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By Piers Robinson. NY: Routledge, 2002. 177 pp. ISBN 0415259053.
News From Abroad. By Donald R. Shanor. NY: Columbia University Press, 2003. 247 pp. ISBN 0231122411.
Written under the shadow of 9/11 and subsequent events, including the U.S. war on terror and the conflict in Iraq, these two seemingly disparate treatments of international news coverage foreground some pressing conceptual and methodological issues that confront scholars and observers seeking to understand the role of information in the global arena. Shanor's study is presented as an analysis of whether profit or quality should prevail in the reporting of foreign news in the U.S. and reads, itself, like an extraordinarily well researched piece of investigative journalism. Robinson's expose of "the CNN effect," on the other hand, attempts to craft a new theory of media-policy interaction to assess whether, and the circumstances under which, news coverage affects policies geared towards military intervention in humanitarian crises. At first glance, there is little uniting these two books beyond a general concern with the complexities of understanding and producing "foreign" news. Taken together, however, they provide a compelling argument for applying, as Robinson notes "a variety of research strategies" to make sense of the dynamics which govern and are effected by international news coverage.
Robinson explores an important and persistent question regarding the role of news media in affecting policy decisions, particularly during times of crisis. Focussing on various circumstances within which American forces were deployed as humanitarian intervention, he employs a multiple-layered theory and method to examine evidence for the explanatory efficacy of "the CNN Effect," or the conviction that media coverage of conflict and suffering in crisis-ridden zones of the world cause policymakers to apply military measures. Particularly critical of previous attempts to explain such matters based solely on interview data, he calls for more systematic and theory-driven approaches to isolate and explain the effect of news coverage on the policy process. His own "policy-media interaction model" instead offers a two-way understanding of the role of media in decision-making, based on more specific variables (such as the degree to which certainty about policy can be observed), and other "situational" matters (such as the personal predilections of world leaders). The approach is generally useful: he melds analysis of news frames (seeking...