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Political Communication, Vol. 22, pp27 – 44.
By Etyan Gilboa
The CNN Effect: The Origins and Development of a Misguided Concept
Abstract
This study investigates the decade long effort to construct and validate a communications concept of international relations, which asserts that global television networks, such as CNN and BBC World, have become the decisive actor in determining policies and outcomes of significant events. The article traces the origins and development of this concept, known also as the CNN effect, and critically analyzes major academic and professional publications that have sought to explain it. These publications include theoretical and comparative works, specific case studies, and methodologies. The study reveals an ongoing debate among politicians, government officials, journalists, and scholars, on the validity of this theory. This article concludes that studies have yet to present sufficient evidence validating the CNN effect, that many works have exaggerated this effect, and that the focus on this concept has deflected attention from other ways global television affects mass communication, journalism, and international relations. The paper also proposes an agenda for research on the various effects of global television networks.
Introduction
The Second World War created for the first time in history a truly global international system. Events in one region affect events elsewhere and therefore are of interest to states in other, even distant places. At the beginning of the 1980s, innovations in communication technologies and the vision of Ted Turner produced CNN, the first global news network (Whittemore 1990). CNN broadcasted news around the clock and around the world via a combination of satellites and cable television outlets. In the 1990-91 Gulf War CNN emerged as a global actor in international relations. Books written by CNN’s commentators and executives shortly after this war including Smith (1991) and Wiener (1992), helped to boost CNN’s prestige and reputation. Hachten (1998) placed the importance of CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War in the context of American history: "During the American Civil War in 1861-1865, the demand for news was so great that U.S. newspapers went to 7-day publication. During the 1963 Kennedy assassination, live television emerged as the preeminent medium for reporting breaking news. Such events positioned ABC, CBS, and NBC as major news gathers but still essentially American media. During the 42-day Gulf War, CNN established the importance of a 24-hour news network with true global reach" (p. 146). CNN’s successful coverage of the Gulf conflict inspired other broadcasting organizations such as BBC, which already had world radio broadcast, NBC, and Star to establish global television networks.
CNN’s growth and diversification, including the creation of CNN International, have affected many facets of global communications and international relations, such as, technology, economics, culture, law, public opinion, politics, and diplomacy, as well as warfare, terrorism, human rights, environmental degradation, refugees, and health. (Gurevich, 1991). In the 1980s, these effects attracted limited attention from both the academic and professional communities, but CNN’s coverage of the Gulf War encouraged greater investigations. The war marked a turning point in the history of communications and of CNN in particular, which brought about a similar change in scholarship of the network. The emergence of a significant new actor in communications and international relations requires adequate theoretical and empirical work to scientifically assess its place and influence. Scholars have conducted studies of CNN within various general frameworks (Silvia, 2001; McPhail, 2002) and specific contexts, such as public sphere (Volkmar, 1999), ownership and economics (Parker, 1995; Flournoy & Stewart, 1997), competition (Johnston, 1995), and newsmaking (Flournoy, 1992; Seib, 2002). This article investigates studies of CNN’s effects on war and intervention, foreign policy, and diplomacy. Many of these works explore what became known as the CNN effect.
The CNN effect theory was developed primarily through reflections made by policymakers and journalists on the roles played by global television networks, particularly CNN, in major international conflicts of the post-Cold War era. These conflicts include the Chinese government crackdown on students’ protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern Europe in 1989-90; the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war following Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait; the Russian coup attempt of August 1991; and the civil wars and humanitarian interventions in Northern Iraq/Kurdistan (1991), Somalia (1992), Rwanda (1994), Bosnia (1992-1995), and Kosovo (1999).
Scholars have yet to define properly the CNN effect, leading one to question if an elaborated theory exists or simply an attractive neologism. In the early analysis of this supposed effect, writers also called it the "CNN complex, the “CNN curve,” and the “CNN factor,” each carrying multiple meanings with journalists, officials, and scholars. In recent years, however, researchers have predominantly associated global real-time news coverage with two interrelated facets–forcing policy on leaders and accelerating the pace of international communication. Constructing and testing a new theory in these fields is significant because the international community has considered ethnic and civil wars and peacekeeping interventions two of the most important issues of the post-Cold War era. The effects of instant communications and time pressure created by that speed also may push policymakers to make decisions without sufficient time to carefully consider options. In addition, the popularity of the CNN effect and the attention it has received in all circles, including the policymaking and the media communities, and the consequences of this effect for both policymaking and research also call for a comprehensive study of the theory's origins, development, and contributions.
This study attempts to answer the following questions: What exactly is the CNN effect? What were the circumstances behind the inception of the concept? Why is it important, if it all, to research this effect? How has it been researched and analyzed previously? What are the results of these efforts, and what progress has been made during a decade of investigations? Which research issues have been missed? Where do we go from here? Which research directions and strategies should scholars adopt to investigate the effects of global communications, not just those of CNN, in the near future? In order to answer these questions, this study systematically and critically analyzes all the major works published on the subject in the last decade, both in professional and academic outlets. These publications include theoretical and comparative works, specific case studies, and methodologies. The results reveal an ongoing debate among politicians, government officials, journalists, and scholars on the validity of the CNN effect theory. The debates occur both within each group and among them, but these exchanges have yet to take significant steps toward resolving the issue. This article concludes that studies have yet to present sufficient evidence validating the CNN effect, that many works have exaggerated this effect, and that the focus on this theory has deflected attention from other ways global television affects mass communication, journalism, and international relations.
