Piers Robinson

The CNN effect: can the news media drive foreign policy?

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of the decade the question was being asked as to what extent this ‘media pervasiveness’ had impacted upon government – particularly the process of foreign policy making. The new technologies appeared to reduce the scope for calm deliberation over policy, forcing policy-makers to respond to whatever issue journalists focused on. This perception was in turn reinforced by the end of the bipolar order and what many viewed as the collapse of the old anti-communist consensus which – it was argued – had led to the creation of an ideological bond uniting policy makers and journalists. Released from the ‘prism of the Cold War’ journalists were, it was presumed, freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but to criticise US foreign policy as well. The phrase ‘CNN effect’ encapsulated the idea that real-time communications technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events.

Too polemical or too critical? Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomskys research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomskys work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

Operation Restore Hope and the Illusion of a News Media Driven Intervention

US intervention in Somalia (1992) and Iraq (1991) are held as evidence for a more powerful media in the post Cold War era and the thesis that media coverage of suffering people is a major cause of humanitarian intervention. This paper investigates the role of mass media during the 1992 decision to deploy ground troops in Somalia. A media influence model is outlined and then applied to the decision to intervene in Somalia. The research indicates that significant levels of media attention actually followed the intervention decision and that this coverage was framed in a way that built support for the intervention. I conclude there is little evidence to support the claim that media coverage compelled policy makers to intervene or that media coverage was a major factor in policy deliberations. Overall, the role of media in causing intervention in Somalia has been substantially overplayed, instead other factors are likely to have had a far greater effect in causing the intervention. This finding challenges both the thesis that media coverage is a major cause of the deployment of ground troops during humanitarian crisis and suggests caution be exercised with regard to post-Cold War claims of a more powerful and influential media.

War and Media

Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: from Vietnam to Iraq. London and New York: Continuum, 2004, 148 pp. David Domke, God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the War on Terror and the Echoing Press. London: Pluto Press, 2004, 240 pp. Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq. London: André Deutsch, 2003, 594 pp. David Miller (ed.), Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto, 2004, 310 pp.

The CNN effect revisited

For policy-makers and academics, the 1990s appeared to be an era of media empowerment. The ending of the Cold War anti-communist consensus between journalists and policy-makers and the spread of real-time news reporting technology seemed to disrupt traditional patterns of media deference to foreign policy elites and expand the power of the media. Interventions during humanitarian crises in northern Iraq 1991, Somalia 1992, Bosnia 1995, and Kosovo 1999, often preceded and accompanied by emotive media attention to human suffering, confirmed to some the thesis that media was driving foreign policy formulation. CNN, with its global reach, 24-hour news cycle, and foreign affairs agenda, came to encapsulate the idea of a media-driven foreign policy, creating the so-called ‘‘CNN effect.’’ In the wake of 9/11 and the Bush administration’s ‘‘war on terror,’’ however, the geopolitical landscape has been dramatically transformed. U.S. foreign policy has come to be dominated by the perceived threat of global terrorism, rogue states, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In this essay I discuss the impact of both 9/11 and the subsequent shifts in U.S. foreign policy upon the CNN effect thesis. I start by assessing the extent to which foreign policy was indeed driven by the CNN effect during the 1990s. I then discuss how developments since 9/11, specifically the ‘‘war on terror,’’ a ‘‘humanitarian war’’ discourse inherited from the 1990s, and strengthened media management by government, have undermined the CNN effect and ushered in a new era of media deference to government reminiscent of the Cold War era.

Moving media and conflict studies beyond the CNN effect

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

The Propaganda Model: Still Relevant Today?

