Abdel Salam Sidahmed, Walter C. Soderlund, E. Donald Briggs. The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur: The Role of Mass Media. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. 172 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-3806-9.
Reviewed by Keisha Haywood (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
Published on H-Human-Rights (March, 2011)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
Alerting and Framing: Darfur, the American Media, and John Q. Public
In The Responsibility To Protect, Abdel Salam Sidahmed, Walter C. Soderlund, and E. Donald Briggs examine the role of the “CNN effect” in shaping the American public’s ideas about the crisis in Darfur. Specifically, they set out to address three questions: Did the American media’s coverage of Darfur alert the American public to the crisis? Did the media’s coverage of Darfur help frame the public’s beliefs about whether and how the United States should intervene in the crisis? Did the American public’s beliefs about Darfur influence U.S. foreign policy in the region?
The authors begin their examination of these questions by explaining the evolution of international norms about whether foreign governments and the United Nations could and should intervene when governments abuse the human rights of their people. They explain that before the early 1990s, the prevailing belief about international intervention was that every country is sovereign, and no country or intergovernmental organization has the right to interfere in domestic affairs, regardless of the situation. The authors explain that atrocities in Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were catalysts for a shift from a strict noninterventionist policy to one of intervention to provide humanitarian assistance with the permission of the host country.
The authors then provide a detailed background of the crisis in Darfur, going back to precolonial Sudan. The most important aspect of this background is their discussion of the changing nature of violence in the region, which began as localized conflict over cattle-grazing and land rights. They identify several factors that led to the escalation of violence, including the flow of arms from the Sudanese government, cross-border conflict between Chadian and Sudanese ethnic groups, the weakening of traditional methods of conflict resolution, etc. After this discussion, the authors dive into the analysis of American television and newspaper coverage of the crisis, now considered by many to be genocide, and how this coverage shaped Americans’ views about whether the United States should intervene. Sidahmed et al. identify the number of times each medium shared news about Darfur, and how the language and images used influenced the American people’s belief that the UN should send peacekeepers to the region and that the United States should support this effort. The authors show that early coverage of Darfur (2003-04) was lacking, but that between 2005 and 2007, stories about Darfur increased dramatically in both television and newspapers. During the latter period, the media, government officials, and celebrities called for UN intervention in what had clearly become one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history.
Based on this evidence, the authors find that the American media’s coverage of Darfur alerted the American public to the crisis and framed the coverage in such a way that influenced the public’s belief that the UN should intervene. They also argue that the public’s calls for intervention may have influenced American officials, including secretaries of state, to make Darfur a priority. These findings provide important additional evidence to the existing debate over the real impact of the “CNN effect.” Often, the relationship between media coverage of an event and the public’s beliefs about this event is assumed, or discussed in the abstract, but Sidahmed et al. examine and test this relationship with a real-world example. The findings will be interesting not only to academicians in various disciplines, but also to policymakers and the media. Evidence that the media can both inform and shape the public’s opinion might influence decisions by producers, editors, reporters, and journalists about whether and how to cover current events. This evidence also tells policymakers to pay closer attention to the news coverage of a current event, and even closer attention to the viewer and reader responses to the coverage for anecdotal evidence about possible support for a particular course of action.
This relevance and accessibility to various audiences are important strengths of The Responsibility to Protect. The book leaves out much of the jargon that makes academic books inaccessible to audiences outside of academia, and often inaccessible outside of specific disciplines and subdisciplines. The introduction includes an outline of the book that tells the reader what to expect, and each chapter logically works toward the authors’ goal of addressing their three central questions. The in-depth background of the conflict provided in chapter 2 is another aspect of the book that makes it user-friendly. The reader does not have to possess a deep understanding of the conflict to understand the authors’ argument and evidence.