The article first briefly traces the origins of the concept and then documents how leaders, policymakers, and journalists have described the ways in which CNN has influenced their work. The second section chronologically surveys the developments in research of the topic including methodologies. The next section presents results of case studies on how CNN’s coverage influenced decisions to intervene in Northern/Iraq Kurdistan and Somalia. The fourth section explores results of comparative analysis and attempts to develop new paradigms of world politics with global communications at the center. The last section presents lessons and a research agenda for future studies on the effects of global communications.
Origins and Policymakers’ Perceptions
The term CNN effect first appeared during the 1991 Gulf War. Since terms tend to appear in speech before they are written, in all likelihood the CNN effect was first discussed in financial, political, military, and social circles. The initial uses of the term in newspapers referred to the adverse psychological, economic and financial consequences of CNN’s war coverage. 1 Political and diplomatic references incorporated two basic versions: the ways in which CNN facilitates instant communication and forces leaders to adopt into policies decisions they would not otherwise make. The instant communication version first appeared in the professional media in connection with the pressure real-time coverage exerts on the military. 2 In an article published in the Public Relations Journal, Shell (1991) quoted a public relations officer who served in the Gulf war: "From a public relations standpoint, instant communications--the CNN effect--has made a tough job even tougher. Information that once took days to transmit is now broadcast live as it happens."
The policy forcing version of the CNN effect first appeared in connection with the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf war. Commentators and scholars did not explicitly use the term “CNN effect,” but they described the decisive influence television coverage had on the formulation of American and British policy. An editorial published in the Washington Post on April 12, 1991, shortly after the beginning of the operation, observed that “International public opinion may be doing what international statecraft earlier failed to do: provide at least some relief for the 2 million or so Kurds being driven out of their homes in Iraq by Saddam Hussein. Fed first by media coverage of their desperate straits and then by the spectacle of their alleged betrayal by the American government and others, a great public outcry has gone up for the Kurds. As a result, official hesitations about interfering in sovereign Iraqi affairs have been swept aside” (p. 18A). On the next day, The Independent (London) also wrote “Public opinion, shaped by newspaper, radio and television coverage, has set the pace and forced the politicians to toughen their line and take action to succour the Kurds” (p. 14). Schorr (1991) published the first known professional article using the term in this manner in the July-August 1991 issue of Columbia Journalism Review. 3 In the piece titled "Ten days that shook the White House" he wrote: “Within a two-week period, the president had been forced, under the impact of what Americans and Europeans were seeing on television to reconsider his hasty withdrawal of troops from Iraq” (p. 23). All these publications asserted that television coverage of the Kurdish crisis forced the United States and Britain to intervene.
The testimony of principal policymakers of the factors that had the greatest impact on their decisions provides evidence on the effects of global television. In May 1993, then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Madeline Albright (1993) offered the first official citation and explanation of the CNN effect: “Every day we witness the challenge of collective security on television--some call it the CNN effect,” she told a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “Aggression and atrocities are beamed into our living rooms and cars with astonishing immediacy. No civilized human being can learn of these horrid acts occurring on a daily basis and stand aloof from them.” When asked to comment on factors that changed foreign policymaking, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger emphasized the importance of the CNN effect: "The public hears of an event now in real time, before the State Department has had time to think about it. Consequently, we find ourselves reacting before we've had time to think. This is now the way we determine foreign policy--it's driven more by the daily events reported on TV than it used to be" (Pearce, 1995, p. 18).
Among high ranking officials, former Secretary of State James Baker III placed the greatest emphasis on the CNN effect. In his memoir (1995) he wrote: “The terrible tragedy of Tiananmen was a classic demonstration of a powerful new phenomenon: the ability of the global communications revolution to drive policy” (p. 103). He added that since then “in Iraq, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and Chechnya, among others, the real-time coverage of conflict by the electronic media has served to create a powerful new imperative for prompt action that was not present in less frenetic time.” Baker further elaborated on this conclusion in an interview with Marvin Kalb (1996): "The 'CNN effect' has revolutionized the way policymakers have to approach their jobs, particularly in the foreign policy arena" (p. 7). Baker identified three CNN effects, negative and positive. The negative effects are the need to respond quickly to events without sufficient time to consider options, and to cope with television’s attempts to determine the national interest. The positive effect is that CNN provides a tool for fast and direct communication with foreign leaders.
Several high ranking American military and foreign policy officials made more assertive statements. A U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck (1996) wrote: “The media got us into Somalia and then got us out” (p. 174). In 1995, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili said: "The CNN effect: Surely it exists, and surely we went to Somalia and Rwanda partly because of its magnetic pull. Surely the world's actions-- or inaction-- and political leaders' pronouncements are greatly influenced by this effect" (Jakobsen, 2000, p. 133). Non-American officials have also expressed similar opinions. Former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated in 1995: “Pictures relayed around the world by CNN have led people to demand that their governments, through the UN, take action” (Epstein, 1995). He is also quoted as complaining that “CNN is the sixteenth member of the Security Council” (Minear, Scott, & Weiss, 1996, p. 4). Former British Foreign Secretary David Owen (1996) observed that media's calls for intervention in civil wars are not new, but "what is different today is the 'CNN effect.' The TV camera in Sarajevo recording minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, in real-time…conveys an immediacy and has an impact that no newspaper …carries" (p. 308). Another former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd (1997, p. 11; Hindell, 1995, p. 73) blamed foreign correspondents covering the Bosnian crisis for advocating military intervention by being the founding members of the “something must be done” school.
