Page 17 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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FOREWORD
who are presented as victims, this effect makes an official policy appear
ineffective or even misguided, exposing gaps between media represen-
tation and policy claims. These gaps challenge the policy’s credibility,
creating the environment in which policy decision makers are pres-
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sured to alter policy in order to fill the void.” The key to understand-
ing Bahador’s contribution is to appreciate the role of policy.
The impediment effect presupposes the existence of a clearly artic-
ulated and established policy: usually war at some level of severity. In
Bahador’s apt phrase, policy is “interrupted by media content.” But
there is a policy. On the other hand, as I formulated it in 1996, the
agenda-setting manifestation of the CNN effect can be read as a
media effect on policy when there is, in essence, no preexisting policy
preference, or at least not an articulated one. Indeed, much of the
early CNN effect literature placed considerable emphasis on the pre-
sumed demise of ordering principles of U.S. foreign policy following
the antiquation of the Truman Doctrine and Containment after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the cold war, the United States
fell into a state of conceptual drift as it looked for a new way to order
the international system and, in the process, make sense of its own
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foreign policy objectives.
Into the void flowed dramatic media images from Kurdish north-
ern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and other bloody wars. Without a
clearly articulated guide to U. S. foreign policy preferences, media
filled the void left by the collapse of the foreign policy rationale of the
cold war.
The challenging effect begins with an entirely different premise. It
says the starting point is an articulated policy of nonintervention.
Policymakers in this case have decided to, in a sense, follow Horatio’s
advice and not give in to the temptations of revenge and righting past
wrongs. As Bahador states it in the language of policy analysis, “As
policy is often formulated in an atmosphere where subsystems have
competing agendas and interests, media images can play an impor-
tant role in favoring certain policies over others, making it difficult at
times to maintain commitment to an official policy of noninterven-
tion.” Put another way, in the rough and tumble of bureaucratic
debates, compelling images of massacres and the like can provide
ammunition to opponents of a policy of nonintervention. This is a
subtle but important distinction to make regarding the CNN effect.
It is made all the more relevant by more recent events in Iraq where
righting wrongs became part of the rallying cry of the Neo-
Conservative interventionists who saw the mere policy of containment
of Saddam’s Iraq as immoral and wrong. The rise of the challenging