Page 67 - The CNN Effect in Action - How the News Media Pushed the West toward War ini Kosovo

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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
of criticism narrows when national interests are clearer to elites and
when significant risks to troops exist. As a result, journalists rarely
question government policy in times of crisis or war and often tend
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The main arguments of the indexing
to rally around the flag.
hypothesis can be traced to the pioneering work of Daniel Hallin in
The Uncensored War. In this landmark survey on the role of media during
the Vietnam War, Hallin challenged the widely held conviction that
television turned opinion against the war, and instead claimed that tel-
evision largely followed elite opinion from a position of consensus at
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the beginning of the war to one of increasing division after 1968.
Other notable studies by Lance Bennett and Jonathan Mermin,
amongst others, backed up Hallin’s conclusions, while providing
additional clarifications. Bennett’s key study demonstrated that
debates in The New York Times closely followed those in the U.S.
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Congress in the 1980s over the Nicaragua conf lict. Mermin’s study
found not only a correlation version of the indexing hypothesis,
demonstrating that media coverage followed elite policy debate, but
also a marginalization version, suggesting that critical viewpoints not
articulated in the government were either ignored or relegated to the
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margins of the news.
Despite its dominance amongst political communications scholars,
indexing has been challenged on a number of alleged shortcomings.
These include methodological critiques, such as the omission of non-
American sources cited in American television news broadcasts; 98 the
failure to distinguish criticism of the means, context, and ends; and the
use of proxy data instead of full text sources that might underrepresent
criticism. In a study of the 1990–1991 Gulf War using a more rigor-
ous indexing research design, Althaus found much greater journalistic
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independence than suggested by previous studies. Findings included
the discovery of extensive criticism in the news from sources outside
the U.S. government—including journalists themselves—challenging
the notion that official elite debate dictates media dissent. He also
found significant disagreement over tactical matters while concurring
consensus on first principles and strategic dimensions as might be
traditionally suggested by the indexing hypothesis. According to
Althaus,
The 1990–1991 Persian Gulf crisis had all the elements that should
have undermined press independence: a unified executive, a deferential
Congress, a military buildup signaling American intentions for war, and
an easy villain in Saddam Hussein. Yet, by closely examining the
pathways and processes by which critical voices entered the news about