These statements may imply that global television usurped policy control, as if leaders can no longer decide on the basis of interests, but are driven by emotional reactions of public opinion aroused by television coverage. Yet politicians and senior policymakers have offered diverse and often contradicting views on this claim. In a policy meeting, held on July 17, 1995, President Bill Clinton is quoted as saying: "We have a war by CNN. Our position is unsustainable, it's killing the U.S. position of strength in the world" (Woodward, 1996, p. 261). Morris (1999, p. 165) also heard him complaining that, “TV reporters are doing their damnedest to get me to enter a war.” However, Clinton only talked about media “pressure” to intervene militarily in Bosnia. Although he was sensitive to both horrific violence and to the media coverage of his policies, he successfully resisted the pressure to change his policy of non-intervention for several years.
Other senior policymakers have also provided a more complex view of the effects of global news coverage. Colin Powell observed that “Live television coverage doesn’t change the policy, but it does create the environment in which the policy is made” (McNulty, 1993, p. 80). Anthony Lake, a scholar and Clinton’s first National Security Adviser, acknowledged that public pressure, driven by televised images, increasingly played a role in decisionmaking on humanitarian crises, but added that other factors such as cost and feasibility were as important (Hoge, 1994, p. 139). Finally, when commenting on Canada’s policy toward the 1996 refugee crisis in Eastern Zaire, the Canadian senior diplomat Brian Buckley (1998) wrote that the media was crucial in focusing international attention on the crisis, but “they did not determine the policy, the key decisions, or their implementation” (p. 39).
Diplomats and journalists have also debated the CNN effect. One interesting exchange occurred in 1993 between the veteran diplomat George Kennan and CBS’s reporter and anchor Dan Rather. On the day the U.S. Marines landed in Somalia, December 9, 1992, Kennan (1996, pp. 294-297) wrote in his personal diary that this was “a dreadful error of American policy” accepted by the public and the Congress because of television coverage. "There can be no question that the reason for this acceptance lies primarily with the exposure of the Somalia situation by the American media, above all television. The reaction would have been unthinkable without this exposure. The reaction was an emotional one, occasioned by the sight of the suffering of the starving people in question." Almost a year later, he published this commentary in the New York Times (September 30, 1993, p. A25) eliciting a sharp denial from Rather titled “Don’t Blame TV for Getting Us into Somalia" (October 14, 1993, p. A22). Rather asserted: “Reporters sometimes feel strongly about the stories they cover, and some may wish for the power to direct public opinion and to guide America policy—but they don’t have it.” MacNeil (1994) followed up on this debate and summarized well the positions of the two sides. He added however, a single decisive variable: leadership. If a leader can define the national interest clearly, "television--however lurid, responsible or irresponsible--will not drive foreign policy. When he fails to do so, it may" (p. 130).
Research Directions and Methodologies
The growing discussion of the CNN effect in the media, as well as in statements and writings of policymakers, inspired journalists, scholars, and various professional institutions to investigate the phenomenon. Journalists mainly employed interviews with policymakers and their colleagues in the media because interviewing is an essential part of their daily professional work. Scholars have used interviews, but also content analysis and placed the data within models and theories of both communication and international relations. Several professional institutions such as the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center and Wilton Park, a policy oriented center in Britain, initiated conferences and publications on the media’s roles in the post-Cold War era, including the CNN effect. 4 All these reports however, were based on intuitive judgments and they revealed substantial disagreement among the participants, officials, journalists, and scholars, on the validity of the CNN effect theory.
In 1993-1994, Michael O’Neill (1993), the former editor of the New York Daily News, James Hoge Jr. (1993, 1994), the editor of Foreign Affairs, and Nik Gowing, (1994) a BBC World anchor, published pioneering works on the CNN effect. Bennett & Paletz (1994) also published an edited volume on the communications aspects of the Gulf War, which placed global communications including CNN’s coverage in the larger context of linkages between media, public opinion, and foreign policy. O’Neill suggested for the first time a new paradigm of world politics that accorded television a dominant role in politics and foreign policy. He argued that television and public opinion have democratized the world and that CNN’s real-time coverage has destroyed the conventional diplomatic system and determined political and diplomatic outcomes. Hoge and Gowing focused on the effects global news coverage was having on humanitarian intervention and reached more moderate conclusions.
The claim that CNN forced the United States and the West to intervene in Kurdistan and Somalia finally attracted scholars, and the initial research focused on case studies. Livingston and Eachus (1995) conducted the first empirical-scientific study of the media’s influence on U.S. decisions to intervene in a humanitarian crisis. They investigated the U.S. decision to intervene in Somalia and used both content analysis and interviews with officials. Later, Livingston published findings on coverage of the war and famine in Sudan (1996), on "variations of CNN effects" (1997), and on coverage of the crises in Rwanda (with Eachus, 1999) and Kosovo (2000). Several books dealt specifically with the media’s roles in humanitarian interventions (Girardet, 1995; Rotberg & Weiss, 1996; Minear, Scott, & Weiss, 1996; Gow, Paterson, & Preston, 1996). These books present various historical interpretations of the media’s roles, but often oscillate between normative approaches, which prescribe what the media should do, and empirical approaches, which inform what the media are actually doing. Shaw (1996) published an important empirical-sociological study of the media’s influence on the 1991 British decision to intervene in Kurdistan.
