PROOF Contents

PROOF

Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Acknowledgments x

Introduction 1

1 Media Power: A Radical View 5 1 Media effects 10 2 Media power 16 3 For a new analytical framework 20 4 The sources of power: the image and the arena 25 5 A four-dimensional deﬁnition 31 6 Two case studies 33 7 Looking for media effects 38

2 Power over the Agenda 47 1 ‘Agending’ Kosovo 53 1.1 The beginning: Kosovo in 1992 58 1.2 The creation of a visual link with Bosnia: Kosovo in 1993 61 1.3 Climbing the agenda: Kosovo between 1997 and 1998 63 2 ‘Agending’ Afghanistan 65 2.1 Building salience 66 2.2 Building narratives 71 3 Comparison and conclusions 76

3 Power over the Process 80 1 Real-time Kosovo 82 2 Real-time Afghanistan 92 3 Comparison and conclusions 96

4 Power over the Channel 99 1 Media Diplomacy in Kosovo 101 1.1 The level of the actor 102 1.2 The level of the interaction 107

vii PROOF viii Contents

2 Media Diplomacy in Afghanistan 113 2.1 The level of the actor 114 2.2 The level of the interaction 118 3 Comparison and conclusions 123

5 Power over the Instruments 126 1 Kosovo’s Semiotic War 128 1.1 The air strikes 132 2 Afghanistan’s Semiotic War 146 2.1 Operation Enduring Freedom 149 3 Comparison and conclusions 160

6 Conclusions 163 1 Media power clariﬁed 165 1.1 The medium and the system 167 1.2 Narratives, framing, and the image 169 1.3 Release of sensitive information 173 1.4 The arena 175 2 Implications for warfare 176 2.1 Mediated perceptions, analogies, and practices 178 2.2 Mediated interaction 181 3 What’s next 182

Notes 185

Bibliography 188

Index 216 PROOF

1 Media Power: A Radical View

Even though they are recognized as being among the most important agents of contemporary societies (see Debord, 1967; Baudrillard, 1981; Harvey, 1990), the media have rarely been investigated as an agent contributing to the transformation of war.∗ That a transformation has occurred seems to be confirmed by the constellation of labels that have been used to define contemporary conflict: it has been called a war that is ‘of the third kind’ (Holsti, 1996), ‘postmodern’ (Gray, 1997), ‘without identity’ (Laïdi, 1998), ‘new’ (Kaldor, 1999; Shaw, 2005), ‘virtual’ (Ignatieff, 2001), ‘virtuous’ (Der Derian, 2001), ‘humane’ (Coker, 2001), and even a form of ‘spectator-sport’ (McInnes, 2002). Besides the nuances differentiating each scholar’s view, contemporary conflict and warfare have been invariably connected to several recur- rent elements: globalization; the decline of the state; the emergence of transnational relations, both cultural and economic; late capitalism; post-industrialism; the end of ideologies and metaphysics; post-heroism; and the rise of the ‘society of spectacle’ and the information age.1 Only Der Derian and Shaw recognize an active role of the media in defining the new nature of the Western way of war. Der Derian’s ‘virtuous war’ is the result of a new alliance of the military–industrial– media–entertainment network. Moreover, it is characterized by the production of a new configuration of power in which ‘made-for-TV wars and Hollywood war movies blur, military war games and computer video games blend, mock disasters and real accidents collide’ (Der Derian, 2001, p. xi). At the heart of a ‘virtuous war’ is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance, with no or minimal casualties. Shaw (2000, 2005) argues that Western warfare changed after the Vietnam War when it became clear that it is necessary to legitimize a military intervention

5 PROOF

6 Media Power and the Transformation of War in the eyes of the public in order to win it. War, he explains, is nowadays fought in a context of global surveillance, where ‘national publics take notice of what allied governments and public think, as well as of a broader international official and public opinion’ (Shaw, 2005, p. 75). As a consequence, war ‘must be strictly time-limited’ (ibid., p. 76); ‘must, above all, minimize casualties to Western troops’ (ibid., p. 79); ‘should rely heavily on airpower and look to others – as far as possible – to take risks on the ground’ (ibid., p. 81); must kill the enemy ‘efficiently, quickly, and discreetly’ (ibid., p. 82); must minimize civilian casualties (ibid., p. 84); must ‘rely on “precision” weaponry’ (ibid., p. 87); must hide suffering and death (ibid., p. 88); and must have media management at its core because ‘it maintains the narratives that explain the images of war’ (ibid., p. 92). Holsti, Kaldor, and Laïdi, on the other hand, do not turn to the media at all to better understand the new wars. In the case of Gray, Coker, McInnes, and Ignatieff, the media are treated as channels of communication or spaces of war representation rather than as agents or factors shaping contemporary conflict. According to Gray, two of the aspects of contemporary war are related to the media: (1) the increase in human communication which, in turn, increases international networking and changes the nature of local conflicts as well as potentialities for peace; and (2) the centrality of machines, TV satellites included, in war fighting and information control. Ignatieff (2001) claims that the virtual war, which takes place on television screens and at a distance, emerged because it promises to restore war to its place as the continuation of politics by other means. The reality of war is, in fact, blurred by the lexicon of ‘humanitarian action’ and ‘coercive diplomacy’, as well as by the use of precision weaponry for destruction. McInnes (2002) focuses instead on the nature of the enemy which has changed in contemporary conflicts. Indeed, he claims that wars are no longer fought against another state but rather against the regime or government of a state. The result is that we observe war from a distance, as if it is a show, and we experience it as if we are sport spectators. By combining the ideas developed by Coker and Laïdi, Hammond (2007) explains the specific role of the media in postmodern conflict as a reaction to the ‘crisis of meaning’ that Western societies have been experiencing since the end of the Cold War and which coincides with a search for meaning that is ultimately destined to failure. As a result, humanitarian interventions as well as the ‘War on Terror’ and culture wars are used to produce meaning in order to set the political agenda. This in turn has led to a heightened emphasis on images, spectacle, PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 7 and media representation (Hammond, 2007, p. 11); has favored the media’s narrative in many contemporary conflicts, for example, in the Balkans; and has exacerbated a preoccupation with images and the representation of war in all recent military interventions. With a very similar argument, Michalski and Gow (2007) underline how war narratives are constructed and shaped through the charac- ter of ‘moving-image media’. They argue that the image itself and its consumption are salient in shaping and defining the interpretation and understanding of a conflict with respect to its legitimization. The possible meaning of war is limited by the discursive possibility of the moving image, which, at the same time, becomes a potential source of sense and a weapon. ‘The image is a “blunt” instrument’, they argue (Michalski & Gow, 2007, p. 222), and its impact is difficult to control, even when it is part of a propagandistic design. War legitimacy, indeed, is affected not only by intentional attempts to control information and shape public opinion, but also by unintentional effects due to the simple diffusion of images, no matter if they are managed or not. Thus, the media, which are structured by their dependence on the image, can challenge the narratives of the political elites and participate in the construction of war legitimization. Arguably, influential to all of the most recent studies is the notion of ‘mediatization’ as formulated by Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999), Jansson (2002), Schulz (2004), Hjarvard (2004), and Strömbäck (2008) who write of ‘a process through which core elements of a social or cultural activity (like work, leisure, play etc.) assume media form’ (Hjarvard, 2004, p. 48). Furthermore, most of the arguments discussed above are indebted to the works of so-called ‘postmodernist’ scholars like Virilio and Baudrillard (1981). The latter characterizes postmodernity as the age when, in a complete reversal of modernist thinking, images, appear- ances, and signs become more important than material or objective values. According to him, it is the mass media that transfigure reality into simulation through a continuous semiotic process: on the one hand, the media segment, fragment, and transform the world into suc- cessive signs while, on the other hand, we consume, interpret, and experience not the ‘real’ world, but just the signs of it. In this radical analysis of the epistemological effects of the media, Baudrillard argues that events are ultimately transformed into ‘nonevents’: media simulation prevails over the ground-level event and causes events not to take place. Baudrillard uses contemporary conflict as an example of this process when he provocatively claims that the Gulf War in 1991 did not actually happen (Baudrillard, 1991). Moreover, he also argues that the PROOF

