split the analysis in accordance with categories: Problem Definition The first example of consensus among the elites and the media are in the problem definition’s coverage by the two newspapers analysed (K7 and K12, but this last one was forgotten after late January). However, the intensity of coverage about humanitarian issues surpass this statement by large. We think that this is the reason behind the lack of support for the threat Milosevic posed to the region. Cause It was the cause the main issue covered by editorials in the newspapers. We have differentiated here between ethnic cleansing (K4) and deportations (K5), because the first denotes mass killings while the later has not, clearly, that sense. K15, again, is reminiscent of the early steps of the conflict, when was reported more as a clash between Serbs and Kosovars. Also, K5 was widely used during the war, with the escape of thousands of Kosovars-Albanians from the province. K4 was used intensively just started the war, maybe in a try to build public support, but it is worthy to know that NATO never used the word “genocide” in any communiqué. It was an addition of political and media levels. K16 is intended to state that the blame for deportations was not in NATO actions, as some leftist parties said, but in Milosevic actions. Nevertheless, El Mundo did cover such statement in a deviation from the indexing theory, but not from Entman’s cascade model, which states that journalists perceive their function as critics of governmental action (Entman, 2004). This can be a good example of that attitude, but is very “weak” to constitute a threat to the general frame of events. Remedy It is here, in this category where we can find some disagreement between media and political level. But, in this issue, especially about civilian victims (K11) and the air war as an ideal tool to stop the “genocide” (K9), we find some disagreement in the political level too. If it was clear that somebody must stop the crisis (K13), a position very coherent with the humanitarian and genocide frame, it was not so clear that the air war was what the people –and journalists- were thinking of. Anyway, only El Mundo stated that clearly, while El País showed a more neutral position, waiting, perhaps, the end of the war.

0,00 2,00 4,00 6,00 8,00

10,00 12,00 14,00 16,00 18,00

K1 K2 K3 K4 K5 K6 K7 K8 K9 K10 K11 K12 K13 K14 K15 K16 K17

Proposition

Chart 1: Percentage of valuations per paper and proposition.

El MundoEl País

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In fact, NATO had to cope with heavy criticism for the so-called “collateral damages” or civilian victims. Again, only El Mundo showed their disagreement with this coverage of events, again a position correlated with K9. Moral Judgement But, the ultimate culprit was on Milosevic’s policy as it is clearly shown in K6. This idea exhibit a wide consensus, especially in moments of tensions, like the star and end of Rambouillet conference, and the start of the war. It was never stated -at this time- that the conflict started as a conflict between KLA (Kosovars guerrilla, portrayed as terrorists in 1998 and resistant in 1999 by the press) and Yugoslavian government. Legitimacy The legality and legitimacy of the conflict is an interesting point for our study. As we said earlier, the war of Kosovo illegal from some points of view. But here was an issue sub-represented by both the media and the political parties, except the leftist parties mentioned before. K1 was not a concern for the press. And the main supportive idea of the government, the consensus among the International Community (K2) was portrayed positively o ambiguously, but just in two cases (by El País) in a negative manner. And we have to remind the strong opposition of Russia and China. While K3 shows a strong consensus in the press, K16 shows a strange behaviour. This is because there were some initiatives –mainly from Russia- to stop the war and to initiate negotiations. Only El Mundo covered these events from an optimistic point of view. DISCUSSION After this brief analysis, due to the lack of space, we can conclude that a closer look at the press during the Kosovo campaign shows evidence enough to estate that political-press relations are not always conditioned to indexing relations, and that the press while supporting the conflict also stressed some incongruence in the political discourse. This could very well lead to a negative response by public opinion and help to explain their relatively negative support for the war. Also, propositional analysis seems to add some methodological clarification to frame analysis, at least in comparative studies, since we can make different content analysis for each proposition or category. This way reproducibility –one of the main purposes of this method- is much more stressed, as it is reliability because codification process is clearer, even if we work with samples. REFERENCES Bartollini, Stefano. (1996) Manual De Ciencia Política. Alianza Madrid. Bennett, W. Lance (1990). Toward A Theory Of Press-State Relations In The United States.

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Opinion, And Foreign Policy In The Gulf War. The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago. Canel, María José Y Sánchez-Aranda, José Javier (1999). ʺLa Influencia De Las Actitudes

Profesionales Del Periodista Español En Las Noticiasʺ. Análisi Nº 23. Pp. 151-170. Caplan, Richard (1998). ʺInternational Diplomacy And The Crisis In Kosovoʺ. En:

International Affairs, Vol. 74, Nº 4. Octubre 1998. Charney, Jonathan I. (1999). ʺAnticipatory Humanitarian Intervention In Kosovoʺ. En: The

American Journal Of International Law, Vol. 93, Nº 4 (Octubre 1999). Pp. 834-841. Chomsky, Noam Y Herman, Edward S. Manufacturing Consent. Pantheon Books. Nueva

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