Document(s) 22 of 37

To understand American news coverage and government policy concerning the 1994 Rwanda genocide, one must begin with the 1992–93 United States intervention in Somalia. Why did the Bush administration decide to intervene in the Somali crisis in the first place? Conventional wisdom at the time suggested that the only viable explanation was the television coverage of the horrific famine, fighting and disease that plagued the country. American statesman and scholar, George Kennan, made this argument when he explained the acceptance of the mission by Congress and the public.

There can be no question that the reason for this acceptance lies primarily with the exposure of the Somalia situation by the American media, above all, television. The reaction would have been unthinkable without this exposure. The reaction was an emotional one, occasioned by the sight of the suffering of the starving people in question. (Kennan 1993a)

The idea that media attention to distant crises can trigger policy responses is typically referred to as the CNN effect (for a full description of this phenomenon, see Livingston 1997; Livingston and Eachus 1995–96; Robinson 2002). Foreign policy priorities are established and public attention is directed to issues that happen to be in the news, rather than toward strategic objectives defined by national interest. As Kennan (1993b) put it, foreign policy should not be determined by news stories that are 'fleeting, disjointed, visual glimpses of reality, flickering on and off the screen, here today and gone tomorrow'.

Foreign policy conducted in such a manner is not only irresponsible; it may actually undermine the constitutive authority of elected government.

If American policy, particularly policy involving the uses of our armed forces abroad, is to be controlled by popular emotional impulses, and particularly ones invoked by the contemporary commercial television industry, then there is no place – not only for myself, but for what have traditionally been regarded as the responsible deliberative organs of our government, in both executive and legislative branches. (Kennan 1993b)

In this chapter we consider the realist critique of media and humanitarian interventions. At the heart of that critique is the claim that news of international affairs in the US media – when it is found at all – tends to be fleeting, ephemeral and all too typically frivolous. We present evidence that suggests critics on this score are largely correct.

Implicit in this criticism is the idea that media content, frivolous and fleeting as it sometimes may be, has the capacity to reorder US foreign policy priorities. Kennan's assumptions concerning Somalia offer one example of this faith in the power of media. This assumption is also held by the activist community that lobbied for US intervention in Rwanda (and elsewhere). Both the realists and interventionists (for lack of a better term) share the common belief that media content spurs intervention, although, of course, they hold opposing views regarding the wisdom of such a thing.

We argue that this assumption regarding the power of the news media is mistaken. Realists' worries and interventionists' hopes are misplaced. In most instances, media do not have the ability to reprioritize policy objectives and policymakers' attention.

Why is this important in developing our case concerning Rwanda? The United States stood at arm's length from events in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 because policymakers believed their predecessors in the George H.W. Bush administration were lured into Somalia by television pictures. Although this assumption was fundamentally inaccurate, it prevailed and coloured the US response to the genocide in Rwanda. As a result, Rwanda became a test case for a new-found commitment to realist principles. Television and talk of genocide, no matter how compelling and emotional, would not be allowed to sway the steely-eyed pursuit of national interests. In short, the non-intervention in Rwanda was predicated on a misunderstanding of the causes of intervention in Somalia.

THE REALIST CRITIQUE OF MEDIA

It cannot be said that realist foreign policy theorists have given sustained attention to the issue of media and foreign affairs. The critique is more oblique. What is said, however, has roots in a core philosophical component of realist belief: foreign policy conducted properly keeps a cold eye on the rational pursuit of interests clearly understood. Anything else, including sentimentality, is regarded, at best, as distraction. Media content is heavily laden with emotional freight concerning distant injustices and brewing evil. In populating the news with victims of one sort or another, calculations of national interest are supplanted by mere sentimentality. This is the core principle at the heart of the realist critique of the media and foreign policymaking.

Even if emotion weren't such a poor substitute for the rational calculation of national interest, news would still serve as a poor guide to a foreign policy process based on the more emotional landscape of international affairs. The news media, particularly television news, is fickle, shifting from one crisis to the next. As a result, even a foreign policy based on the pursuit of morally derived duties to right wrongs would be ill-served. This criticism comes most often not just from realists, such as Kennan, but also from those I have referred to above as interventionists – those who believe media have a responsibility to alert the world to circumstances such as Rwanda early, loud and unwaveringly (see Livingston and Eachus 1999). What evidence supports these claims? What do we know about media content patterns?