8 Media Power and the Transformation of War prevalence of simulation has put the credibility of war, and therefore its social function, under question. According to Baudrillard, after 1945 war passed from being ‘hot’ to ‘cold’, and finally ‘dead’, because it is conducted according to the media model, by annihilating the ‘other’, the enemy, at a distance so that we only have technologically mediated and ‘clean’ relations, while any dual or personal relation is missing. In the absence of confrontation and of anything in contrast to this model, war becomes a military unilateral production whose result is always predictable. Virilio (1977, 1989, 1994, 2002) has focused on the relation between war, speed, technology, and the means of representation, particularly vision machines. His starting point is the analysis of the strategic value of speed which, in contemporary conflict, has supplanted that of place to the point that the question of possession of time has superseded that of territorial appropriation. He then suggests that, with progressing military surveillance, cinematic representation became more and more salient to military strategy now including informatics, computer simulation, and satellite imagery. Images and representations replace ‘the real’ and new modes of weapons based on annihilation of time, disinformation, and high-tech military spectacle change the nature of war. Moreover, he fears, media like cinema and television train and constrain vision, leading to degradation of human beings’ experience of war. Having moved from this conceptual background but arriving to a different conclusion, Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010) argue for the emergence of a specific paradigm of war, which they call ‘diffused warfare’, as the outcome of media-driven processes. According to them, the ‘mediatization of war’, which is the transformation and reconstruction of war in a media form, transforms the knowledge about war which is then employed in all those practices where force and violence are used. This then triggers more diffused causal relations between action and effects which create increasing uncertainty for policymakers. The media, in this respect, are a factor shaping perceptions, enhancing social chaos and complexity, and making the relationship between the government and the public more unpredictable. A different approach to the topic is the one followed by those journalists, sociologists, or scholars in communication and media studies who, either explicitly or implicitly, have developed concepts and theories explaining media effects on contemporary conflicts. Following either the all-powerful media paradigm or the limited effects hypothesis, these works developed, over the same period, very different concepts, such as ‘News Management’ or ‘Media Diplomacy’. The popularity of PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 9 each concept varies according to the events that scholars observe while they write. Thus, if a renewed interest in propaganda followed the Gulf Wars in 1991 and 2003, the adoption of the powerful media paradigm was particularly in vogue after the intervention in Somalia, and again nowadays among those focusing on the emergence of non-Western TV networks, like al-Jazeera, and the World Wide Web, especially after the Arab Spring. Strömbäck (2008) has recently written that the literature on media effects shows that the media can exert influence over individual’s perceptions and opinions, but ‘largely fail to appreciate the interactions, interdependencies, and transactions at a system level and with regards to how the media shape and reshape politics, culture, and people’s sense making’ (ibid., p. 232). He therefore elaborates on the concept of mediatization by describing it as a process developing through four phases: (1) mediation, when ‘the mass media in a particular setting constitute the most important source of information and channel of communication between the citizenry and political institutions and actors’ (ibid., p. 236); (2) when ‘the media do not unconditionally mediate the messages preferred by the different sources’ (ibid., p. 237) and do follow instead their internal logic; (3) when political actors have to adapt to the media and ‘further increase their skills in news management and so-called spinning [...], and it makes media considerations an increasingly integral part of even the policy-making processes’ (ibid., p. 238); and (4) when ‘political and other social actors not only adapt to the media logic and the predominant news values, but also internalize these and, more or less consciously, allow the media logic and the standards of newsworthiness to become a built-in part of the governing processes’ (ibid., pp. 239–240). Although agreeing with Strömbäck’s thoughtful analysis of media influence, this book is based on the very idea that media-driven changes in policymaking and warfare can be understood as a macroeffect that ‘transcends and includes media effects’ (Schulz, 2004, p. 90 as cited in Strömbäck, 2008, p. 232), but which can be empirically studied only starting from a clear and radical definition of media power and an analysis of media effects in different conflict-related contexts, that is, foreign policymaking, conflict mediation, and warfare. This book will show, in fact, how ‘interactions, interdependencies, and transactions at a system level’ (Strömbäck, 2008, p. 32) emerge precisely through the existing interconnections between media effects. Moreover, the process of ‘mediatization’ as described by Strömbäck insists on phenomena which still imply a mediation between the media and the public only and overlooks PROOF

10 Media Power and the Transformation of War the impact of the media on the interaction between political actors and on their strategic behavior, which can be understood by applying Meyorowitz’s approach to policymaking and warfare. A detailed analysis of the literature which has investigated media effects on foreign policymaking will follow together with an attentive examination of its limits and some suggestions on how to overcome them.

