Dying for attention: Television coverage and American participation in humanitarian crises during the post-Cold War era

The increase in 'real-time' coverage of international events has lead some policymakers to believe television media, rather than traditional foreign policy elites, set American policy agenda on complex humanitarian crises. This study analyses four such crises during the 1990's---Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda and East Timor---to determine the relationship between television news and American foreign policy. I argue that to determine if television media influences American foreign policy, it is necessary to analyze not only news content, but also administration policy decisions throughout a crisis.; My analysis utilizes process tracing and content analysis over two issue areas: famine and genocide, testing three separate models---Indexing, the CNN Effect, and Mediated Policymaking---with each model predicting different patterns of agenda setting behavior. I draw upon a variety of primary sources to establish the news frames, pictorial images, and policies present during the crises, including news stories from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives, declassified government documents from the National Security Archive, and statements from the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents and Foreign Policy Bulletin.; My findings indicate that television news did not influence policy in the four cases analyzed. Most crisis stories either aired simultaneously with administration policy decisions or shortly after decisions had been made, suggesting that television follows the government's lead during emerging humanitarian crises. Furthermore, when looking at the content of the media coverage, the trend is to support the administration's policy decisions, with instances of intervention garnering substantial airtime and positive portrayals of American efforts. In cases of non-intervention, minimal coverage to the crisis is given, and no effort is made to explain why the crisis is politically unimportant. Finally, while dramatic images of suffering do appear in coverage of all four cases, the dramatic impact of these compelling visuals is downplayed, when the verbal content of the stories is taken into account: story lines were devoted to issues other than the need for intervention. Given these results, I conclude that Indexing and Mediated Policymaking best describe the relationship between the media and policymakers.