Any progress in the study of the CNN effect required comparative systematic analysis and this occurred in the next research phase. Jakobsen (1996, 2000) employed "structured focused comparative analysis" to identify the roles of several factors in decision-making on humanitarian intervention, including the CNN effect. He investigated the crises in Kuwait, Kurdistan, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti. Strobel (1997) used interviews with policymakers to explore the CNN effect in peace operations in the Balkans, Somalia, Rwanda, and Haiti. Finally, Robinson (2000a, 2001, 2002) developed a policy-media interaction model and progressively applied it to the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Somalia, Rwanda. Miller (2002) revisited the Kurdish crisis and applied positioning theory from discursive psychology to British and American decisionmaking.
Several scholars preferred to investigate the CNN effect through political communication theories such as the "indexing hypothesis" (Bennett, 1990) and the "manufacturing consent" theory (Chomsky & Herman, 1988). The "indexing hypothesis" suggests that the media index the range of opinion among policymakers, and doesn’t have an agenda of its own. The "manufacturing consent" theory argues that the powerful control both the media and the government through economic power, and consequently are able to use the media to mobilize public support for governmental policies. Both theories contradict the CNN effect because they view the media as a tool in the hands of governments. Mermin (1997) used content analysis and applied the "indexing hypothesis" to the U.S. intervention in Somalia, and later (1999) applied the same methodology to the U.S. interventions in the post- Vietnam crises from Granada to Bosnia. He found support for "indexing" in all these cases. On the other hand, Hammond and Herman (2000) and Thussu (2000) applied the "manufacturing consent" theory to the Kosovo intervention and also found support for their theory.
A series of books and studies published since 1995 dealt with CNN’s influence within the more general context of foreign policy and international relations. These studies were written from the perspectives of journalists, officials, and scholars. Pearce (1995) focused on the tension between diplomats and reporters, while Newsom (1996) and Buckley (1998) examined the issue from the perspective of the foreign affairs bureaucracy. Neuman (1996) placed the CNN effect within a broad historical context of technological innovations in communications, and Taylor (1997) traced the effects of global communications on international relations since 1945. Seib (1997, 2001, 2002) placed the topic in a broad historical communication setting. Almost any recent book on media and war includes a chapter on the CNN effect (Carruthers, 2000; Badsey, 2000). Two recent studies have elevated the debate about this effect to a higher paradigmatic level. Like O’Neill, Ammon (2001) and Edwards (2001) claimed that the media, particularly television, have completely transformed world politics. Both respectively used post-modern terms to describe their new paradigms of media domination: Telediplomacy and Mediapolitik. The question is whether these paradigms and the CNN effect theory are based on sufficient scientific evidence.
Findings: Definitions and Case Studies
Scholarly and professional studies of the CNN effect present mixed, contradictory, and confusing results. Any systematic research of this effect first requires a workable definition but researchers have employed a variety of broad and narrow definitions. The narrow formulations address only humanitarian intervention decisions while the broad formulations suggest a wider application. Schorr (1998) offered a general definition of the CNN effect: “the way breaking news affects foreign policy decisions,” while Livingston and Eachus (1995, p. 413) defined it "as elite decision makers' loss of policy control to news media." Fiest (2001, p. 713) wrote: “The CNN effect is a theory that compelling television images, such as images of a humanitarian crisis, cause U.S. policymakers to intervene in a situation when such an intervention might otherwise not be in the U.S. national interest." According to Seib (2002), the CNN effect "is presumed to illustrate the dynamic tension that exists between real-time television news and policy-making, with the news having the upper hand in terms of influence" (p. 27).
Other researchers expanded the range and evidence of effects. Neuman (1996) addressed the coverage's impact on the initial decision as well as on subsequent intervention phases including long term deployment and exit strategies. She described the effect in terms of a curve: “It suggests that when CNN floods the airwaves with news of a foreign crisis, policymakers have no choice but to redirect their attention to the crisis at hand. It also suggests that crisis coverage evokes an emotional outcry from the public to ‘do something’ about the latest incident, forcing political leaders to change course or risk unpopularity” (pp.15-16). This definition consists of two parts linked by a “forcing” function. The first represents classic agenda setting-- forcing leaders to deal with an issue they prefer to ignore. The second part refers to the power of television to force policymakers through public opinion to adopt a policy against their will and interpretation of the national interest. The “curve” in this context means that television can force policymakers to intervene militarily in a humanitarian crisis, and force them again to terminate the intervention once the military force suffers casualties or humiliation.
Livingston (1997) wasn't only one of the first scholars to empirically test the CNN effect, but he also searched for a path to break away from the confines of the "forcing policy" version and developed an elaborate framework. He successfully applied communication concepts to a typology of military interventions developed by Haass (1994). Livingston identified three variations of CNN effects: an accelerant to decisionmaking, an impediment to the achievement of desired policy goals, and a policy agenda-setting agent (p. 293), and then showed how these effects differently operate in eight types of interventions including conventional warfare, strategic deterrence, tactical deterrence, special operations and low intensity conflict, peacemaking, peacekeeping, imposed humanitarian operations, and consensual humanitarian operations (p. 308). This distinction is useful and the framework is sophisticated precisely because it fully utilizes and combines relevant models from communication and international relations.