1. Media effects

Six different concepts may be identified, to which six different types of media effects correspond: the CNN Effect, Agenda Setting, Real Time Policy, Media Diplomacy, Indexing, and Consent Manufacturing.2 How- ever, only to a certain extent do they represent consolidated categories as different scholars use them to refer to different phenomena. For example, as Strobel (1997) has pointed out, there isn’t one single definition of the ‘CNN Effect’ as this label is usually used to describe three different hypotheses: (a) media coverage (printed or televised) of suffering and atrocities → journalists and opinion makers demand that governments ‘do something’ → the public pressure becomes unbearable → governments do something; (b) the media select the news → news creates and emphasizes certain issues and neglects others → public opinion formation → public pressure to confront the issues → the issue of the media agenda enters the political agenda; and (c) the high speed of broadcasting and transmitting information + rhythm of flux of information characterized by different news media programs + influence of media coverage on public opinion → policymakers decide when to do what they want to do. The third definition (c) is also known as Real Time Policy, the second (b) as Agenda Setting, while the first (a) is what most scholars consider a proper CNN Effect. Several senior politicians and officials could be quoted here who make a case for the ‘CNN Effect’, that is, for a loss of policy control to global television, as if leaders no longer make decisions on the basis of interests but are rather driven by emotional public opinion aroused by television coverage.3 However, it is hard to find scholarly studies clearly arguing the same. Cohen (1994) does so when he concludes that global television coverage ‘forced’ the 1992 intervention in Somalia upon US policymakers. Similarly, referring to Somalia, Mandelbaum claims that ‘televised pictures of starving people created a political clamor to feed them, which propelled US military into action’ (Mandelbaum, 1994, p. 16, emphasis in original), and Kennan (1993) describes American policy as being controlled by popular emotional impulses, and particularly PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 11 those provoked by the commercial television industry. Finally, Entman (2000) maintains that the media impose a double bind on US presi- dents that tends to diminish the legitimacy of their power over foreign policy: a simultaneous demand for assertive interventionist leadership by ‘the world’s only superpower’ and chastisement of US leaders when interventions become costly (Entman, 2000, p. 12). Other scholars have claimed that the CNN Effect occurs only in certain situations, which they have tried to identify. Hoge (1994) connects political uncertainty and the CNN Effect, by emphasizing how, in the absence of persuasive government strategy, the media are catalytic, so that policymakers who do not want to leave the agenda to the media simply need to have an agenda. A similar idea is developed by Robinson (2002) in his Policy–Media Interaction Model. Having been applied to different cases (Somalia, 1992–1993; Bosnia, 1995; Kosovo, 1999), the model shows that media inﬂuence on policy occurs when there is (1) uncertainty regarding policy, and (2) critically framed media coverage that emphasizes suffering people. In this situation, policymakers, uncertain of what to do and without a clearly deﬁned policy line on how to counter media coverage, can be forced to intervene during a humanitarian crisis by media-driven public pressure or the fear of a potential negative reaction to government inaction. Strobel (1997) instead argues that, under the right conditions, the news media may have a powerful effect on processes, but also that these conditions are almost always set by foreign policymakers themselves or by the growing number of policy actors on the international stage. Thus, policymakers can be driven by the news media only if they allow others to dominate the policy debate: for example, if they do not closely monitor the progress and the results of their own policies; if they fail to build and to maintain popular and congressional support for a course of action; or if they step beyond the bounds of their public mandate or fail to anticipate problems. Livingston (1997) hypothesizes that a media effect might occur when policymakers are personally affected by random media reports highlighting a particular crisis, and distinguishes three manifestations of the CNN Effect: (1) an Agenda Setting manifestation – what is here referred to as Agenda Setting; (2) an impediment manifestation, which undermines public support for an extant operation, what Freedman (2000) calls the ‘body-bags effect’ (see below); and (3) an accelerant manifestation, what is here referred to as Real Time Policy. Finally, Bahador (2007) introduces the notion of ‘Challenging CNN Effect’ and demon- strates its functioning during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. According to him, the CNN Effect occurs when the media take sides and present one PROOF

12 Media Power and the Transformation of War party as a victim. Thus, by characterizing an official policy as ineffective or misguided, the media can challenge the policy’s credibility and create an environment ‘in which policy decision makers are pressured to alter policy in order to fill the void’ (Bahador, 2007, p. 11). Other scholars recognize the media’s role in international politics, but they do not argue for the CNN Effect. They see the existence of a weaker media effect, resulting from an indirect influence of the media on policymakers, that is, influence on the political agenda. The concept of Agenda Setting comes from one of the most important theories about media effects, which was elaborated first by Lang and Lang in 1962, by Cohen in 1963, and by D. Shaw and McCombs in the 1970s and 1980s. According to this hypothesis it is the media that determine which elements of the public discourses the audience notices or ignores, and consequently emphasizes or neglects. In the literature discussed below, the Agenda Setting hypothesis is applied, mainly implicitly, to decision-makers. However, it is not always clear if scholars argue for a direct cognitive effect over policymakers or for an indirect effect based on the concern of politicians that the media could set the agenda of their audience. Nye (1999) maintains that the media have an important role in forcing politicians to intervene in certain international crises and to neglect others that are even more serious. This is because decision-makers must respond rapidly to the fast flux of information which reaches public opinion through the media. As a result, the media favored all those humanitarian interventions which have had the aim of contrasting what, based on a typology first elaborated by Carter and Perry (1999), the author calls ‘threats of group C’ (important events which concern Western security indirectly, but which are not a direct menace to Western interests, such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda crisis) to the detriment of the strategically more relevant ‘threats of groups A’ (vital threats to the West comparable with that which the Soviet Union has represented) or of group B (imminent, but not vital, threats to the Western interest, such as that coming from Iraq in 1991). Following an analogous argument, Jakobsen (2000) concludes that by ignoring conflicts during the pre- and post-violence phases and by being highly selective in its coverage of the violence phase, the media have an indirect, invisible, and far greater impact on conflict evolution. Other authors clearly frame Agenda Setting as an indirect effect which affects foreign policymaking because of the existing relationship between the latter and public opinion. Soroka (2003), for example, shows statistical evidence of the media’s role in shaping the salience PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 13 of certain issues within public opinion with respect to foreign policy matters. Subsequently, he shows a strong connection between changes in the issue salience for the public and the issue salience for the foreign policy agenda. Seib (1997) claims that the media do not determine, but only influence, policymaking: by revealing, or not revealing, what is going on in distant places, they shape public opinion and, consequently, policymakers’ behavior. Moreover, Seib adds that the extent of the media’s influence depends on the quality of the political leadership and on how well-defined political goals and strategies are. The less defined or realistic an administration’s foreign policy is, the greater the impact of news coverage will be. However, on the other side, news organizations must pursue a policy with single-minded fervor to be able to create a superficial reality which captivates the public and indirectly influences policymakers. A similar idea is also claimed by General Sir Michael Rose (2000), who was in Kosovo working with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) commander Wesley Clark. He points out that the diffusion of certain images does not determine policies, but rather the hierarchy of political priorities, that is, the political agenda. The application of Agenda Setting to foreign policymaking has been challenged by the concept of ‘indexing’, according to which the media do not set the political agenda but only ‘index’ the different positions which are already present in the government debate. First introduced by Bennett (1990) and then developed by Mermin (1999), this concept explains Hallin’s famous work on the Vietnam War. Hallin (1989) argues that, contrary to its powerful myth, the Vietnam War was not lost in the living room because the coverage changed from being supportive of, to being opposed to, the government. Rather, the shift can be explained as a reflection of the increasing divergence within the US Congress. The media simply mirrored the internal divisions of the political establish- ment and the coverage of the war, although critical and detached, was ultimately determined by that. This phenomenon is explained by referring to the distortions introduced by newsgathering and journalistic routines. The concept of Real Time Policy recalls Virilio’s work as it refers to the fact that politicians, led by concerns about public support, feel the need to respond quickly and publicly to the images transmitted by the media and to plan declarations or even actions according to news media schedules. Gowing (1994), for example, argues that the media ‘com- press transmission and policy response times. In turn, this puts pressure on choice and priorities in crisis management’ (Gowing, 1994, p. 1). According to him, real-time television pictures ‘beamed back live by PROOF