Of Noam Chomsky’s many contributions, this chapter focuses on his analysis of mainstream US news media and its role as a propagator of elite interests. Published in 1988 and written in collaboration with communications scholar Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media presented a clear-cut and uncompromising critique of the US media. In essence, their provocatively titled propaganda model argued that mainstream US media output were being driven by corporate business interests and reliance upon advertising as a source of profit, while being constrained by over-reliance upon official sources, bullying right-wing think tanks, and Cold War ideological imperatives. As a consequence, US news output presented a truncated and fundamentally distorted view of the world, and one that served the interests of US political and economic elites. Within the framework of the propaganda model, enemies of the US government were highlighted by US media as abusers of human rights, undemocratic, and belligerent, while the crimes of the US government and its allies were largely ignored. Most importantly, underlying the framing of all media reporting was the representation of the United States as inherently benign, peace-loving, and the indisputable leader of humanity. At its very worst, this misrepresentation of reality enabled wars such as Vietnam, which involved the deaths of millions of people, to be understood by the US public as a noble and dignified war in pursuit of freedom and democracy. In short, the critique of US media developed by Herman and Chomsky could not have been more fundamental and disconcerting.

Measuring media criticism of war and political elites: A response to Florian Zollmann

In his 2011 article, ‘Managing the elite consensus’, Florian Zollmann takes issue with a number of arguments put forward in Pockets of Resistance: British News Media, War and Theory in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq (Robinson et al., 2010). This book was the endproduct of a research project1 that examined UK television news and press coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, focusing mainly on the invasion phase (mid-March to midApril). Our central conclusions were that most UK news outlets, for reasons of humanitarian warfare ideology, over-reliance upon official sources, and patriotism, failed to maintain their independence (pp.161–172). But we also noted that there were exceptions, and, due to factors such as professional autonomy, event-driven news and UK mediasystem characteristics, a minority of media outlets (Channel 4 News, The Mirror, The Guardian and The Independent) were able to exercise meaningful levels of independence from the government position (pp.172–176). We also noted that both patriotism and humanitarian warfare ideology were limiting factors on the degree of independence exercised by these media outlets (p.177). In criticising our account, Zollmann argues that by over-measuring media criticism, we incorrectly claim that UK media performance deviated, on occasions and across a minority of media outlets, from the predictions of elite-driven accounts of media-state relations (e.g. Herman and Chomsky, 1988). In this response, we first identify several issues in need of clarification and correction. We then pick up and expand on the matter of procedural vs substantive media criticism,

Organized Persuasive Communication: A new conceptual framework for research on public relations, propaganda and promotional culture:

Organized persuasive communication is essential to the exercise of power at national and global levels. It has been studied extensively by scholars of public relations, promotional culture and propaganda. There exists, however, considerable confusion and conceptual limitations across these fields: scholars of PR largely focus on what they perceive to be non-manipulative forms of organized persuasive communication; scholars of propaganda focus on manipulative forms but tend either to examine historical cases or non-democratic states; scholars of promotional culture focus on ‘salesmanship’ in public life. All approaches show minimal conceptual development concerning manipulative organized persuasive communication involving deception, incentivization and coercion. As a consequence, manipulative, propagandistic organized persuasive communication within liberal democracies is a blind spot; it is rarely recognized let alone researched with the result that our understanding and grasp of these activities is stunted. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new conceptual framework that theorizes precisely manipulative forms of persuasion, as well as demarcating what might count as non-manipulative or consensual forms of persuasion. This framework advances PR and propaganda scholarship by clarifying our understanding of manipulative and propagandistic forms of organized persuasive communication and by providing a starting point for more fully evaluating the role of deception, incentivization and coercion, within contemporary liberal democracies.

Media empowerment vs. strategies of control: Theorising news media and war in the 21st Century

This article provides an overview and critical assessment of the ways in which political communication scholarship has sought to understand and explain the importance of news media vis-a-vis war and international politics. It reviews existing approaches that have shaped debates over the last 30 years and critically evaluates the significance of new communication technologies and organised persuasive communication in this context. The central objective is to assess both the extent to which the orthodox elite-driven paradigm remains relevant to the 21st century and the major questions now facing attempts to theorise the relationship between war and media. It is argued that existing theoretical accounts retain significant purchase, despite the emergence of the Internet-based contemporary media environment, and that greater academic attention needs to be paid to organised persuasive communication.