Livingston (2000) demonstrated the usefulness of this framework by applying it, particularly the impediment effect, to NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Freedman (2000, p. 339) also distinguished among three effects: the "CNN effect," whereby images of suffering push governments into intervention, the "bodybags effect," whereby images of casualties pull them away, and the "bullying effect," whereby the use of excessive force risks draining away public support for intervention. All these effects however, result from global news coverage and therefore could have been described as variations of the CNN effect. Freedman applied this framework to the intervention in Kosovo. Wheeler (2000, p. 300) distinguished between "determining" and "enabling" effects of television coverage. The "determining" effect means policy forcing while the "enabling" effect means that coverage makes humanitarian intervention possible by mobilizing domestic support. Finally, Robinson (2001, p. 942, 2002, pp. 37-41) adopted a somewhat similar distinction between "strong" and "weak" effects. The "strong" is equivalent to policy forcing, while the "weak" effect occurs when "media reports might incline policymakers to act rather than create a potential imperative to act." Both the "enabling" and the "weak" effects mean that the media plays only a marginal role in decisionmaking.
Television coverage of the Western interventions in Kurdistan and Somalia were considered the best examples of the "determining" or "strong" CNN effect. Schorr (1991) examined official American statements and policy on the Kurdish crisis on a daily basis from April 2 to 12, 1991 and major themes in media coverage and concluded: "Score one for the power of the media, especially television, as a policy-making force. Coverage of the massacre and exodus of the Kurds generated public pressures that were instrumental in slowing the hasty American military withdrawal from Iraq and forcing a return to help guard and care for the victims of Saddam Hussein’s vengeance" (p. 21). The language of this conclusion is strong but the evidence on the linkage between coverage, public opinion and policy is very weak.
Shaw (1996) conducted a more systematic empirical study of the media-policy linkage in the British policy toward the Kurdish crisis. He meticulously surveyed coverage of the crisis both in the print and the electronic media, analyzed national public opinion polls, and independently conducted a survey in two locations. He placed the findings within the broad concept of "global civil society" where the media more than any other institution represents the victims of violence and war. He concluded that "In Kurdistan it was the British media and public opinion which forced governments’ hands" (p. vii), and that "the Kurdish crisis is the only clear-cut case, of all the conflicts in the early 1990s, in which media coverage compelled intervention by the Western powers" (p. 156). Yet the correlation he found between media attitudes and public opinion is not sufficient to establish a cause-effect relationship as well as a connection between public opinion and policy change. This could have been accomplished only by an additional examination of the policymaking process that Shaw avoided (Robinson, 2000b, p. 229).
Miller’s (2002) study of the media effect on Western policy toward the Kurdish crisis is impressive and innovative. His findings contradict the conclusions of Schorr and Shaw. He distinguished between media coverage and media pressure, and applied the "positioning hypothesis" from discursive psychology to examine the linkages between coverage and policy in Britain and the United States. The "positioning hypothesis" allows a researcher to analyze conversations between institutions such as the media and the government through questions in press conferences and official responses. Unlike Shaw, Miller focused on the policymaking process and consequently was able to distinguish between government rhetoric and sequences of actual policymaking. He argued that both the United States and Britain did not change their policies in the Kurdish crisis, but only "adapted them to accommodate the refugee crisis and the pressures on Turkey" (p. 46). He concluded that "Had moral action by the Bush administration been contradictory to other coalition interests; had no other explanations for U.S. policymaking been available; and had the administration changed its policies rather than adapt them to new realities, we may have been able to argue for a CNN effect. However, this was not the case" (p. 47). Miller acknowledged (pp. 49-50) weaknesses in his measurement technique but his approach is sophisticated and very promising.
The U.S. intervention in Somalia has been the second battle ground for studies of the CNN effect and it also has yielded similar controversial results. Cohen (1994) wrote that television “has demonstrated its power to move governments. By focusing daily on the starving children in Somalia, a pictorial story tailor-made for television, TV mobilized the conscience of the nation’s public institutions, compelling the government into a policy of intervention for humanitarian reasons” (pp. 9-10). Mandelbaum (1994, p. 16) also wrote that "television pictures of starving people" propelled the U.S. intervention. Shattuck (1996, p. 174) made a similar statement. But using careful content analysis and interviews with decision makers in Washington and Africa, Livingston and Eachus (1995) concluded that the U.S. decision to intervene militarily in Somalia “was the result of diplomatic and bureaucratic operations, with news coverage coming in response to those decisions” (p. 413, emphasis added). Similarly, Riley (1999) argued that in the cases of Somalia and Rwanda leaders set the media's agenda, not the other way around. Mermin (1997) called the Cohen's claim "a myth" and later (1999) added: “The case of U.S. intervention in Somalia, in sum, is not at heart evidence of the power of television to move governments; it is evidence of the power of governments to move television” (p. 137). Wheeler (2000, p. 300), and Robinson (2001, p. 941) also agreed that the media had respectively an "enabling" or a "weak" effect on the decisions to intervene in Kurdistan and Somalia.
Using the realist approach to international relations, Gibbs (2000) presented an alternative explanation of the U.S. intervention in Somalia. He argued that policymakers employed humanitarian justifications but were much more concerned with strategic and economic interests. Somalia was close to shipping routes in the Red Sea and to the strategically important Bab-el-Mandeb straits, and Conco, an American oil company, had been investing in oil explorations. U.S. policy varied considerably over time, from cooperation to confrontation with the local war lord Mohammed Aideed, based on his will and ability to protect these interests. Gibbs mentions the CNN effect only in a footnote and concludes that this intervention did not result from humanitarian considerations including television pressure.
