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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
In one story typical of coverage at the time, Rwanda was described as
“over-populated, over-farmed, underfed and wracked by tribal
hatreds, 400 years in the making. The history of Rwanda is full of
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massacres like this—killing followed by counter killings.”
Although Shaw’s case study on the Kurdish crisis following the
Gulf War is well documented, critics have suggested that it overplays
its hand and fails to take into account the role of other forces outside
the media that also pushed for intervention. For example, the geopo-
litical concerns of key NATO member Turkey, which was uneasy over
the implications of refugee flows into its territory from Iraq, was at
least as important a factor as the media. Furthermore, little attention
was given to the actual decision-making process, which other analyses
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of the same crisis demonstrated to have been far more complex.
Despite these shortcomings, this study and others like it highlight the
importance of two additional ingredients as prerequisite to a CNN
effect: media access and sympathetic media framing that presents a
particular party as victims.
Quantitative Approaches
Livingston and Eachus use a more rigorous approach in qualifying the
CNN effect, comparing the quantity of media coverage on a particu-
lar issue with the timing of policy decision on that issue in order to
identify a potential media impact. This approach is used to assess the
1992 decision by the United States to intervene in Somalia. 32
Livingston later uses a similar approach in a case study on Kosovo. 33
Under this method, it is assumed that there is a CNN effect if the
majority of media coverage precedes policy change. If the majority of
coverage follows policy change, however, then there is no effect, as
media takes its cues from the government. In the Somalia case, the
vast majority of media coverage followed the government’s decision
to intervene. If there was a CNN effect, significant media coverage
should have emerged earlier. Furthermore, what media coverage did
exist, according to the authors, originated from government officials
who used the media to draw attention to the Somalia issue. 34 In the
Kosovo case, Livingston believed that two opposing CNN effects
largely negated each other, limiting the overall effect. While NATO
bombing mistakes reduced support for the campaign, images of
suffering Albanian refugees countered this and increased support. 35
While this approach is more rigorous than the interview- and
media-based methods, some of its assumptions are questionable. In
the Somalia case, for example, while it may be true that the desire for