Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of the Media (review)

Countless people die every year from conflict, famine, or struggles over diamonds, gold, coltan, money, and power. One common response to the suffering of others is to call for more or better news coverage. But in themselves the media are powerless to halt armed conflict, and they come to no one's rescue with humanitarian assistance. Yet scholars, policymakers, officials from international and nongovernmental organizations, and journalists themselves perpetuate the convenient little fiction that media have a tremendous capacity to spur international action and assistance. Much of the public loves this fiction, which is one reason for its perpetuation.

A multitude of books and scholarly articles have explored the media's influence on the foreign policies of modern states. To simplify only slightly, there are two schools of thought about the media's importance in foreign policy decision-making. Some believe in what is called the "CNN effect": that media have a powerful, if indirect, influence on government decisions, mainly by swinging the public and thus their leaders in one direction or another. Others advocate the "propaganda model," wherein media are seen as willing partners or largely compliant followers of governments as they operate on the world stage. But all-inclusive formulations such as these are rarely useful; when a field of study is dominated by extreme and opposite assertions, it's a sure sign that its subject is tough to sort out. It should be no surprise, therefore, that on the relationship between news reporting and foreign policy decisions, most recent scholarship has demonstrated that the truest statement we can make so far is that the connections are complicated, complex, and in need of further research.

The authors of Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of the Media make a good attempt to elucidate the complicated relationship between news reporting and international humanitarianism. The authors are interested in the extent to which five independent variables are associated with varied levels of international interventions, their dependent variable: (1) the severity of a humanitarian crisis, (2) the perceived risks associated with an intervention, (3) the national interests of the potentially intervening powers, (4) the volume of coverage, and (5) the content of news stories (in particular, whether coverage includes reasons for intervention). The book examines ten richly detailed case studies of humanitarian crises in the 1990s (eight in Africa) to ask why intervention occurs in some places and not others, and particularly to ask whether media coverage affected intervention decisions.

The authors are especially interested in the power of media to sway government policy through two roles: an alerting function (with media telling us what is happening in the world); and an opinion-leading function (with media advocating or cautioning against intervention). This book really amounts to a test of the CNN effect; for a book that seeks to assess media impact, its review of how the media affects foreign policy literature is quite limited. The usual concerns with the "powerful media" theory are trotted out: priming, agenda setting, framing, gatekeeping, and the interaction of media and policy. That's all well and good. These familiar theories of media effects should be mentioned. But what this literature does not do is help us determine under what conditions, to what degree, or for how long a period of time the media influence policy. The literature cited by the authors assumes that media interest in a crisis and media support for intervention lead foreign policy or "push" public opinion toward taking steps to resolve crises (16). Yet like much of the research on media and foreign policy, this study is based ultimately on content analysis of news stories. Content analysis can tell us nothing about causal or directional linkage between news coverage and international intervention responses. To be sure, the authors do mention that the connections they study between media...