Studies of the interventions in Kurdistan and Somalia, as well as in other places, caused a methodological debate. While Cohen’s arguments were intuitive and impressionistic and it is not clear why a scholar of his stature would even make them, Mermin’s empirical study has raised methodological reservations. His evidence supports the "indexing hypothesis" for both the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. Zaller and Chiu’s (2000) evidence on media-government relations in the United States during the Cold War supports the "indexing hypothesis," but their findings for the post-Cold War period do not (2000). They explain the difference between Mermin’s results and their own in the different coding schemes employed in the two studies, and claim theirs are more valid (pp. 80-81). 5
Findings: Comparative Analysis and New Models
A valid scientific approach to the study of the CNN effect requires two interrelated comparative analyses: (1) an assessment of global television’s impact on a specific foreign policy decision in comparison to the relative impact of other factors, (2) application of this procedure to several relevant case studies. Only a few researchers have systematically followed this procedure. Jakobsen (1996) examined the impact of the following factors on humanitarian intervention decisions: a clear humanitarian and /or legal case, national interest, chance of success, domestic support, and the CNN effect. He then examined the relative influence of these factors on decisions to intervene in several crises from the Gulf War to Haiti. He discovered that CNN's coverage was an important factor because it placed the crises on the agenda; but still the decision to intervene “was ultimately determined by the perceived chances of success” (p. 212, emphasis added). In a more recent study (2000), he furthered argued that "in situations when governments are reluctant to use force, interventions are unlikely to follow unless they can be conducted quickly with a low risk of casualties. Since this is rarely the case, media pressure on reluctant governments are most likely to result in minimalist policies aimed at defusing pressure for interventions on the ground” (p. 138).
Robinson (2000a, 2002, pp. 25-35) developed a policy-media interaction model that predicts that media influence is likely to occur when policy is uncertain and media coverage is critically framed and empathizes with suffering people. When policy is certain, media influence is unlikely to occur. Robinson applied this model to the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo and found that U.S. policy to defend the Gorazde "safe area" in Bosnia was influenced by the media because Clinton’s policy was uncertain and the media strongly criticized him. In the Kosovo case, Clinton’s air-war policy was clear and consequently the media failed to expand the operation to include ground troops. Despite weaknesses in defining and measuring "influence" and "framing," this model could be useful and effective.
Journalists’ comparative analyses were much less systematic. Gowing (1994) argued that CNN’s coverage has drawn attention to crises and may have evoked emotional public reactions. But based on interviews with policymakers in several countries, he concluded that they resisted pressure to act solely in response to television news reports. He noted that in 1991, the United States and Western governments refrained from intervention in the Bosnian crisis despite substantial news coverage of atrocities. In a later study (2000, pp. 212), he used the reversal of U.S. policy toward the 1996 catastrophe in Burundi to demonstrate the opposite example: willingness to intervene despite the absence of television coverage. Strobel (1997) also interviewed policymakers and also reached similar conclusions. He distinguished between effect on outcome and effect on policymaking and wrote: "I found no evidence that the news media, by themselves, force U.S. government officials to change their policies. But, under the right conditions, the news media nonetheless can have a powerful effect on process. And those conditions are almost always set by foreign-policy makers themselves or by the growing number of policy actors on the international stage" (p. 5). Studies based solely on interviews, however, raise reliability and validity questions. The answers may reflect how policymakers would like to be remembered and not how they really made policy.
Regan (2000) provides an example of a comparative work on interventions that is conducted primarily from a political science perspective. He employed quantitative policymaking approaches to explore the conditions under which the U.S. changes its intervention strategies in civil conflicts, and the type of interventions that are substituted once the decision to change has been made. He found media coverage to be a highly influential domestic variable. Yet Regan chose to analyze only press coverage, the reporting of the New York Times, and only the amount of coverage measured in column inches. He equated the amount of reporting with public concern for a particular conflict. This procedure suffers from several shortcomings that characterize other similar works of political scientists who don’t sufficiently consult communications research. First, most people get the news from television, not from the press (Graber, 2001, p. 3). Second, the amount of media attention doesn’t necessarily represent the level of public concern. Sometimes, it is exactly the opposite (Gilboa, 1993). Third, the measuring of media attention alone is insufficient. The direction of coverage, positive, negative, and neutral must be decoded and calculated to allow any meaningful evaluation of the media’s influence. Fourth, coverage is a poor proxy measure for media pressure on policymaking (Miller, 2002, p. 5).
Two recent studies suggest new paradigms to study the symbiotic relationship between media and world politics. Ammon (2001) claims that paradigmatic changes both in communication and diplomacy produced a new paradigm of world politics, which he calls “telediplomacy.” The emergence and expansion of real-time global news coverage caused the shift in communication, while the “new diplomacy,” mostly characterized by openness, caused the shift in foreign policymaking. The result, telediplomacy, has displaced the existing diplomatic methods, and for the first time in human history, under certain conditions, it also drives policy and determines diplomatic outcomes (p. 152). According to Ammon (p. 91-95), these conditions include: a specific issue such as a global crisis or a humanitarian emergency, with a fast breaking event, which is characterized by a leadership vacuum, media autonomy, and high visibility which means the event can attract the attention of real-time global television.
Ammon applied this model to three crises: the Kurdish crisis, where he thought all the five conditions were present and global television forced intervention on the U.S. and its allies; the simultaneous Shiite's uprising in Southern Iraq, where several conditions were missing and therefore the media did not affect policy; and the 1994 civil war in Rwanda, where despite the presence of all the five conditions, real-time global coverage did not affect policy. He explained (pp. 117-18) that television coverage of the crisis in Rwanda only portrayed "dead corpses," not "living victims," and that intervention in this country "entailed risks that exceeded those justified by national interest or any reasonable degree of humanitarian concern." Conditions that were not included in the original model determined the outcome of this case, thus exposing a major structural weakness in Ammon's paradigm. Moreover, meeting all the five plus conditions would be extremely difficult and would happen only in rare situations. A new paradigm of world politics can’t be founded on rare exceptional cases. He also exaggerated the instant communication version of the CNN effect.
