Page 55 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

1403975191ts03.qxd 19-2-07 05:00 PM Page 30
30
THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
administration before the intervention, relying largely on quotes from
Bush, public statements from the Bush administration, and secondary
55
But there is no substantiation of agreement and coopera-
sources.
tion between the executive’s subsystems—the evidence identified as
the basis for determining policy certainty.
Regarding U.S. Bosnia policy after the Srebrenica massacre and
before the decision to defend Gorazde (Robinson’s first Bosnia case
study), Robinson again equates a policy of nonmilitary intervention to
no policy. But once more, there was a policy in place. It just happened
to be a policy of nonintervention that became inadequate in the light of
the Srebrenica incident. Robinson refers to the U.S. policy by quoting
Bill Clinton during a July 17, 1995 meeting, where the U.S. president
states, “I don’t like where we are now . . . This policy is doing
enormous damage to the United States and to our standing in the
56
world. We look weak . . . [it] can only get worse down the road.”
Likewise, over a year earlier, in the aftermath of the Sarajevo market-
place massacre of February 5, 1994 (Robinson’s second Bosnia case
study), Robinson again claims policy uncertainty, as no policy existed
57
Again, a policy did
regarding a military response to the massacre.
exist, but it became unsustainable in light of the latest events, which
made the policy appear weak and unacceptable. Whereas Robinson
assumes that policy uncertainty precedes the CNN effect, the evidence
from the Bosnia case studies actually demonstrate the opposite—that
it is the unexpected and emotive media images of events, such as those
of a massacre’s aftermath, that create policy uncertainty. In short,
policy uncertainty is not a precondition for the CNN effect—it is a
consequence of it in cases when an official policy becomes untenable
under the weight of new circumstances that have come to light due to
recent, shocking media images.
The policy-media interaction model is also limited methodologi-
cally by its reliance on relatively short case studies. In Somalia, for
example, during the period before policy change when a CNN effect
was a possibility, only twenty days of media coverage were reviewed.
The Bush policy of aid delivery before November, however, was active
for four months. Furthermore, according to Robinson, the Somalia
crisis was on the U.S. government’s radar for one and a half years
58
before the military intervention. Perhaps a review of both media and
policy over this longer period may have yielded different results or
at least provided a better explanation of the influence of media on the
Somali intervention. The same was true of Bosnia, where Robinson
conducted a detailed review of media content only for one week (July
11–18, 1995), while, as Robinson stated, “US involvement did not