19
1) South Africa under apartheid had an extensive media censorship. A decree from
1985 required print reporters to obtain permission from local police before entering
emergency areas, and authorizes the police to supervise their movements. More
relevant for the perspective of this study is, however, that Western media compa-
nies started to boycott South Africa themselves and withdrew more and more their
reporters from South Africa in the course of the 1980s.
2) An analysis of the effects of foreign policy measures on bilateral relations towards
South Africa has to deal with the specific problem that foreign policy interventions
in this case very likely affected both the main interesting dependent variable (i.e.
the dyad) and the media bias. It has to be assumed that a governments intervention
into its countries bilateral relations towards South Africa also increased the media
attention on the country’s South Africa relations. Thus, observable changes may
also be influenced by a changed reporting on the dyad.
A possible strategy to correct the assumed case specific media biases is to identify the
changes in the reporting of the news stories on South Africa. The first step is to locate
different event types and how they were reported over time. If there are systematic
changes in the reporting of these events, a diagnosis of the media bias should be possi-
ble.
6 Conclusions
Does South Africa serve as model case for the question of imposing of international
sanctions against an international law breaker? The answer is probably no. Empirical
studies are drawing a rather pessimistic picture of the effectiveness of international
sanctions as a foreign policy tool of influence, although, in the case of South Africa,
scholars and policymakers were debating the role that international sanctions played to
overcome apartheid back and forth. But because of important case specific parameters
such as the country’s role in the international political system and its position in the
world market, the South Africa was an exceptional case and generalizations are hardly
feasible.
Convention