Page 50 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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DEMONSTRATING THE CNN EFFECT
and John Major’s stating that this was a civil war. According to Shaw,
this barrage of media coverage finally compelled Western govern-
ments to do something about the crisis, leading to the creation of the
safe havens. As Shaw writes, “These reports had the essential ingredi-
ents of what was, effectively, a campaign which lasted several weeks,
although within a single week it was to achieve a major change in
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Western policy.”
But just as importantly, Shaw points out that the Shi’ite rebellion in
southern Iraq, which led to far more deaths, did not receive the same
attention as the Kurdish rebellion and did not evoke framing that
called for action. There were two main reasons for the difference. The
first was a lack of media access to the south. According to John
Simpson, “By comparison with the Kurds, the predicament of the
Shi’ite people has had very little attention in the outside world. That’s
not surprising; there have been no pictures of the suffering Shi’ite
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Similar compar-
refugees; the Iraqi government has seen to that.”
isons would be made regarding Sudan in the following years. Dubbed
“Somalia without CNN,” the famine in Sudan, exacerbated by civil
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war, also failed to attain a global audience due to media inaccessibility.
Likewise, carnage in Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kashmir, and
Angola received limited media attention in similar regard. 25 25
The second reason for nonintervention was the fact that coverage
of the southern Shi’ite rebellion was framed in distancing terminology
that did not link it to Western responsibility and largely described the
conflict as an internal one. This was markedly different from the
framing of the Kurdish uprising, which was sympathetic and chal-
lenged the official government policy. For example, in one television
report in the early days of the Shi’ite rebellion, the media report
stated, “Islamic fundamentalists say they control Iraq’s second biggest
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city, Basra.” At the same time, a film was shown of a “fundamentalist”
ayatollah speaking in Iran, and in another piece of coverage, viewers
are reminded that “A major Western concern is that Iraq could literally
split apart.” 27 The lack of access and emotive images, in combination
with distancing framing, meant that the Shi’ite rebellion received
limited coverage, and framing discouraged intervention.
Similar patterns of coverage were prevalent in other cases of mass
human suffering in the 1990s, with the most notable being the 1994
Rwandan genocide, where an estimated 800,000 civilians perished. In
studies by Livingston and Eachus 28 and Robinson 29 that assessed
media coverage and framing, it was demonstrated that while some
notable coverage did exist, the violence was framed in a distancing
manner that presented it as part of an ongoing cycle of bloodletting.