Edwards (2001) developed a new Mediapolitik model to fill the void in theories and models of linkages between media and politics. This crude framework is designed to "examine the reality of media power and its impact on the politics of the nations of the world" (p. 276). Edwards’ book is very broad and includes interesting observations on media-government relations in several countries. The model however, is not well defined and is often confusing. Mediapolitik operates in different political systems: liberal democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian, but there are also variants such as "Japanese Mediapolitik" that doesn’t belong to any of these systems. Edwards argues that the role the mass media play in politics depends upon four criteria (pp. 60-63): a significant media infrastructure, a large reading and viewing public, public officials who sought to use the media to their ends, and a mass media that reversed public policy. The last condition lies at the heart of the CNN effect theory, but it is not clear however, whether all these conditions must be present for Mediapolitik to exist, or they merely determine the level of this phenomenon.
Edwards applied his model to many countries around the globe and to major events such as the protests in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the democratization of Eastern Europe, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile, the Gulf War, and the civil wars in the Balkans and Africa. He claimed that the mass media played a decisive role in all these events and processes. He used the term "CNN phenomenon" to describe the connection between Mediapolitik and CNN: "What a computer does within an office, CNN does around the world, giving millions of viewers on different continents the same information at the same moment" (pp. 312-314). Yet the empirical connection between this effect and Mediapolitik in different countries is not sufficiently developed.
Discussion and Conclusions
The effort to explore the CNN effect represents an interesting case study in terminology and theorization. The concept was initially suggested by politicians and officials haunted by the Vietnam media myth, the confusion of the post Cold-War era, and the communications revolution. Despite evidence to the contrary (Hallin, 1986), many leaders still believe that critical television coverage caused the American defeat in Vietnam. Since then, many have viewed the media as an adversary to government policies in areas such as humanitarian intervention and international negotiation. Leaders’ fascination with CNN also resulted from a perception of the media in general, and television in particular, as being the most important power broker in politics. Mediademocracy, medialism, mediacracy, teledemocracy, and mediapolitik are but a few fashionable terms coined to describe this new media dominated political system. Application of the same perception to foreign policy and international relations yielded similar terms and concepts such as the CNN effect and telediplomacy. This background helps to understand why global television has been perceived as having a power to determine foreign policy, primarily in severe crisis situations, and why policymakers feel they need to neutralize the media when they use force or embark on new diplomatic initiatives (Gilboa, 1998).
This study reveals considerable debate and disagreement on the concept among leaders, officials, journalists, and scholars. Researchers are also debating the methodologies used to analyze and test the effect. Scholars have adopted too many different definitions of the theory and suggested too many different and sometimes contradicting CNN effects. These effects include "forcing" policy on leaders, "limiting" their options, "disrupting" their policy considerations, and "hindering" implementation, as well as "enabling" policymakers to adopt a policy, and "helping" implementation by "legitimizing" actions and "manufacturing consent." Authors argued that the CNN effect has completely transformed foreign policymaking and world politics, and leaders have promoted CNN to a superpower status with a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. Others suggested the opposite, that the CNN effect has not dramatically changed media-government relations, doesn’t exist, or has been highly exaggerated and may occur only in rare situations of extremely dramatic and persistent coverage, lack of leadership, and chaotic policymaking.
Various studies’ findings essentially cast doubts about the two basic facets of the CNN effect: instant communication and policy forcing. Neuman (1996, p. 16) and Buckley (1998, p. 44) concluded that global communication has not changed the fundamentals of political leadership and international governance. Strobel (1997, p. 5) wrote: "The CNN effect implied by Kennan doesn’t exist," and Seib (2002) also asserted: “There is a certain logic to the [CNN] theory, and it cheers journalists who like to think they are powerful, but there is a fundamental problem: It just ain’t so, at least not as a straightforward cause-and-effect process” (p. 27). Natsios (1997, p. 124), Gowing (2000, p. 204), and Jackobson (2000, p. 133) agreed that the CNN effect has been highly exaggerated. Commenting on the policy forcing version, Badsey (1997, p. 19), suggested that "although the CNN effect may happen, it is unusual, unpredictable, and part of a complex relationship of factors."
Several studies specified conditions under which global television is likely to force policy on leaders. These conditions exist both at the policymaking and the newsmaking processes. One study suggested that "Vivid coverage will only create major international political resonance if, by chance, it hits a critical, often unpredictable void in the news cycle. Alternatively, there will be impact if it creates a moment of policy panic when governments have no robust policy and charts a clear course" (Gowing, 2000, p. 210). Other studies point to conditions such as policy uncertainty and pro-intervention media framing (Robinson, 2000a, 2001), broadcast of dramatic images and an issue that is simple and straight-forward (Hopkinson, 1993, p. 33), slow and indecisive government reactions (MacFarlane & Weiss, 2000, p. 128), and a policy vacuum (Seib, 2002, p. 28). The critical factor in all these conclusions is leadership. If leaders don’t have a clear policy on a significant issue, the media may step in and replace them. These situations however, reflect more on leaders than on the media, and these conclusions don’t require extensive research. The question is whether global television can force leaders to alter a policy that they do have.
