The CNN Effect in International Conflicts - Free Essay Example

Introduction

On November 29, 1990, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force by the United States and demanded the withdrawal from Iraq until January 15, 1991. James Baker, US Secretary of State, issued the final ultimatum to Iraq using CNN, not the American Foreign Affairs Officer in Baghdad. This created the CNN effect. Governments and newspapers no longer kept public information; the power had been transferred to the media, namely through television. The CNN effect and the Arnett factor became essential features of postmodern wars: governments and the military had to adapt to journalists' ability to show the other side - the enemy side - of war. The international consensus on the seriousness of the invasion by Saddam led to the creation of the largest military alliance assembled since the Second World War. The United States obtained support from the Middle East, through Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Oman. In the West, through Portugal, Spain, Italy, and, mainly, the United Kingdom. The current paper will analyze the CNN effect regarding international wars.

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The CNN Effect: The Iraqi War

CNN has had the technological ability to broadcast news "live" from anywhere in the world around the clock since the early 1980s. Nevertheless, it was not until the Gulf War in 1991 that public attention was drawn to the news broadcaster as a specific phenomenon of changed communication culture. The assumed CNN effect is of course not limited to CNN reporting, but rather applicable to the entire TV news landscape, even outside the United States (Zingarelli, 2010). CNN is only the earliest representation of a structural change in news production and distribution and is therefore used interchangeably for its idiosyncrasies: the transmission of emotionally powerful television images and comments in real-time from anywhere in the world.

CNN achieved its global breakthrough at the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991. CNN correspondent Peter Arnett was one of the few western journalists allowed to stay in Baghdad at that time and presented the ghostly images of the nightly US air raids on television screens all over the world - and the propaganda on both sides (Robinson, 2011). Suddenly CNN was no longer just a television station, but, according to critics, an active part of the events. The CNN effect was born and the global reporting of crises, in which the viewer could directly follow the events at home became possible. Governments were forced to act by the power of images (Livingston, 2017). The basic concept of the CNN effect, which emerged in the early 1990s, is based on the hypothesis that the specific properties of satellite-supported CNN reporting, namely the transmission of emotionally powerful television images and Real-time comments from any hotspot in the world that would affect foreign policy.

In 1990-1991, Operation Desert Storm mobilized a broad international coalition to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Public opinion of the States involved was unified around a common source of information: CNN. CNN had morphed into a chain with an international audience and had imposed its concept of "continuous information" on the rest of the world (Gilboa et al., 2016). Throughout the conflict, in all parts of the world, the other television networks took their images live and frequently reproduced practically the same comments.

In 1990, as Secretary of State James Baker III struggled to convince public opinion of the need for a war on Iraq, a public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton spread rumors that Iraqi soldiers had robbed incubators in maternity hospitals in Kuwait, leaving more than three hundred premature babies to die (Regan, 2002). The rumor was confirmed by an Amnesty International report. Public hearings were held at the United States Congress, broadcast live by CNN, and broadcast around the world. A young nurse, remaining anonymous, testified in tears of these crimes.

After the war, a journalist from Harper's Magazine showed that this accusation was false and that the young nurse was, in fact, the daughter of a Kuwaiti diplomat. The deception had been staged by one of Hill & Knowlton's directors, Victoria Clarke. In this affair, the Bush Sr. administration has not only sought to poison Parliament but also international public opinion (Regan, 2002). She achieved this by letting the "CNN effect" play. At the moment, no journalist made the cross-checks that he would not have failed to do usually to verify the reported facts. All of them considered admissible an anonymous testimony that they would normally have regarded with suspicion. More alarmingly, no rules were established to prevent the reproduction of such manipulation. Worse yet, no one protested when Victoria Clarke became the current spokesperson for the Department of Defense.

During Operation Desert Storm, the then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff Colin Powell announced that Saddam Hussein had opened the floodgates of his oil wells, dumping the crude into the Gulf and causing the greatest ecological disaster of all time (Livingston, 2011). CNN confirmed that oil slicks threatened the coasts and broadcast images of an oiled cormorant on a beach. However, from day one, Reuters had explained that a small oil spill followed the attack on an Iraqi tanker by the US military who believed, probably wrongly, that the building was carrying an arsenal (Robinson, 2019). The accusation leveled against Saddam Hussein allowed Washington to cover up a military blunder and, in passing, to demonize Saddam Hussein in the eyes of environmentalists.

Once again, the “CNN effect” was enough to give the information credibility. Apart from the fact that no journalist immediately verified the extent of the oil spill, no one either carefully observed the images or considered the credibility of the accusation (Robinson, 2005). It was only much later that people saw old ITN images, that it was observed that oil slicks could not oil a beach as long as they were drifting at sea and that this race of cormorant did not live in the Gulf. Above all, it was noted that this accusation was stupid since the Iraqis had no interest in destroying the shores of Kuwait they claimed.