Systematic empirical investigation of news content supports these criticisms of the American news media. From 1990 to1998, American television networks more than doubled the time devoted to celebrity and entertainment, disasters, accidents and crime, while decreasing the time spent on policy and international affairs (Patterson 2000). Indeed, until the September 2001 attacks on the United States and the war in Afghanistan, international news almost disappeared from American television news. Foreign affairs coverage on network television declined from 45 per cent of stories in the 1970s to 13.5 per cent in 1995 (Hoge 1997). Similar trends were evident in American newspapers. International news coverage in newspapers shrank from over 10 per cent of non-advertising space in the early 1970s to 6 per cent in the early 1980s and less than 3 per cent in the 1990s (Hoge 1997). Similarly, between 1985 and 1995, international news in the national weekly news magazines declined from 24 to 14 per cent in Time, from 22 to 12 per cent in Newsweek, and from 20 to 14 per cent in U.S. News and World Report (Hickey 1998).

A Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found similar results. By 2001, the three nightly network newscasts were devoting fully a third of their broadcasts to stories in the categories of lifestyle, features and crime (Kurtz 2002). In a study of 5,000 news stories taken from television, magazines and newspapers, Patterson (2000) found similar patterns in content. Other studies confirm these findings. Livingston and Stephen (1998) found a steady decline in international news content offered by the broadcast television networks between 1972 and 1995 (Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1 illustrates the trends in international news content as a percentage of total news content per year. Several high-water marks in coverage occurred during or near the end of the Cold War. Interestingly, the low-water mark also occurred during the Cold War; Watergate dominated news in 1973–74. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Cold War politics of the Reagan administration led the post-Watergate resurgence in international news content. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in 1989–90 received the greatest share of attention by the networks.

What in general is revealed in Figure 15.1? In the 20-year period between 1972 and 1991, 40 per cent of the network's news content focused on international events. The end of the Cold War marked a dramatic shift in focus.¹ In the four years after 1991 that are represented in Figure 15.1, the networks' international news content averaged about 27 per cent. The Rwanda massacre occurred during this second period of relative journalistic inattentiveness to international affairs. Looking more closely at the crucial years when Rwanda was – or could have been – the focus of media attention in the US (1993–95), we see that only one in four network news stories concerned international events (Figure 15.2). In general, following the end of the Cold War, American networks paid less attention to international events.

Figure 15.1 International news as a percentage of total television network newscasts, 1972–75

Source: Livingston and Stephen 1998.

Figure 15.2 Proportion of domestic versus international news stories, 1993–95

Source: Livingston and Stephen 1998.

What was covered in the 1990s? Figure 15.3 (p. 193) tracks several events that occurred during the Rwanda crisis. A coup and civil unrest in Haiti leading to a mass exodus of refugees to Florida was the object of considerable media attention. The refugees made Haiti both a domestic and international news story. The election and inauguration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa also peaked in May. The networks devoted significant resources, including mobile 'flyaway' units used to cover events in locations without sufficient satellite uplink capacity, to the coverage of the South African elections in 1994. Both South Africa and Haiti coincided with the start of the massacre in Rwanda. At the same time, the bloody civil war in Bosnia received significant attention in April and May. In fact, Bosnia was such an important story to the American news media, we need to spend a moment putting it into proper context.

The realists' critique of a media-dominated foreign policy centres on claims that media coverage of international politics is uneven and distorting of the international landscape. News coverage of Bosnia relative to other humanitarian crises illustrates this point well. Table 15.1 lists the 13 worst humanitarian crises in the world in 1996 and compares the news coverage devoted to each. Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia and Bosnia presented the worst humanitarian crises, each with approximately four million people at risk of death. Ethiopia, Angola and Rwanda are next in severity.

Table 15.1 Number of people at risk in various countries and corresponding number and percentage of reports by major news organizations

Moving to measures of news coverage, each cell in a column shows the number of reports on the crises along with the percentage of total coverage of all 13 crises that it represents. For example, of all articles published in The New York Times on these 13 crises in 1996, 6.9 per cent (401 articles) were devoted to Rwanda. Of all Washington Post articles on these 13 crises, 5.9 per cent (277 articles) mentioned Rwanda.

The figures for Bosnia reveal the sort of distortion that concerns critics of US news coverage of humanitarian crises. With 3.7 million people at risk, Bosnia received nearly 46 per cent of the total coverage of these crises in the The New York Times, nearly 44 per cent of the Washington Post total and 66 and 67 per cent of the coverage on ABC and CNN, respectively. National Public Radio devoted about 61 per cent of its total coverage to Bosnia alone. On the other hand, Afghanistan and the Sudan – the two places in the world that we would later discover harboured Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda – had more people at risk than Bosnia, but together received only 12 per cent of the total media coverage of all 13 crises concerning the worst humanitarian crises in the world – affecting nearly 30 million people. Nearly half were devoted to the crisis in Bosnia where 3.7 million people were at risk.

