(Page 9 of 28) - News Coverage about the Bosnian War authored by Ruigrok, Nel., Scholten, Otto. and De Ridder, J..

with regard to their education and social class a perfect representation of the Dutch population
(Bakker en Scholten, 1999, pp.6-8). De Telegraaf has no actual equivalent in other countries. It
brings relatively numerous human interest stories with slightly sensational aspects although it is
more elaborate and politically oriented than the English tabloids for example.

Trouw was founded as an orthodox protestant newspaper but can nowadays be seen as a
progressive protestant newspaper. Trouw is one of the smaller national newspapers with a
circulation of 115.000 issues a day that reaches 250.000 readers. The readers are relatively highly
educated (42% have a university degree) and belong to the higher classes of society.

NRC Handelsblad is an independent, moderately progressive evening paper with a circulation of
280.000 issues a day that reaches 463.000 readers. The readers are relatively old (67% are older
than 35) well educated (59% have a higher education) and rich (90% belong to the highest social
classes of society).

De Volkskrant was originally founded as a Catholic newspaper but nowadays the newspaper is
read especially by young and highly educated people. The newspaper is politically more leftwing-
oriented. The circulation of the newspaper is 450.000 issues a day and it reaches almost 800.000
people.

Chronology; news coverage as a reflection of reality
A study into the news coverage of a certain event can be considered as a research into the
relationship between the actual happenings and the covered parts of these happenings in the
media. The lack of a standard for determining the "real world" adds to the difficulty of comparing
media coverage with the outside world. These difficulties are pointed out by Rosengren (1974),
who makes two distinctions, between intra-media data and extra-media data and between report-
oriented and event-oriented studies. Intra-media data is data about the ‘real world’ as depicted in
the media while extra-media data is data about the ‘real world’ taken from other sources. The
report-oriented studies focus on differences between media reports about a certain event while
event-oriented studies try to reconstruct the event and compare this reconstructed event with the
different coverage in the media. Our study is an event-oriented one, using intra- and extra media
data. The extra media data we obtained from a chronology made for the research “Srebrenica, a
‘safe area’ by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation on Srebrenica (NIOD, 2002).

A reconstruction of all events that happened during the Bosnian war is impossible. Reality can
never be fully described. However, a chronology can serve as an objective reflection of the war
reality to which the newspaper coverage can be compared. To achieve this comparison we coded
the chronology as put together by the NIOD (NIOD, 2002). The content of the chronology is
based on about thirty chronologies found on the internet in 1998. Those chronologies come from
international organisations like the UN, NATO, NGO’s, universities, press agencies, private
persons, and, to a limited extent, books. The chronologies are combined and edited in such a way
as to give a general overview of the most important political and military developments in the
former Yugoslavia during the period of 1990-1995 and the involvement of both the international
community and the Dutch government. We coded the enumerated events in accordance with the
events that compose the seven themes of the news to make a comparison possible.