Methodologically, the authors’ explanation and use of content analysis provides the reader with a clear understanding of how they came to their conclusions. Their discussion of their sources, data, and specific methods of coding and analyzing the data is transparent enough to allow the reader to decide whether she agrees with their findings. It is clear that the authors put a great deal of thought into choosing the right methods for this particular study, and then adhered rigorously to these methods throughout each phase of the research.
Along with the obvious strengths of this book, there are, however, two important shortcomings. First, the authors use a rather narrow reading of the word “media,” and limit their sources to the three major broadcast networks that have an evening news program (NBC, ABC, CBS), and the New York Times. There are few American newspapers with the extensive coverage of international current events of the New York Times, so perhaps it is not unusual that the authors chose to collect data from only one newspaper. For television coverage of Darfur, however, it seems counterintuitive that they did not include cable news channels, or even specific cable news programs, as another type of source. After all, what is the “CNN effect” without CNN (and MSNBC, Fox News, BBC America, etc.)? Many Americans rely on cable news networks for most, if not all, of their news, especially news dealing with current events around the world. Perhaps there was a valid reason for the omission of these networks, but the authors do not provide it. The authors also do not provide a reason for not including Internet news sources, where a large portion of the American public gets its news. To justify the exclusion of cable news networks and Internet sources, the authors might have provided data on the viewership of the three networks and circulation of the New York Times, and compared these statistics with those on viewership for cable news networks and visitors to news Web sites. If this comparison showed that more people watch and read the sources the authors used than watch and read other types of sources, the authors would have provided sound evidence that they made the best choice regarding types of sources to include. Another option would have been to collect poll data on where Americans go for information on world news.
The second major limitation of this book involves the authors’ data on whether and how the American public received news about Darfur from the chosen sources. For the question of how the American media covered Darfur, the authors provide a great deal of information on the number of stories about Darfur, the types of images used, the language used by interviewers and interviewees, and how each of these indicators changed over time. In fact, the better part of three chapters is spent providing the reader with detailed information on these indicators, demonstrating that the authors did a thorough job collecting data on their explanatory factor (i.e., American media coverage of Darfur). The authors fall short, however, of providing the same amount of data on what they are actually trying to explain, namely whether the American public was alerted to the crisis by media coverage, and whether the public believed the UN and/or the United States should intervene. They offer polling data that show that by April 2007, when Sudan’s president decided to allow a UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur, the majority of the American public knew about the crisis, and almost half of the American public believed the United States should do something to stop the genocide (p. 95). This polling data comes from only one poll, and the authors do not identify whether the media was the source of the American public’s knowledge of and ideas about Darfur. It is impossible to know whether the American media, especially with the relatively limited number of sources the authors use, actually alerted the public to what was going on in Darfur, let alone influenced their beliefs about whether the international community should intervene in the crisis. A much stronger argument about whether the CNN effect really happened in this case could have been made with more polling data that asked Americans the following types of questions: How did you first learn about Darfur? Do you believe the United States should try to stop what is happening in Darfur? Why do you believe the United States should get involved? How did you feel when you saw images of suffering in Darfur? The American public’s answers to these questions would have helped the authors accomplish their stated goal of understanding whether and how the American media’s coverage of Darfur alerted the public to the crisis, and whether this coverage portrayed the crisis in a way that led viewers and readers to believe the United States should intervene. The authors would have had a strong argument for a causal effect, but instead they are only able to show a correlation between increased coverage and the public’s knowledge of and desire to do something about Darfur.
Despite these shortcomings, this book includes significant empirical research on how the media cover world events, and how this coverage might influence the public and policymakers. It offers important background information on the human rights abuses and humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Their findings that the media influences how the public thinks about current events are even more relevant today as the world watches media coverage of new and continuing human rights abuses in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran, and humanitarian crises in Haiti, south Sudan, and, of course, Darfur.
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Citation:
Keisha Haywood. Review of Sidahmed, Abdel Salam; Soderlund, Walter C.; Briggs, E. Donald, The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur: The Role of Mass Media.
H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30390
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