This leads to another observation: information does not need to be credible to benefit from the CNN effect, it is enough that it has a tragic dimension. Thus, Dick Cheney, seeking to demonstrate that Iraq had not invaded Kuwait to reestablish its initial borders, but by expansionist will, affirmed that Saddam Hussein foreseeing future conquests had endowed himself with the "fourth army of the world" (after the USA, the USSR, and the United Kingdom) (Bahador, 2011). This accusation was unfounded since Iraq did not have the means to equip itself with such an army, it indeed invested a lot of military budgets but it only became the ninth in the world. Certainly, during the war it waged against Iran, Iraq devoted most of its energy to its military budget until it became the ninth in the world. But the country had emerged bloodless from a decade of excruciatingly deadly fighting, without being able to win. It was only a third world state equipped with many obsolete armored vehicles, recycled from the scraps of Western armies.

The CNN Effect: Attack on Afghanistan

At the end of the 90s, at the initiative of General Colin Powell, who had become the administrator of AOL (America Online), a complex process of mergers and acquisitions made it possible to create the communications giant AOL-Time-Warner, including CNN. In 2001, Cheney, Powell, Clarke, and the consort team returned to power in Washington.

On September 11, 2001, shortly before 9 a.m., CNN was the first media to broadcast images of the North Tower of the World Trade Center which had just been hit by a plane. The channel, which permanently has a camera installed on a New York rooftop, allowing the city to be filmed, simply placed on the screen a fixed shot, poorly framed (Coban, 2016). The commentator did not know what exactly had happened, what type of plane it was, and whether it was an accidental or criminal act. However, a few minutes later, and although no investigation had started, CNN claimed to know, from an anonymous official source, that it was a terrorist attack and that it was ordered by Osama bin Laden.

At around 10 a.m., CNN announced that two explosions had been heard at the Pentagon and that seven people had died. Then, an hour later, CNN claimed that a hijacked plane was heading for the Pentagon. Around noon, CNN reported that, according to Victoria Clarke, a hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon. Channels around the world relayed the CNN version minute by minute without noticing the inconsistency of the chronology.

It is worth recalling that Victoria Clarke, spokesperson for the Department of Defense, is the person who staged the false testimony in Congress in the Kuwait incubator case in 1990. According to her, Ms. Clarke knew that the attack was committed with a hijacked plane because Donald Rumsfeld himself had testified. Indeed, the Secretary of Defense, claimed that during this perilous moment, he had abandoned his office to help the firefighters at the other end of the Pentagon (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004). From a distance, he had distinctly recognized in the building the wreckage of an airplane, precisely a Boeing 757, even as the firefighters, penetrating with their fireproof suits in the heart of the blaze claimed to have seen nothing that evokes pieces of a plane.

It is worth remembering that the weapon that struck the Pentagon entered the ground floor, through a porte-cochere, without damaging the facade, and broke up inside the building while exploding. However, CNN military correspondent Jamie McIntyre, who has an office inside the Pentagon, said that a Boeing 757, over 100 tons, 38 meters wingspan and 12 meters in height high, entered through a porte-cochere without damaging the doorframe, then dematerialized in the building.

At the same time, a floor of the annex of the White House which accommodates the technical services of the presidency and the offices of the vice-president was devastated by a fire. ABC was broadcasting live footage of the drama, not CNN, so this event was absent from foreign screens. During the day, the major US networks agreed on the free reciprocal borrowing of images. For them, the priority was to have images to fill the live. It did not matter what look these images reflected (Jakobsen, 2000). In other words, their concern was to show images, without seeking meaning, at the risk of falling victim to illusions. A headline appeared on the CNN screens: "America is under attack". CNN indicated that the attacks would be the work of a foreign power (state or not). Yet at that time, no journalist had substantiated this charge.

At around 3 p.m., CNN announced that teams from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), located in Atlanta as the channel's headquarters, had been mobilized. They had to prepare for an anthrax attack on the United States by bin Laden. No explanation was provided to understand why the authorities feared an attack by Bin Laden, or why it was precisely an anthrax attack. However, to people who interpreted facts after the fact, these imputations seemed quite strange. In October 2001, a week after the attack on Afghanistan, when American public opinion began to slow, five letters trapped with anthrax killed five people (Hawkins, 2011). Numerous clues, revealed by investigators to the press, made it possible to build a bundle of presumption showing that the letter bombs had been fabricated in advance by the terrorists of September 11.