Babak Bahador

Media coverage of New Zealand’s 2014 election campaign

New Zealand’s 2014 general election campaign was seen by many observers as out of the ordinary: it was variously described as ‘weird’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘crazy’. However, did media coverage reflect the unusual nature of the actual campaign? This study’s content analysis of that coverage reveals that the news media’s concentration on ‘non-policy’ issues meant that much of it was dominated by alleged scandals, which were reported with a negative tone, and less space was devoted to policy. However, this does not indicate an extraordinary shift in New Zealand politics. Although seen by many as damaging to democracy and antithetical to a robust public sphere, these are now often features of the media-dominated ‘modern’ campaign.

Rehumanizing Enemy Images: Media Framing from War to Peace

When a state enters a war or commits mass atrocities against a particular group, the mass media are believed to be essential in mobilizing the public for the upcoming violence in their name. This process can include the creation of enemy images so stripped of their human qualities that their destruction becomes justifiable and even desirable. But what happens when conflicts are ending and the political will emerges for peace and reconciliation? Does the mass media reflect the changing intensity of conflict through its depiction of the enemy? Furthermore, does the mass media help to rehumanize groups that were previously dehumanized?

The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses, Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraqs undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.

The CNN Effect

At 2:38 am, on January 17, 1991, the residents of Baghdad were woken by the launch of the first Gulf War. Initial sounds of dogs barking were superseded by bright lights and thundering shots from antiaircraft volleys that were eventually drowned out by the explosive sounds of smart bombs destroying Iraqi infrastructure sites. For an awestruck international audience watching events unfold on television screens in their homes, the live images of the first night of bombing over Baghdad were unprecedented. For the first time, moving images of war were transmitted instantaneously and simultaneously around the world to millions of viewers as events unfolded. According to one analyst, the Gulf War made other recent conflicts over Grenada and the Falklands, less than a decade before, look like nineteenth-century wars.1

Did the Global War on Terror end the CNN effect

While the Global War on Terror (GWOT) aimed to eradicate terrorists, it also allegedly claimed another casualty — independent media coverage of foreign policy — a key component of the CNN effect. To many analysts of this media effect, the launch of the GWOT clarified foreign policy priorities, much like the Cold War era. From this perspective, the media, which enjoyed relative freedom in their foreign policy coverage in the 1990s, became subservient to the state again after 9/11. This article challenges this conventional wisdom by first arguing that the media’s foreign news agenda did not significantly change with the GWOT. However, problems with the notion of independent media framing, which existed in the 1990s, continued post-9/11. The article offers a nuanced understanding of the CNN effect that places the media’s influence within the existing foreign policy decision-making structure. It also shows how the CNN effect can be a sustainable concept regardless of changing international security environments.