‘The CNN effect’: media
influence on US intervention
COMM212: Global News, Media, and War - Qihan Wang (BA Communication Studies, second year)
discusses media influence on interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
It is universally accepted that the proliferation of technology catalyses the
potential of contemporary media to offer an instantaneous circulation of
global news (Robinson, 2002). Therefore, the prompt revolutions in the
worldwide media context and the propagation of war performers exploiting
the media to obtain certain benefits necessitate an innovative notional
and systematic method to recognize the interaction of media conflicts.
The term ‘CNN effect’ has been considered as pervasive shorthand
to clarify the media-conflict interactions (Carruthers, 2011, p.142).
Notwithstanding this development, within the humanitarian community,
there exists a massive discussion concerning the discernible ability
of the media to promote intervention (Robinson, 2002). For example,
Gilboa (2005, p. 328) reflected that the majority of representatives of
policy makers, journalists and scholars have invariably confirmed
that CNN effect forces officials to take actions in humanitarian crises,
while extra scholars argue that the CNN effect does not considerably
change the association between the media and the government, it is
vastly overstressed, and may only occur in scarce cases of particularly
dramatic reports, absence of governance and disordered policy-making.
Conversely, Freedman (2000) firmly argued that while the power of
the media may have been overstated in the early stages of CNN effect
debate, policymakers have actually come to realize the importance of
media. In short, although media causality is the dominant factor in the
CNN effect debate, these authors still support that the media plays an
essential role in facilitating intervention during humanitarian crises. Their
comments on media effects therefore resonate conventional claims
about immeasurable media influence.
This article will firstly define the CNN effect and introduce several
typically different and systematically advantageous definitions of
media effects. Then it critically examines the media functions in US
government intervention in two prominent events—Bosnia and Kosovo,
exploiting policy-media interaction model (Robinson, 2002, p.30), which
hypothesizes that media influence appears when policy uncertainty
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