This is not to say that Bosnia wasn't important. Nor is it to say that populations at risk are necessarily the only or best dimension for calibrating the importance of a crisis. But it does illustrate that US news coverage tends not to be calibrated to more complex determinants. Bosnia coverage reflected its proximity to major European cities – all major operational bases for the news media – and its geostrategic importance. Second, Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans sit on the southern edge of Europe and indirectly involve at least two key NATO member states: Greece and Turkey. Instability along NATO's southern tier was as much a catalyst for US intervention as was news coverage. Indeed, as we will argue below, news coverage followed US involvement.

Table 15.1 illustrates the distortions that occur within the universe of humanitarian crisis reporting. But the distortions don't end there. Most often, humanitarian crises are shunted aside by news of another sort.

Turning to Figure 15.3, we can see that, beginning toward the end of May and peaking in the summer of 1994, the O.J. Simpson drama received more attention than any other news story. The Rwanda massacre received relatively little attention; it wasn't until later, when events in the Great Lakes region of Africa shifted, did the news media pay significant attention. By July and August the crisis in Rwanda centred on the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in camps such as in Goma, Zaire.

Figure 15.3 Coverage (in minutes) of various topics in ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts, 1994

Source: Livingston and Stephen 1998.

In short, during the crucial spring months of 1994, the American broadcast television networks devoted relatively little attention to the systematic extermination of nearly a million people. Figure 15.3 highlights aggregate news coverage of Rwanda by the (then) three major American broadcast network newscasts. O.J. Simpson's trial received more American network news coverage than the systematic murder of over 800,000 people.

MEDIA EFFECTS ON POLICY

What effect does news content have on policy decision-making? Clearly, the foreign policy realists have a point when they argue that news content offers an uncertain guide to international events. But this fails to address the question of whether media content of any kind has the capacity to affect foreign affairs decision-making.

Critics and policymakers alike assume that it does. Critics who favour robust international responses to humanitarian crises tend to fault the news media for not paying more attention to Rwanda in the early weeks and months of the crisis, implicitly suggesting that, had more attention been given by the news media, Western policymakers might have responded differently. It is indeed true that most of the attention was paid to the Hutu refugees in the camps around Rwanda, rather than to the Hutu massacre of Tutsi in Rwanda earlier. Figure 15.4 shows the frequency of CNN datelines (the locations from which a report is filed or transmitted) over the course of the massacre and humanitarian crisis in the refugee camps in Zaire.

Figure 15.4 CNN coverage of the Rwanda genocide and refugee crisis 1994

Source: Livingston and Stephen 1998.

The vast majority of CNN news stories about Rwanda were not about the Hutu massacre of Tutsi and moderate Hutu; instead, they were about the Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda on the heels of the RPF military campaign to stop the genocide and unseat the Hutu government. My own observations of the Western press operating in Nairobi, Kenya, at the time indicated an initial mix of fatigue (Somalia had demoralized journalists working out of Nairobi, the hub of the Western press corps for much of Africa) and a sense of danger that prevented closer coverage at the time. This certainly was not universally true. Mark Doyle and Fergal Keane of the BBC, Terry Leonard of the Associated Press and Donatella Lorch, then with The New York Times, took enormous personal risks in their attempts to cover the massacre, as did many others. Yet, despite these efforts, most media attention failed to focus on the start of the crisis when, presumably, something could have been done to stop the massacre. But does media coverage actually have the presumed effect implied by the criticism? If more media attention had been given to events in Rwanda early in 1994, could the massacre have been prevented?

By the spring of 1994, American policymakers and pundits assumed that coverage of the Somalia crisis drove the US decision to intervene. CNN and other television networks covered the suffering of the Somali people and US policymakers responded with the intervention. Wanting to 'learn the lessons of Somalia', the Clinton administration was adamant: it would not allow pictures of yet another humanitarian crisis in Africa to drive foreign policy decision-making. That is what happened in Somalia and it would not happen in Rwanda.

The only problem with that lesson of history is that it is wrong. The American inaction in Rwanda was the consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of the policy decisions made by the Bush administration going into Somalia in 1992. In their analysis of US media coverage of events in Somalia in 1991–92, Livingston and Eachus (1995–6) found no evidence to suggest that media determined or otherwise served as the primary cause of the administration's decision to intervene in Somalia. Instead, the decision was the consequence of political pressure put on the administration by key members of Congress, and even from officials within the administration itself. Livingston and Eachus's findings have been substantiated numerous times by subsequent analyses. In a summary of a decade of fairly intense scholarly investigation of the CNN effect, media researcher Piers Robinson (2000) concluded that only under certain and generally unlikely conditions might one expect media coverage to force intervention decisions on policymakers. 'No evidence was found that media coverage could cause policymakers to pursue the more risky option of deploying ground troops during humanitarian crises. The idea of media driving this kind of intervention is a myth' (Robinson 2000: 128). After noting the lack of effect television coverage of Bosnia had on US policymaking, Susan Moeller (1999: 225) reached similar conclusions concerning Rwanda:

And the Holocaust language and images of genocide in Rwanda did not force American military intervention there either. Stabilizing the internal situation appeared to officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere to be a black hole of commitment. But once the slaughter ended and the refugees settled in camps at the borders, the potential debacle turned into a doable humanitarian effort that the U.S. forces were well-equipped to solve. So the Americans went in.