14 Media Power and the Transformation of War satellite from a location [...] distort and skew the work of diplomats, military planners and politicians’ (ibid.). Although adopting a general approach stressing the centrality of propaganda and media operations in military doctrinal thinking, Moorcraft and Taylor (2008) also admit that there is a tyranny of time and, by quoting Gowing, argue that TV images can be a nuisance factor. Gilboa (2003) also considers the media as an agent constraining policymaking, due to the high speed of broadcasting and information transmission. Politicians and officials find themselves struggling between, on the one hand, the need for time for accurate analysis as well as thoughtful decision-making and, on the other hand, the time pressure imposed by media schedules. In Gilboa’s words, this situation favors snap decisions, as well as the exclusion of expert advice and high public expectations in both warfare and diplomacy. Simi- larly, Neuman (1996) maintains that real-time news has speeded up the deliberative process, shortened the reaction time for policymakers, and written a new job description for diplomats. Yet she calls this phenomenon ‘CNN curve’ and traces it through history to show that it is not new at all and that it has not changed the fundamentals of political leadership and international governance. Likewise, Seib (1997) stresses that often the speed of events dictates the president’s pace, especially if news coverage heightens public interest. In this case, it could even be possible that the media create a pressure to act, and sometimes even to act in a specific way, for example, more or less aggressively or more or less compassionately. Finally, McNair establishes a causal chain con- necting the fact that ‘the time lag between event and reportage of it has inexorably shortened’ (McNair, 1999, p. 177) with the ‘full glare of publicity’ (ibid.) received by foreign policies and the fact that ‘for all governments domestic and global public opinion has become a key factor in the formulation and execution of foreign policy’ (ibid.). The concept of Media Diplomacy has been scholarly developed while investigating the effect of the media on conflict mediation. It addresses the fact that the media have become an extremely important channel of communication during crises, in some cases even more important than traditional diplomacy. According to Katz et al. (1984), the media con- duct diplomacy when they open a channel between nations that do not have formal diplomatic links, when they allow foreign leaders to talk to the people of another nation over the heads of their leaders, and when they emphasize ritual, ceremony, and holidays (both national and international). O’Heffernan (1993) has argued that television has become the crisis communication system of international relations because (1) it opens the door to private organizations to influence foreign policy; (2) it PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 15 dilutes the secrecy of diplomacy, principally by giving every party a way to instantaneously communicate their version of the other side’s offers in a specific set of talks; and (3) it levels the diplomatic playing field because it can be employed by a poor country on equal terms with a rich state in possession of technology and power (O’Heffernan, 1993, p. 21). Similarly, Eban (1998) has claimed that the media have deeply changed the nature of diplomacy, as negotiations are no longer sheltered from domestic constituencies. Finally, Gilboa (2002) has underlined the role that journalists have as agents of mediation when they debate with leaders of the other side, represent the position of their government, or suggest proposals to rivals to end a conflict or a crisis. Finally, the concept of Consent Manufacturing pertains to the works of those scholars who explicitly reject the CNN Effect because they think that the media are simply powerful instruments in the hands of various interest groups that use them in order to influence public opinion. These scholars consider the media to be, simultaneously, powerful in the formation of public opinion and a slave to political power. Regarding the influence on public opinion, they refer clearly not only to those theories about media effects which focus on the public’s cognitive dependency on the media, such as Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s (1976) Dependency Model, but also to those theories which underline the media’s ability to create social reality. An important concept related to Consent Manu- facturing is that of ‘News Management’. News Management addresses the techniques by which political actors can control ‘news making’. Cumings (1990), for example, recognizes the existence of what he labels a ‘CNN Effect’ – he is among the first scholars to use this term – referring to the fact that the media can be a powerful instrument by which political actors in a conflict can reach their own goals. Herman and Peterson (2000) maintain that close links between the media and political power emerged during NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, when the CNN Effect did not occur, precisely because CNN ‘served as NATO’s de facto public information arm’ (Herman & Peterson, 2000, p. 120). In the same way, Skoco and Woodger (2000) point out that the relation between the US media and the military is not as conflictive as soldiers claim. On the contrary, the military tend to co-opt the media for their own purposes, with the media supposedly benefiting from receiving or being led to report a greater number of ‘quality’ stories. Davis (2007) even reverses the Agenda Setting approach by explaining it as an effect resulting from politicians using the news media and journalists to promote or negotiate agendas and policy options among themselves. This group of scholars uncovers some factors that limit the independence of the media which PROOF

16 Media Power and the Transformation of War originate not from direct or indirect political control, but from certain dynamics that are internal to newsmaking. Hence, some of these scholars have concentrated their attention on newsmaking itself in order to highlight those sources of distortion in media reports which are caused by factors not external to but rather internal to media organizations and which eventually favor media compliance with official discourses. In particular, Herman and Chomsky (1988) develop a framework, the so-called Propaganda Model, in order to explain why the news media are unable to resist and combat political propaganda. In the model they identify five filters: the critical points where the weakness of the media emerges in relation to the strong interest groups which decide media contents. The first filter is related to the dimension of ownership and profit orientation of the media, which leads to news media concentra- tion and to the creation of big corporations whose interests are then defended by political parties. The second filter lies in the dependence of the media on advertising licenses, as ‘advertisers’ choices influence media prosperity and survival’ (Herman & Chomsky, 1988, p. 14). The third filter relates to the sources of news, because institutions, business corporations, and trade corporations are the most widely used suppliers of information. The fourth filter is called ‘flak and the enforcers’ and refers to the fact that political parties frequently attack the media in order to protect themselves, reply to media statements or programs, and threaten the media outlets behind those stories with punitive actions. The final filter refers to the ideological frame of news, like opposition to communism.

