Page 33 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
There were many incidents throughout the 1990s in which media
pervasiveness was blamed for rushed policy responses. For example,
when Boris Yeltsin closed the Russian Parliament in October 1993, it
was reported that the U.S. State Department’s upper echelon sus-
pended normal activities in order to focus on the television response
of the president and secretary of state later that day. In a previous era,
according to James Hoge Jr., the response would have been to wait
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and gather all the facts before responding.
According to Livingston, the accelerant CNN effect is not always
harmful for governments and can, in fact, be useful for reaching wider
audiences much faster than conventional diplomatic channels. It can
also be used to conduct more rapid diplomacy and communication
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with rivals with whom diplomatic channels are blocked.
The Impediment Effect
The impediment CNN effect comes into play in the context of
military engagements and generally operates under two scenarios. In
the first, media images can raise doubts about the legitimacy of
military engagements and the policies behind them by exposing the
operation’s shortcomings and negative consequences. In many cases,
emotionally disturbing images from a military operation, such as
those of enemy civilian casualties (or collateral damage) or dead
military personnel from the home side, raise questions about the
benefits of the engagement in relation to its mounting costs. This
effect is particularly exasperated when the media successfully demon-
strate a gap between rhetoric from political and military leaders and
events in the conflict zone. In the United States, the decline of
public support for the Vietnam War (especially after the 1968 Tet
Offensive) is often blamed on television images of carnage and U.S.
body bags from South East Asia. Significant amongst these images
was the summary execution of a Viet Cong officer by South
Vietnamese national police chief Loan. According to Richard Nixon,
“More than ever before, television showed the terrible human suf-
fering and sacrifice of war. Whatever the intention behind such
relentless and literal reporting of the war, the result was a serious
demoralization of the home front, raising the question whether
America would ever again be able to fight an enemy abroad with
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unity and strength of purpose at home.” This concern explains why
the American media has been tightly controlled during military oper-
ations ever since Vietnam, and why great effort is made to sanitize
images during war. 28