ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the television coverage of war in the 1990s. It explores how the 1991 Gulf War represented a new model of conflict: a ‘top-down’ war involving the close management and control of both the military and the media theatre of operations. Militarily this involved the achievement of air-supremacy and the use of new precision weaponry to destroy opposition forces, with minimum casualties for oneself or civilians. But this military campaign was matched by a systematic media campaign to control the narrative of the war and to mobilize domestic and international support. The chapter explores how this model was introduced in the Gulf, the problems of intervention in the 1990s and the re-use of the Gulf model in the Kosovo War in 1999. It focuses on how the wars were covered by the mainstream broadcast media and the impact of this on the experience of conflict in the west.
