| In the 1990s, Americans witnessed live televised images of U.S. soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, wounded American prisoners of war paraded in front of video cameras in Iraq and Kosovo while their families were interviewed simultaneously on live television at home, and scud missile attacks in Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War. These events have brought foreign policy directly into America's living rooms. By transforming complex, distant events into entertaining and compelling human dramas, these images have captured the American public's attention to a far greater extent than printed reports, photographs and tape-delayed videos ever could. Does the nature and extent of media coverage of foreign crises influence public opinion in ways that affect presidential decisionmaking, and if so, how? I argue that the Information Revolution has fundamentally changed how the media covers foreign crises, that, as a result, Americans are becoming more attentive to such crises and, in turn, that an attentive public makes it difficult for presidents to use force as a foreign policy tool. I employ content analyses of media coverage of various foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys to demonstrate trends in public opinion and to relate increases in attentiveness to changes in the mass media, particularly television. I find that even as the Americans declare themselves in countless surveys to be less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era than at any time since World War II, they are simultaneously growing increasingly attentive to foreign crises. I then develop a formal model to derive hypotheses concerning when and how public opinion will influence presidential crisis decisionmaking. To test the hypotheses, I conduct statistical analyses of all U.S. post-WWII foreign crises and a case study of the 1992–94 U.S. intervention in Somalia. I find that an attentive public can inhibit presidents from escalating foreign crises, particularly if the strategic stakes involved are relatively modest. I also find evidence of a growing reluctance by the U.S. to become engaged in low-stakes military operations and increasingly risk-averse tactics in those low-stakes conflicts in which the U.S. becomes involved. |
