Africa’s Deadliest Conflict: Media Coverage of the Humanitarian Disaster in the Congo and the United Nations Response, 1997–2008

Conclusion: The Impact of Mass Media on “The Will to Intervene”

159 Conclusion: The Impact of Mass Media on “The Will to Intervene” According to the so-called “CNN effect,” what appears in the media, and especially on television, has a major, if not determining effect in getting governments to respond to faraway humanitarian disasters. A good deal of effort has gone into trying to assess the validity of this theory. Most assessments of the deterministic claims for the CNN effect have ranged from skeptical to dismissive (see Livingston and Eachus, 1995; Jakobsen, 1996; Minear, Scott, and Weiss, 1996; Natsiois, 1996a; Livingston, 1997; Mermin, 1997; Livingston and Eachus, 1999; Robinson, 2002. This, however , is not to say that media have no impact at all. In International Crises and Intervention, a study that surveyed ten major Third World humanitarian crises of the 1990s, Walter Soderlund and colleagues found a relatively strong Spearman Rank Order Correlation (+.79) between volume of media coverage (the media “alert”) and the strength of the international response. The correlation was somewhat stronger (+.81) for the eight African crises included in the study (2008: 272–73).1 The authors concluded that the alerting function clearly is of some importance. And, while this by no means constitutes a wholesale endorsement of the CNN effect, it does appear to indicate that in the overall mix of factors leading to an international intervention, the international community is more likely to respond to a serious crisis in a country of marginal strategic or economic importance if the mainstream media are effective in alerting the population to the crisis. (2008: 279–80; italics in the original) Africa’s Deadliest Conflict 160 David Rieff agrees, pointing out that during the 1990s it was precisely those conflicts that garnered significant media attention that received robust international responses (2003: 38–42). Governments, at least democratic governments, do listen to their publics, and it may reasonably be argued that a high volume of media attention to a particular event or situation will ensure public and, more important, government awareness of it. But in reality government awareness of international crises is likely to precede extensive media attention; government information sources are simply more extensive than those available to media organizations. As a result, it may be a government (or a specific agency within it) that alerts the media to a crisis as much as or more than the reverse. This would be particularly true if there is division within the government concerning the appropriate response to events and if it is thought useful to test the temper of public opinion by issuing statements concerning the matter. However, a government that is united behind a policy response may also be interested in seeing whether there is adequate support (both domestic and international) for that course of action and, if support is wanting, attempt to “shape” public opinion in a desired direction. While governments respond in one way or another to media/public pressure, it must be recognized that media are conduits that governments routinely use to inform, consult, and persuade their publics with respect to issues of the day. Indeed, the “need to persuade” may have a significant impact on the amount of media coverage an issue or situation receives, as well as on how it is framed. The relationship between media and governments is a symbiotic one, and influence can run in both directions, often at the same time. It is often assumed, however, that the relationship is far more direct and unidirectional: that a “failure to report” on the part of the media is a major contributing factor to the international community’s “failure to respond” to a humanitarian crisis. Our study shows that the media, television in particular, did not provide a steady stream of news from the Congo, much less any discussion of a possible response called for by Washington. This finding is consistent with the “failure to report” argument (for the case of Rwanda, see Thompson, 2007b; for Darfur, see Grzyb, 2009b).2 Although there is no agreed-upon definition of “failure to report” or “failure to respond,” there is considerable evidence that it is not always a lack of reporting or knowledge about a situation that inhibits a response. For instance, during the height of the genocide in Rwanda (April to June 1994), the combined television and newspaper coverage of the disaster was the third highest of the ten major humanitarian crises of the 1990s Conclusion 161 studied (Soderlund et al., 2008...