9
in the New York Times (September 30, 1993, p. A25) eliciting a sharp denial from Rather titled
“Don’t Blame TV for Getting Us into Somalia" (October 14, 1993, p. A22). Rather asserted:
“Reporters sometimes feel strongly about the stories they cover, and some may wish for the
power to direct public opinion and to guide America policy—but they don’t have it.”
2
MacNeil
(1994) followed up on this debate and summarized well the positions of the two sides. He added
however, a single decisive variable: leadership. If a leader can define the national interest clearly,
"television--however lurid, responsible or irresponsible--will not drive foreign policy. When he
fails to do so, it may" (p. 130).
The Scholarly Evidence
Scholarly and professional studies of the CNN effect present mixed, contradictory, and confusing
results. Studies of the humanitarian interventions in Kurdistan and Somalia well demonstrate this
record. Schorr (1991) and Shaw (1996) argued that television coverage of Saddam Hussein's
massacre of Kurds forced respectively the governments of the United States and Britain to
reverse their non-intervention policy. Miller (2002) however, applied the "positioning
hypothesis" from discursive psychology to examine the same issue and reached the opposite
conclusion. The "positioning hypothesis" allows a researcher to analyze conversations between
institutions such as the media and the government through questions in press conferences and
official responses. Miller found that CNN's coverage did not affect the American and the British
policy in Kurdistan.
The U.S. intervention in Somalia has been the second battle ground for studies of the CNN
effect and it also has yielded similar controversial results. Cohen (1994) wrote that television
“has demonstrated its power to move governments. By focusing daily on the starving children in
Somalia, a pictorial story tailor-made for television, TV mobilized the conscience of the nation’s
public institutions, compelling the government into a policy of intervention for humanitarian
Convention