2. Media power

Each single concept that has been analyzed in the previous section characterizes the media as either a particular type of international political actor or an instrument in the hands of other actors, therefore imply- ing a particular theory about media power. In the CNN Effect theory, media power is deﬁned in Dahl’s classical terms: a successful attempt by party A to get party B to do something he/she would not otherwise do. According to this formulation, ‘power is a relational, not to be confused with a relative, concept. In other words power does not reside in capabilities or resources [...] but in the effect those can have in the relationship between actors. [...] As such power is a counterfactual concept, since it means that action has been affected which would have been different otherwise’ (Guzzini, 2001, p. 5). By referring to this deﬁnition, it is possible to explain something more about the CNN Effect: (1) a situation of PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 17 conflict between the wills of the media and of policymakers is necessary (this is also coherent with Weber’s definition of power); and (2) media power is to be found in concrete, observable behaviors, as in the case of decisions either to intervene militarily in humanitarian crises or to then withdraw. A corollary of this conceptualization of media power (whose logic is generally used also by those scholars who moderate the CNN Effect, see, e.g., Robinson, 2001b) is that when the media do not succeed in forcing policymakers to do what they do not want to do, then they do not have power in policymaking. Moreover, by focusing on the fact that journalists take explicit sides in the intervention, the CNN Effect seems to stress that there is media power if the effects of the media are intended. Interestingly, even if it claims that governments and interest groups rule the media, the Manufacturing Consent theory defines power in a way that is actually similar to that of the CNN Effect theory. The idea here is that political and economical elites try to manipulate the media in order to rule public opinion. Thus, the media are said to be powerful and capable of controlling public opinion about certain policies while at the same time lacking the freedom necessary to exercise power over policymakers: the independence from political power is here seen as a condition for media power. In the Real Time Policy theory too, the same definition of power is given, even if implicitly. The scholars who have been earlier described as representative of this theory define power in a most classical way and, as they do not see the media as capable of forcing politicians to ‘do something’ they otherwise would not do, they cannot say that the media have power. They see instead the media as capable of doing something else – for them something weaker – that is, determining the timing of decision-making. Something similar happens in the case of Media Diplomacy whose leading scholars consider what the media do as being something weaker than the exercise of power. Agenda Setting theory, instead, defines the role of the media in a way that recalls Bachrach’s and Baratz’s definition of the exercise of power: not only does party A exercises power when he succeeds in getting party B to do something that B would not otherwise do, but A also exercises power by controlling the agenda, mobilizing the bias of the system, determining which issues are ‘key’, and, indeed, which issue it is that should be decided upon. The argument being made here is that the existing theories about media effects on policymaking and warfare are based on too often implicit and narrow definitions of power that do not account for a PROOF

18 Media Power and the Transformation of War plethora of power phenomena. All theories illustrated above – with the only exception of Agenda Setting – move from the same definition of power. Not surprisingly, most scholars prefer to write of ‘influence’ rather than power, as it looks like a wider and vaguer concept able to embrace different media effects. For example, having distinguished between power and influence, Halloran (1991) maintains that by select- ing what to publish or broadcast and what to ignore, the press and television exert enormous influence, but not power, over policymakers. The refusal to talk of power when referring to media/politics or media/military relations seems to be mainly related to the fact that great importance has been attached to the problem of the media’s dependence on, or independence from, political power. Although surely relevant, this factor actually does not say anything about the media’s capacity to exercise power. In fact, even when dependent on political power, the media can, and indeed do, have a significant impact on politics. This is exactly what Simmel argues by writing that ‘the super–subordination relationship destroys the subordinate’s freedom only in the case of direct physical violation’ (Lukes, 1986, p. 10). In most of the cases of freedom impairment, the actor whose freedom has been reduced can continue to act freely and even exercise power. Moreover, as stressed by Michalski and Gow (2007), unintended media effects can also occur, which can reverse any attempt to manage the news. Also Kellner (1992, 1995) stresses how important unintentional effects are. In studying the 1991 Gulf War, he uses Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, but concludes that television coverage of dramatic political events is a ‘two-edged sword’ (Kellner, 1995, p. 225): it might shape public opinion to support a military intervention, but when consisting mainly of images of protracted suffering as long-term effects of the war, it could also turn public opinion against the system and its leaders who wanted that intervention. In the Gulf, ‘lust for pictures to attract audience led the networks into a race to get into Iraq’ (ibid., p. 226). This, in turn, showed the Iraqi people, their suffering, and ultimately the inability of war to solve anything and therefore helped to undermine Bush and the conservative hegemony. Kellner thus concludes that ‘the very ubiquitousness of television and the central role that television is playing in contemporary politics renders it a complex and unpredictable political force’ (ibid.) producing contradictory effects with unintended consequences. Kellner’s observation emphasizes another important aspect: long-term effects are more difficult to investigate, but should not be forgotten as what looks like absence of media power in the short term can instead lead to important media effects in the long term. Too often the existing PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 19 literature focuses uniquely on media coverage and its content, on what is said or what is shown by the media in the short term, forgetting McLuhan’s important lesson that ‘the medium is the message’ and that it brings about changes that can be seen only in the long term. Specific criticisms can be made of the CNN Effect and Manufacturing Consent theories. Indeed, they show the same problems that characterized the so-called Limited Effect Model of the 1950s. This approach of research on communication had opposed the precedent Katz’s and Lazarsfeld’s Hypodermic Theory by arguing for a level of media power limited by many contextual variables and for limited media effects. According to Noelle-Neumann’s ‘Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media’, the Limited Effect Model came to this conclusion by focusing only on short-term effects and by neglecting the more important long-term effects. Factors that can support the media’s independence from political power are equally neglected by the above-mentioned literature. The status of the media market, for example, can make a substantive difference, as shown by recent studies about what is called the ‘al-Jazeera effect’ (Seib, 2008). By providing a counterweight to the images that the Western media have been presenting to viewers, al-Jazeera seems to have deprived the West of its monopoly on credible and respon- sible media. This development has had a large impact on Western states’ media strategies and foreign policy mainly because it impacts on political actors’ perception of media power, which is another relevant variable conditioning media power. The very fact that the media are perceived as powerful by the decision-makers is an important resource for media power (see Stoppino, 2001). The claim of the opponents of the CNN Effect – that policymakers’ perception of media power is a misperception – is delusive, because, in reality, this misperception contributes to the making of media power. Freedman (2000) and Shaw (2005) have made this point by arguing that, independent of its actual occurrence, the CNN Effect exists in the perception that politicians and the military have of media power. Freedman, in particular, distinguishes between the ‘CNN Effect’, the ‘body bags effect’, and the ‘bullying effect’. While the first postulates that ‘when governments are caught off guard or unsure, the impact of striking images and a groundswell of opinion can shape the responses of policymakers’ (Freedman, 2000, p. 338), the other two refer to the public intolerance for unexpected casualties, both among troops (body bags effect) and among civilians of the target state (bullying effect). Finally, in the implicit definitions of power that are used by the existing literature, if and when the media are attributed with a form of power PROOF

20 Media Power and the Transformation of War over foreign policymaking and warfare, this is mainly seen as indirect and only due to the politicians’ concerns about public opinion. This feature is particularly marked in the works arguing for Agenda Setting or Real Time Policy as in these cases media power over decision-making is seen as a consequence of the inﬂuence the media exert on the formation of public opinion. Only Livingston (1997) and Gilboa (2002, 2005) have built up conceptual maps which explicitly include direct media effects on the political process which are independent from public opinion, while even those who have developed the most compelling theories about the media and war have ended up treating the triangle of government, public, and the media as indissoluble.

