Somalia: Creating Space for Fresh Approaches to Peacebuilding

impact of international media in somalia
Media and humanitarian/military interventions
After the first Gulf War in 1991 and the UN/US interventions in Somalia between
1992 and 1994, the predominant school of thought was that there was a “CNNeffect”
that influenced a government’s decision to both intervene in and exit a
conflict. 1 The CNN-effect refers to the speed and volume of media in the late 20 th
and early 21 st centuries that brings the suffering of people around the world into
Western homes through their televisions screens, computers, and newspapers.
This coverage by Western media outlets, from CNN to the New York Times and
the BBC, puts pressure on government officials to take action to end the violence
and suffering being shown on the news, even if intervening does not further a
government’s foreign policy interests. 2
Extensive studies of the CNN-effect have been conducted with regard to the
US intervention in Somalia in 1992. The most compelling evidence of the effect
comes from a statement former President George H.W. Bush made concerning
his decision to intervene:
Former President Bush conceded Saturday that he ordered US troops into Somalia
in 1992 after seeing heart-rending pictures of starving waifs on television … Bush
said that as he and his wife, Barbara, watched television at the White House and
saw “those starving kids … in quest of a little pitiful cup of rice”, he phoned Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“Please come over to the White House”, Bush recalled telling the military leaders. “I –
we – can’t watch this anymore. You’ve got to do something.” 3
Similarly, the deaths of eighteen US soldiers during a Mogadishu battle and the
television images of their bodies being dragged through the streets is commonly
believed to have precipitated America’s hurried withdrawal from Somalia. 4
However, more recent research has shown that the CNN-effect is not as powerful
as once believed. An alternative theory of media impact is that of Manufacturing
Consent. This literature posits that the government guides media coverage in
accordance with its own interests and agenda, as opposed to the media guiding
governmental policy. 5 Within the Somalia intervention example, proponents of
this theory claim that the government was already leaning towards involvement,
and the media simply converged with this likely policy outcome. 6
Piers Robinson attempts to integrate these two theories with his policy-media
interaction model. This model proposes that when the government’s policy has
already been set, the media tends to conform to it, and therefore has no independent
influence on foreign policy towards a particular conflict. However, in
cases where either members of the government are divided concerning the best
policy, or when the policy is uncertain, the media will reflect those debates, and
has an opportunity to influence the decision to choose one policy over another. 7
When using this model to determine the media’s impact on peacebuilding efforts,
it is important to analyze how the media is framing the conflict:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient
in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition,
causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation. 8
1 Robinson, Piers, “The CNN
Effect: Can the News Media
Drive Foreign Policy?” Review of
International Studies, 25 (1999):
p. 302.
2 Spencer, Graham, The Media and
Peace: From Vietnam to the ‘War on
Terror’, (New York, NY: Palgrave
Macmillan: 2005): pp. 24-25.
3 Hines, Craig, “Pity, not US
Security, Motivated US of GIs in
Somalia, Bush Says”, The Houston
Chronicle, 24 October 1999: A11.
4 Hammond, Philip, Framing
Post-Cold War Conflicts: The Media
and International Intervention, (New
York, NY: Manchester University
Press, 2007).
5 Robinson, “The CNN Effect”: pp.
303-304.
6 Robinson, “The CNN Effect”:
p. 307.
7 Robinson, Piers, “Theorizing
the Influence of Media on World
Politics: Models of Media Influence
on Foreign Policy”, European
Journal of Communication, 16, 4
(2001): p. 531
8 Entman, Robert, “Framing:
Towards Clarification of a
Fractured Paradigm”, Journal of
Communication, 43, 4 (1993): p. 52,
original emphasis.
53