ABSTRACT
The media are often understood to be simply an extension of state power in non-democratic, non-Western countries. They are therefore sometimes viewed as implicated in war crimes – such as in Rwanda, where three media executives were convicted by the United Nations’ (UN’s) international criminal tribunal for having incited genocide in 1994. The media can also be treated as legitimate military targets – as during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombed the main television building in central Belgrade, killing the civilian employees inside. In both of these cases, the assumption was that the role of the media in conflict is to act as an instrument of power, whether they are state-run (as in the Serbian case) or privately owned (as in Rwanda). In Western democracies, in contrast, the assumption is that the media (including national broadcasters such as the BBC) are independent: able to act as a watchdog on the powerful rather than simply being an arm of official authority.