3. For a new analytical framework

While writing about power and power relations in International Political Economy, Susan Strange (1988) taught that power can be investigated only by hypothesizing at the same time about who has power and what the source of that power is. Often, in fact, investigating the source of power leads to a better understanding of who has power. The media can be many things at the same time and I have willingly used this term in a quite vague way so far. In the literature I have analyzed above, the debate is centered on the news, that is to say, the product of the so-called ‘news media’, mainly newspapers and TV networks. As a consequence, attention is paid uniquely to the message and to the conditions of news production, forgetting that the medium is the message. The so-called ‘medium theory’ (Meyrowitz, 1985) argues that the form in which people communicate has an impact that goes beyond the choice of speciﬁc messages, because the media are not simply channels for conveying information between two or more environments, but rather environments in and of themselves. As a consequence, studying media power implies the analysis not only of media coverage, but also of the medium itself, of its communicative characteristics, and of all practices related to its mere presence in the society. Innis (1972), for example, sees control over communication media as a means through which social and political power is held. He, nonetheless, claims that new media can break old monopolies – just as the printing press broke the medieval Church’s monopoly over religious information. Innis adds that the same content can have different effects in different media since every medium of communication has its own ‘bias’ either toward lasting a long time or toward traveling easily across great distances. He suggests that the bias of a culture’s dominant medium affects the degree of the culture’s stability and PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 21 conservatism – as well as the culture’s ability to take over and govern large areas of territory. McLuhan (1964), instead, develops the notion of ‘sensory balance’ and suggests that the media impose themselves upon all levels of our private and social lives and that this process creates a sensory environment as invisible to us as water is to fish. The media, then, become extensions of the human senses and affect the organization of perception, feeling, and understanding. Following the ‘medium theory’ and to overcome the discussed limits of the existing literature, this book elaborates a radical view of media power which is based on a combination of Lukes’ (2005) radical definition of relational power and Parson’s (1969) definition of structural power. Such a radical view is then empirically applied to the medium which more or less explicitly scholars and politicians write or talk about when discussing the role of the media in contemporary conflicts: 24-hour international TV news networks like CNN or al-Jazeera. Lukes’ three-dimensional definition conceives of power as ‘the agents’ ability to bring about significant effects, specifically by furthering their own interests and/or affecting the interests of others, whether positively or negatively’ (Lukes, 2005, p. 65). Power is conceived here (1) as a capacity, and not as the exercise or the vehicle of that capacity (Lukes, 2005, p. 70); (2) as having both a direct effect over decision-making and an indirect effect on the political agenda; (3) as covering also how potential issues enter or stay out the political agenda; (4) as something which is exercised by both individuals and ‘collectivities, such as groups or institutions’ (Lukes, 1974, p. 50); (5) as something not necessarily followed by decisions; and (6) as occurring also ‘in the absence of actual, observable conflict’ (ibid., p. 25). This means not only that ‘A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not want to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping or determining his very wants’ (ibid., p. 23). Media power is therefore ‘real and effective in a remarkable variety of ways, some of them indirect and some hid- den, and [...] at its most effective when least accessible to observation, to actors and observers alike, thereby presenting empirically minded social scientists with a neat paradox’ (Lukes, 2005, p. 64). However, Lukes’ three-dimensional definition misses the fact that power is not exclusively relational, but also structural as explained by Strange (1988). Indeed, Real Time Policy and Media Diplomacy describe something that recalls precisely Parsons’ definition of structural power: the facilitating of changes in the actions of other units, individual or collective, in the processes of social interaction (Parsons, 1969, p. 362). However, diverging from Parsons’ definition and rejoining Lukes, it is PROOF

22 Media Power and the Transformation of War argued here that neither are those changes necessarily intentional (ibid.) nor are those actions necessarily different from what would have been (ibid.). The impact of the media over the structure, and therefore over interaction, is a dimension of media power which is truly missing from the existing literature. It seems that influenced by Baudrillard’s teachings more than by McLuhan’s, some of the most compelling scholarly works on the topic have focused on the message and therefore on the process of ‘mediatization’ and overlooked the impact of the medium over social behavior and interaction as explained by Meyrowitz. As Merrin (2005) describes well, Baudrillard had actually started from McLuhan but finally arrived to the conclusion that the real message and signif- icance of a medium is not the technology itself, nor its psychological and social consequences, but the transformation of the symbolic into the semiotic. Media power is for him visible in the destruction of the symbolic and in its replacement with a semiotic simulation which functions not only as a mode of communication but also as a model of social control and domination (ibid., p. 24). All events are transformed and modeled following their media form till the point of becoming a non- event or pseudo-event, as is also theorized by Boorstin (1990). Such a line of reasoning is indebted to Durkheim’s and Barthes’ definition of communication but does not recall Goffman’s theory of symbolic interaction. Communication is for Baudrillard a symbolic exchange, a strong active, full, present, dual or collective, human relationship, founded on or created through rituals, customs, and exchanges whose meaning is actualized in the moment and which exists as both a mode of communication and confrontation (ibid., pp. 19–20). Such a definition overlooks the existence of other situations when meaning is produced, as it is explained by semiotics (see, e.g., Greimas, 1966–1970) and in terms of symbolic interaction by Goffman (1959) , as well as of all those situations when communication is mediated, as explained by Meyrowitz (1985). Mediatization is of course an absolutely relevant aspect of media transformation of war, but it is not the only one. It explains that in our societies war has become an essentially mediated experience and that the sign of war has become even more important than the war on the ground. However, scholars using this concept do not stress enough that not only the public’s, but also decision-makers’ understanding of war is filtered by the images they consume. They may also have a more direct and un-mediated experience of a conflict, but they are not external to cultures and societies where mediatization takes place. The mediated PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 23 image of war becomes therefore an object of symbolic exchange (Baudrillard, 1979), but also of symbolic interaction. Moreover, as they meet on the screen more or less virtually, decision-makers’ interaction with their peers becomes mediated as well as their own image. As Meyrowitz explains, it is not the content but the medium that matters precisely because it mediates experiences and symbolic interaction. By combining McLuhan and Goffman, Meyrowitz explains that to understand the impact of the media on social behavior we must start from the concept of social ‘situation’. This can be understood as a ‘system of information’, that is ‘a given pattern of access to social information, a given pattern of access to the behavior of other people’ (Meyrowitz, 1985, p. 37). As ‘information systems’, instead of physical setting as understood by most of the situationists, a society’s set of social situations can be modified without building or removing walls and corridors and without changing customs and laws concerning access to places. The introduction of a widespread medium of communication may restructure a broad range of situations and require new sets of social performances’ (ibid., p. 39). In fact, while the separation of people in different situations produces specific beliefs, worldviews and behaviors, the merging of those situations and related actors and audiences will produce new beliefs and behaviors. The media therefore affect social actions because they rearrange the division between different situations, in terms of both actors and audiences, and change the notion of appropriate behavior for each situation. When previously distinct social situations are combined by a new medium, then a behavior that was considered as appropriate can well become inappropriate and vice versa. ‘Electronic media’, explains Meyrowitz, ‘have rearranged many social forums so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. And unlike the merged situations in face-to-face interaction, the combined situations of electronic media are relatively lasting and inescapable, and they therefore have a much greater effect on social behavior’ (ibid., p. 5). The media, in sum, construct and shape new social arenas by building bridges between the existing ones. All phases and operational contexts of a conflict are subjected to this process: from the policymaking to the military operation. From this point of view, the importance that has been given to the independence of the media by the existing literature is clearly over- estimated as it is based on a fairly narrow focus on media coverage. In democratic countries the media are never independent from the influence of politicians or interest groups as it is the political elite who decides upon the rules of the national media market and of journalism. PROOF

