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THE CNN EFFECT
sides developed departments with the mandate of carrying out propa-
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ganda both at home and abroad. Before a war, propaganda often helps
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to define and vilify an enemy, making their destruction more palatable.
During a war, it plays an enormous role in maintaining morale by inter-
preting events in biased ways that often exaggerate the success and virtues
of the home side while inflating the failures and immorality of the adver-
sary. The salience of propaganda has led hegemonic theorists to conclude
that all media-state relations can be reduced to propaganda.
The Challenging Effect
In this book, the challenging CNN effect is employed to describe a
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novel policy-media interaction model.
This effect is most relevant in
the context of third-party military interventions, often involving
Western powers in “other people’s wars” or in humanitarian crises
requiring a military component. Through the emergence of unexpected
and emotive images framed in a sympathetic manner to a particular
party that is presented as victim, this effect makes an official policy
appear ineffective or even misguided, exposing gaps between media
representation and policy claims. These gaps challenge the policy’s
credibility, creating an environment in which policy decision–makers are
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pressured to alter policy in order to fill the void. As policy is often for-
mulated in an atmosphere where subsystems have competing agendas
and interests, media images can play an important role in favoring
certain policies over others, making it difficult at times to maintain
commitment to an official policy of nonintervention. Observing the
Kurdish crisis following the 1991 Gulf War, for example, advocates have
argued that media images of suffering Kurds made it impossible for
George H.W. Bush and the then British prime minister, John Major, to
maintain the status-quo policy of leaving the Kurds to their fate. 43
While the challenging effect has similarities to Livingston’s imped-
iment effect, as both interrupt official policy, the impediment effect,
as presented in the literature, comes into play in a postintervention
phase of a policy, threatening to change a policy of military interven-
tion. The challenging effect, on the other hand, is pertinent in the
preintervention phase of a policy, putting pressure on that policy to
support military intervention. The challenging effect also holds simi-
larities with Livingston’s agenda-setting effect, as both can be relevant
in a preintervention policy phase. The agenda-setting effect, however,
describes the mechanics of policymaking, while the challenging effect
deals with the substance of policy. 44
The challenging CNN effect, it should be noted, is only introduced
here and will be elaborated upon in the following two chapters, which