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THE CNN EFFECT IN ACTION
education—creating a population that critically assesses issues.
Although they might continue, in general, to be ill-informed on
foreign policy, research increasingly shows public opinion polling to
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Furthermore, polling results have
be both rational and stable.
continued to improve in accuracy over recent decades, as techniques
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have improved and become less susceptible to manipulation.
Second, far more information is available to the public in the West
than in previous eras, and governments increasingly find it difficult to
hide information from the public without scrutiny, scandal, and dis-
grace. Third, Westerners are more suspicious of governments and not
as willing to grant unconditional trust in ways common to previous
generations. This is partially due to incidents in which governments
were thought to have betrayed the people’s trust. In the United
States, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal are often consid-
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Fourth, the end of
ered landmark events in breaking public trust.
the cold war led to a period when Westerners felt safe from external
security threats, creating opportunities for alternative viewpoints from
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During earlier periods, such as
that of the government to emerge.
the world wars and the cold war, governments could, with some justi-
fication, ignore public opinion if it was at odds with perceived national
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interests. Looking beyond public opinion, in fact, was deemed a sign
of leadership. The merits of this trait, however, diminished over time
as politicians increasingly began relying on polling data as an impor-
tant factor in their decision-making.
The CNN Effect and Public Opinion
In most interpretations of the CNN effect, public opinion is believed
to be the key intermediary between the media and politics. 24 In its
idealized scenario, media images are believed to lead to public
demand for action, which then puts pressure on politicians to respond
in order to garner future electoral success. 25 Global news networks
such as CNN provide the means for such a chain of reactions to
unfold in an unprecedented scale. In past generations, the lack of
media pervasiveness and public access to media meant that many
atrocities were simply not known, especially those committed in dis-
tant conflicts between other parties or “other people’s wars.” The
genocide of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1922, the mass
starvations in the Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, and even The
Holocaust during World War II were hardly known to the outside
world until the events had passed. In some cases, it was decades later
when the full scale of the atrocity became apparent. Even in familiar