24 Media Power and the Transformation of War

Moreover, democratic governments, especially in crisis situations, are the media’s favorite sources of information and know very well how to use news management to their own advantage. However, the fact that political power influences the content of the news is just an aspect of the game which does not imply a complete absence of media power. Not only can the news media act freely because newsmaking is not subject to direct control by governments, but Luke’s three-dimensional definition of power also clarifies that politics and the media can even have similar goals and interests and still exercise power over one another: politics over the media and the media over politics as well. In the literature, Wolfsfeld (1997) has argued that a key factor that determines whether the media will play an independent role in a political conflict is ‘the authorities’ degree of control over the political environment’ (Wolfsfeld, 1997, p. 24). Wolfsfeld builds a model, the Political Contest Model, the central claim of which is that while news media normally function to reflect, and even mobilize, support for dominant views in society, there are times when they serve the interests of marginalized groups. He concludes that in particular settings, the challengers of the political elites can both set the media agenda and influence political outcomes. Simi- larly, Shaw (2000) has claimed that the news media constitute a social space in which many voices find their place, not only those of the social, political, and economic elites, but also those of challengers (see also Wolfsfeld, 1997). In this book, it will be argued that spinning, PR operations, and news management limit but do not annihilate media power over politics. Other factors are equally relevant to assess the strength of that power: the status of the media market and the perceptions that some of the key individuals involved in a conflict have about media power. Perceptions could be themselves understood as media effects, that is, as something that derives from long-term effects concerning a community more than single actors. Perceptions are, in fact, related to the experience of actors with the media, to their habits of media consumption and strategic ‘use’, and to the previous conflicts they refer to as strategic examples, if any. In most cases, previous conflicts bring both positive and negative models of strategic interaction with the media and occur in politicians’ recollections with both positive and negative connotations. In some other cases, as these conflicts are really negative models and remind politicians of harmful experiences with the media, we can talk of ‘syndromes’. Moreover, in the attempt to detect media effects descend- ing from media power, it makes a difference if policymakers perceive the media as being powerful or not: an actor with a perception of the media as mighty would probably act in a way which confirms that power PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 25 precisely by preventing and limiting it, so that perceptions of the media as being powerful could actually correspond to limited media effects. With reference to the media market, it is worth noting that at the international level news media operate in a highly competitive environment where rival networks are all subject to spinning and inﬂuence by politicians and interest groups in their own countries. As spinning and news management happen at the national level, variations are observable in the newsmaking of different outlets especially as far as news hierarchy and framing are concerned. At the same time, competition leads news networks with an international audience to observe each other and inﬂuence each other in the production of news. As a consequence, competition in the media market, and in particular the presence of outlets of different nationalities and different ownership at the international level, gives the media more room to act freely and therefore increases media power. The relevance of these neglected intervening variables is apparent, especially nowadays, when one tries to understand how international terrorists take advantage of the media to pursue their goals, gain access to the public at large, and challenge the decision-makers of their target society, as Baudrillard (2002), Nacos (2002), and Kellner (2002) explore, albeit from very different angles. Even more interesting are develop- ments in Middle East and North Africa where growth of old and new media can most probably explain, at least in part, the 2011 popular uprisings against the authoritarian regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Bahrain. It is not a surprise, in fact, that the advancement of the so-called new media has revamped the all-powerful media approach, even if with regard to the new communication technologies only and to a media system that appears transformed by them. In fact, given the irresistible rise of the World Wide Web, the reader may be confused by a restrictive focus on international TV networks. However, what this book intends to argue is that a new conception of media power is needed in order to really appreciate the changes that are due to the so-called ‘new media’. Interaction is further mediated by the new media as new forms of social aggregation and mobilization are made possible but mediation was already taking place and, in fact, what we are witnessing today is not a revolution but a new stage in the development of a pre-existing process.

