Page 16 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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FOREWORD
humanitarian crisis where all parties are in agreement to the presence
of troops (what Haass calls consensual military operations) to nuclear
war. What I brought to Haass’s work was a series of potential media
effects and their most likely pairings with his policy options.
As a result, rather than one effect, I spoke of three CNN effects:
1. Agenda-setting manifestation of the CNN effect: Global, real-
time media may entice leaders to engage in distant conflicts or crises,
even those lacking a clear rationale of national interest. Instead,
sentimentality—the abandonment perhaps of sovereign reason, the
bedrock principle of Realist foreign policy—prevails. I argued, as have
others since, that this almost never occurs.
2. Impediment manifestation of the CNN effect: At times media
coverage undermines public and elite support for an extant operation.
Casualties, for example, have long been thought to undermine public
support for military operations. It is in a sense inversely related to the
agenda-setting manifestation of the effect. Agenda setting gets coun-
tries involved in conflicts owing to media coverage; impediment
undermines the willingness to be involved in conflict, again, owing to
media coverage.
3. Accelerant manifestation of the CNN effect: When in war, media
accelerates the pace of decision-making. Decision cycles match the
expectations of 24-hour media coverage, rather than some other more
rationale measure of relevance. In the process, the rapid-response rush
to meet the demands of global media bypasses intelligence agencies,
counselors, and the more deliberative elements of governance.
Rather than speak in general terms about a poorly defined CNN
effect, the essay paired different effects with different politico-military
operations. For example, low-intensity conflicts (or operations other
than war) seem particularly vulnerable to one form of impediment
effect, given this type of warfare’s dependence on stealth and secrecy,
something difficult to maintain in a media saturated environment.
What Bahador does in this insightful book is expand this typology
of potential media effects on policy processes to include what he calls
the challenging CNN effect. This is a significant but nuanced theoret-
ical contribution to the literature on media effects on foreign policy-
making. Resting somewhere between the agenda-setting and
impediment manifestations of the CNN effect, the challenging effect
involves third-party military interventions in humanitarian crises or
war. As Bahador puts it, “Through the emergence of unexpected and
emotive images framed in a sympathetic manner to a particular party