The CNN effect theory has been defined very broadly, but to test it, this theory had to be operationalized in a very narrow way. When this is done, as has been demonstrated in several studies, it becomes easier to disprove many of its claims and implications. Several studies confuse cause and effect relationship between coverage and policy. It is clearly necessary to distinguish between cases where a government wishes to intervene, and therefore not only does not object to media coverage of atrocities but actually initiates or encourages it, and cases when a government is reluctant to intervene and consequently resists media pressure to do so. Global television can not force policymakers to do what they intend to do anyway. Another problematic assumption confuses "control" and "pressure." There is a difference between "forcing" policymakers to adopt policy and "pressuring" them to do so. The "forcing" framework suggests that the media is taking over the policymaking process, while the "pressuring" framework considers the media one of several factors competing to influence decisions. Several studies pursued the "forcing" argument," but they only presented evidence of "pressure" to support it.
Most studies of the CNN effect link media influence on policy to the impact of coverage on public opinion and to subsequent public pressure on leaders to adopt the policy advocated by the media (Riely, 1999). Seib (2002) summarized well this triangular mechanism: "televised images, especially heart- wrenching pictures of suffering civilians, will so stir public opinion that government officials will be forced to adjust policy to conform to that opinion" (p. 27). Graber (2002) described the same process in the following way: "Media coverage becomes the dog that wags the public policy tail" (p. 16). The linkages between media coverage, public opinion and policy aren’t yet sufficiently clear (Seaver, 1998). Researchers that wish to validate the CNN effect and rely on the assumption that the triangular mechanism is valid, may be moving in the wrong direction. On the other hand, as demonstrated by Gilboa (2002a) and Miller (2002) it is possible and even necessary to examine effects of global communication on policymaking that are more direct in their application and independent of public opinion.
Livingston (1997, p. 291) observed a few years ago that numerous attempts to clarify the CNN effect have only achieved minimal success. This observation is still true today and there is a clear need to adopt a new research agenda for studying the effects of global communication, not only those of CNN, on various areas of communications and international relations, not only defense and foreign affairs. The focus on CNN’s coverage of humanitarian crises has created several research gaps. Jakobsen (2000) rightly argues that the focus on the CNN effect misses the point because it allowed scholars to ignore the effects global television is having on two other important conflict phases: pre-violence and post-violence. Lack of coverage and attention characterizes the media’s attitude toward these phases, and this omission may have significant consequences for attempts to prevent violence or for conflict resolution steps that are taken when violence ends. Gilboa (2002a) has found that the effects of global communications on U.S. foreign policymaking are far more complex than is usually meant by the CNN effect, and they impinge on all the participants in the policymaking process: leaders, officials, and journalists. Much more research is needed in this area. Studies of the CNN effect have focused on policymaking in defense and foreign affairs, but global television is affecting, perhaps in different ways, policymaking in areas such as economics, trade, health, culture, and the environment on a worldwide scale. Documenting and analyzing effects on policymaking and international interactions in these areas require separate investigations.
The meaning of global reach in the CNN effect is unclear. It seems that the global networks are interested primarily in places of political, military, and economic interests to the United States and Europe. Therefore, global news coverage may be limited and less relevant to most of the people in the world. Why for example, serious global health problems such as AIDS, where tens of millions of people have died, attracts much less attention than the more violent humanitarian crises of the 1990s. We also don’t know enough how different audiences living in different cultural, economic and political environments interpret a message that is broadcast globally by the global networks. All these areas must be addressed and explored.
Global communications have also affected the work of editors and journalists (Rosenstiel, 1994; Gowing, 2000, pp. 219-223; Gilboa, 2002a, pp. 22-25). Global networks increasingly use overseas video from sources they know very little about, editors push reporters to broadcast pictures even if they don’t have all the facts and may not be familiar with the context of events, and journalists confuse reporting and personal opinions by openly supporting a side to a conflict. Walsh (1996, pp. 240-241), added that the mainstream media in the United States is engaged in excessive subjective analysis and judgment because editors and reporters tuned to CNN all day so they won’t miss any breaking stories, and they think that "if they have seen a story on CNN, the rest of the country must be familiar with it too- even though the cable network has relatively few viewers at any given time." These effects on journalism deserve careful analysis.
There is a need to develop new models and methodologies and apply existing promising ones to promote research on the effects of global all news networks. These networks play multiple roles in policymaking, diplomacy, and international relations other than those incorporated in the CNN effect (Entman, 2000; Gilboa, 2000; Graber, 2002, pp. 159-194; Paletz, 2002, pp. 338-362), and they have to be explored within existing or new frameworks. The grand paradigms of O’Neill, Ammon, and Edwards are not likely to be very useful. On the contrary, a narrower definition of the media’s role and research that combines communication theories with theories of international conflicts may yield more convincing results. Livingston’s framework of "intervention types and media considerations" is an excellent analytical tool to analyze the different effects global news coverage may have on military interventions. Application of Robinson’s media-policy model and Miller’s "positioning" approach could also be very useful. It might also be helpful to view global news networks as an actor in national and international politics playing multiple roles (Gilboa, 2002b). Since CNN is no longer the only global communication network in the world, it would be more useful to replace the term CNN effect with a more neutral term - "controlling actor role" and restrict it to reflect only one of several effects-- forcing policy on leaders (Gilboa, 2002c, pp. 733-735). Finally, the disciplinary divide between political science, international relations, and communication has hindered research on the effects of global communications, and progress in this area requires much more multidisciplinary collaboration.
Etyan Gilboa
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