Yet the conventional wisdom was that media were responsible for setting US policy priorities in Somalia and, therefore, posed that same risk (in the view of those who wished to avoid intervention) or promise (for those who viewed the lack of massacre coverage as the missing ingredient in what would otherwise surely have been an intervention). Media simply do not have that capability, however understood.

That said, it is important to note that media content can indeed have an effect on policy. Television diplomacy in a global information environment, for example, accelerates deliberations. Rather than communicating through traditional diplomatic channels, leaders communicate through media programming of various types. There are other obvious effects. Military operations are vulnerable to disruption by media images in at least two ways. First, such coverage may sap morale. During war, US and civilian casualty coverage is avoided at all costs for fear that support for the war will be adversely affected. Second, in this era of global real-time television coverage using highly mobile satellite technology, reporters may compromise operational security, the secrecy concerning military plans and manoeuvres essential to modern warfare (Livingston 1997). But these effects are not the same as those implied by Kennan and others who have argued that media can establish foreign policy priorities. Policy agenda-setting is left to policymakers.

NOTES

¹ It would be inaccurate to ascribe the shift in focus away from international news solely to the end of the Cold War. Important changes to the internal dynamics of news and news culture in the United States were occurring simultaneously. Growing concentration of media ownership is pointed to by many scholars as a principle cause of the erosion of international news, and serious news generally. With an eye toward the bottom line, corporate media began filling airtime with exactly the sort of stories identified in the content analysis results mentioned: crime, scandal and features. International news is expensive to produce and often, it is sometimes argued, unimportant to American audiences – except when the story from abroad involves Americans. See Bagdikian (1997) for a full discussion of the concentration of media ownership.

REFERENCES

Bagdikian, B. 1997. The Media Monopoly (5th edn.). Beacon Press, Boston, MA, USA.

Hickey, N. 1998. Money Lust: How Pressure for Profit is Perverting Journalism. Columbia Journalism Review, July/August: 32–3.

Hoge, J.F., Jr 1997. Foreign News: Who Gives a Damn? Columbia Journalism Review, November/December: 49.

Kennan, G. 1993a. Through a Glass Darkly. The New York Times, 30 September 25.

—— 1993b. If TV Drives Foreign Policy, we're in Trouble. The New York Times, 24 October 14.

Kurtz, H. 2002. Start Shredding the News: are the Revenue-Hungry Networks Ready to Dump Dinner Hour Broadcasts? Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 18–24 March: 6–7.

Livingston, S. 1996. Beyond the CNN Effect: an Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Intervention. Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

—— 1997. 'Beyond the CNN Effect: the Media-Foreign Policy Dynamic'. In P. Norris (ed.). Politics and the Press: the News Media and their Influences. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO, USA.

Livingston, S. and T. Eachus. 1995–96. Humanitarian Crises and U.S. Foreign Policy: Somalia and the CNN Effect Reconsidered. Political Communication, Winter.

—— 1999. 'Too Little Too Late: American Television Coverage of the Rwandan Crisis of 1994'. In H. Adelman and A. Suhrke (eds). Path to a Genocide: the Rwandan Crisis from Uganda to Zaire. Transaction Publishers, Brunswick, NJ, USA.

Livingston, S. and D. Stephen. 1998. 'American Network Coverage of Genocide in Rwanda in the Context of General Trends in International News'. In S. Schmeidl and H. Adelman (eds). Early Warning and Early Response. Columbia International Affairs Online, New York, NY, USA: 1–18.

Moeller, S. 1999. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge, New York, NY, USA.

Robinson, P. 2002. The CNN Effect: the Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. Routledge, New York, NY, USA.

Patterson, T.E. 2000. Doing Well and Doing Good: How Soft News and Critical Journalism are Shrinking the News Audience and Weakening Democracy – and What News Outlets Can Do About it. Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

USMUN (United States Mission to the United Nations). 1996. Global Humanitarian Emergencies, 1996. USMUN, New York, NY, USA. Available at <www.reliefweb.int/library/usglobal/ghe96_1.html> (accessed 16 September 2005).

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