Page 40 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

1403975191ts02.qxd 19-2-07 04:59 PM Page 15
15
THE CNN EFFECT
inhabitants) in 1997. The growth numbers are even more dramatic
when one looks at countries such as China, where television set num-
bers grew from 660,000 sets, or less than one set per 1,000 inhabitants
in 1970, to 400 million sets, representing 321 sets per 1,000 inhabi-
tants in 1997. Although the numbers are far from equally distributed
throughout the world, it is interesting to note that the majority of
growth over this period occurred in the developing world.
As this study focuses largely on the West, it is important to briefly
review the data on television penetration in these areas in more detail.
In the United States, there were 403 television sets per 1,000 inhabi-
tants in 1970 and 806 per 1,000 in 1997. In Western Europe, the top
five countries, in terms of population (France, Italy, Germany, Spain,
and the United Kingdom), averaged 226 sets per 1,000 in 1970 and
58
524 per 1,000 in 1997.
There have been notable improvements in the freedom of the press
throughout much of the world over the 1990s, caused by the end of
the cold war and the replacement of many military regimes with dem-
ocratic ones. This means that there is both more access to the possi-
bility of the CNN effect and less interference blocking its means. The
combination of growth in access and decline in legal barriers to its dis-
semination has been a boost to the likelihood of a CNN effect
throughout the planet.
In terms of quality, today’s global television networks emerged due
to three trends in news delivery. The first relates to the shift in the
delivery of news from the medium of the newspaper as the most pop-
ular format to television. U.S. data shows that, between 1960 and
1995, the per capita subscription of newspapers dropped by 50 per-
cent. Newspapers had dominated news delivery for at least a century
before television’s arrival after World War II. 59 The number of daily
newspapers in the United States, which stood at 1,700 in 1980,
declined at a rate of 15 titles per year over the last two decades of the
twentieth century. By the 1990s, television was clearly the most popu-
lar form of news dissemination, especially amongst younger genera-
tions. At an annual meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers
Association in the early 1980s, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN,
announced that newspapers were on the endangered species list. 60
What seemed like pure hyperbole at the time has become prophetic, as
CNN and like organizations have grown rapidly while the newspaper
industry has declined since that announcement. Furthermore,
researchers who have compared the impact of different media have
found that television news watchers find it “more personally relevant
and more emotionally involving” in comparison to newspapers, giving