4. The sources of power: the image and the arena

As already noted, the media are conceived of here both as provider of content and as environments. In particular, 24-hour international TV PROOF

26 Media Power and the Transformation of War networks are characterized by the use of mainly visual language and uninterrupted worldwide broadcasting which contributes to the construction of an almost unlimited environment. As a consequence, the power of this particular medium in contemporary conflicts manifests itself as a non-stop mediation of politics and warfare through still and moving images and through the creation of a new political and military arena. While the latter is related to the fact that the medium makes diplomacy-like or war-like encounters on a global scale possible, the former depends on the functioning of the visual sign, the way this produces meaning and what kind of meaning. The classical literature on media and conflict often attributes undue power to images broadcast by the media on the basis of the old adage that an image is worth a thousand words. However, a narrow focus on the content of specific images would be misleading. What matters is not the content of the image, which is very often quite uninterest- ing. Rather, what does really matter is the ‘reality effect’ that the images produce and the alterations to social behavior and interaction that are provoked by the construction of visual connections between images of distant places or phenomena and by the very presence of cameras in the place where the events are happening. We are now amazed by the multimedia nature of the World Wide Web and tend to forget how images mixing up on the TV screen may build astonishing bridges between the most disparate and unconnected objects. Still and moving images are utterances which proclaim the truth of their content and indicate the concrete existence of what is represented: they say that somewhere, at some time, the represented event has actually been in existence. Even nowadays, when digital techniques have enhanced the image’s possibility to lie, what Barthes calls the ‘noeme of photography’ seems to be still working (Barthes, 1980, pp. 83, 86). Photography, as a type of text or discourse, succeeds in making what it represents to be ‘true’ thanks to some mechanisms of meaning production which stay within the text and to some social practices which establish social and cultural usages of the photographic image. The internal mechanisms of photographic images are based on the fact that photography is traditionally produced by the impression of the light coming from an object on film. This creates a perceptive habit that induces the observer to believe that any photographic object is ‘true’, even if it has been manipulated or is a fake. Photography provides a reality to what it represents, independent from the ‘reality’ of the referent (Alinovi & Marra, 1981) and therefore more than reproduc- ing ‘reality’, it produces another reality, an iconic reality which affirms PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 27 the reality of what is represented (Ferrarotti, 1974). This reality effect is even stronger when applied to video forms. Videos are not simple sequences of pictures, or a succession of frames which is able to portray movement: they are multimedia texts in which a number of pictures are associated to a sound and, in some cases, to written text (Metz, 1972). As a consequence, the moving image seems to reproduce life in a way that is even more complete and lively (ibid.). This is particularly evi- dent in the case of videos broadcast via television. As Eco (1997) writes, television ‘appears to us as an electronic mirror which shows from a distance what is happening in a point of the space that our eyes would be not otherwise able to reach’ (Eco, 1997, p. 326).4 This seems true, even if the images that we usually see on television are not coming live from a still camera in a closed circuit, which is the so-called ‘pure television’ form. Thus, even if television images are constructed through artificial lights, alterations of shots, reverse shots, and editing, they usually result in a sense of naturalness and are publicly used as if they were ‘pure television’ (Eco, 1979, p. 329). The reality effect also depends on factors that lie outside the text, that is, in its ‘context’. Indeed, there is a whole group of practices which are established in our culture and which use a picture like a witness, a document, a type of proof, or a memory of something else. Thus, the existence of these social uses is at the same time the best proof of photography’s ‘noeme’ and a source of it. First, photography is commonly considered as attesting to the existence of what it portrays and this is the reason why it is used as proof in courts. The presence of a victim, for example, is supported by photographs taken from different points of view, while the practice of enlarging photographs to reveal significant details is routinely used in surveillance and spy operations and is a standard device in films (like in Antonioni’s Blow Up), enabling the heroes to make key breakthroughs in their cases. The fact that photography functions as a witness also explains with the documentary function of photographs on newspapers or what happens with travel photos, which are shown to friends in order to demonstrate that we have actually been to certain places (while our smiling faces will tes- tify to the quality of our holidays). Second, photography’s capacity of attesting to the identity of the represented subjects is at the origin of its utilization on passports or identity cards together with a verbal description of the main characteristics of that person (eye color, hair color, height, age). This is also why photography is generally used in identity recognition and verification. Some examples would be Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording in the street, underground railway stations, PROOF

28 Media Power and the Transformation of War banks, or other institutions which are seen as possible targets of criminal acts, or the use of photos in Interpol archives, or even the (in)famous ‘wanted posters’ of villains in the American Far West. Moreover, photography’s ability to catch all the salient characters of what it represents explains its use as a tool of analysis in mental disorders in the early twentieth century. The photographic archives of mental hospitals were established not only to identify each single mentally challenged individual, but also to document the variety of madness, mental disorders, criminal characters, and diversity in general. Going further, we can even argue that photography has contributed to the discursive construction of madness (Terzian, 1981).5 Finally, photography is used to construct individual and collective memory, in family albums, state archives, newspapers, documentaries, television programs, and books. Chrono- logically or thematically ordered, photographic images have become a sort of monument for all those experiences whose memory, either sin- gularly or collectively, we have decided to preserve. Bourdieu wrote that the function of photography in a family is celebrating and immortal- izing the great moment of the family life, in short, strengthening the integration of the group by reaffirming the perception that it has of itself and of its unity (Bourdieu, 1965). Collective memory, instead, seems to be more and more constituted by events that we do not know directly, but instead indirectly, from their photographic (and televisual and cinematic) representation: this implies a significant change in the very nature of memory and knowledge. The paradox is that, precisely on the basis of its ‘reality effect’, a photographic image, as well as videos, can lie. This was generally understood first with the birth of cinema and then with the diffusion of works and ideas by conceptual photographers who have worked to demolish the reality effect of photography.6 Now, this is a staple of pop culture so that everybody knows that today’s photographs do not necessarily reflect reality because they can be easily and unnoticeably manipulated. This problem is at the root of the so-called Visual Culture (Mirzoeff, 2002), which focuses on the visual as a place where meanings are created and contested. As an academic discipline, Visual Culture starts from the assumption that modern life takes place on-screen and that human experience is more and more visual and visualized. What matters is not only what is visible, but also who makes it visible, what authority and credibility he/she has, and who controls the discourses that are produced to explain those visions. This is particularly important for the study of television where fictional and nonfictional images become entangled because documentary, journalistic, and fictional images are PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 29 all shown through the same medium and on the same screen. More- over, the relation between the image and the verbal text to which it is associated becomes extremely important. Comments and subtitles are used to anchor the meaning of images and are crucial to giving a name and a precise connotation to objects, faces, and shapes of what we see. This element is critical in the representation of war, not only because the ‘image management’ contributes to the creation of the usual fog of war, but also because by editing and broadcasting certain images a media out- let creates logical and visual links between different ‘realities’, decides on which sources are reliable, and calls on individuals, who are journalists, experts, or politicians, to produce discourses about those images. The act of seeing the war through the media becomes important to develop perceptions and produce discourses about the war. The words of journalists, politicians, and ‘war experts’ have a continuous reference in the images, and even when on screen they very often concentrate on what we are seeing or are mindful of what we are watching. Thus, while the discourse about war gains a visual dimension, discourses about visibility multiply. Commonly phrases are used like ‘oftentimes pictures can tell a story better than words can’ (see, e.g., P. Zahn in CNN, 2003), ‘pictures don’t have to move to tell compelling stories’ (ibid.), ‘talk about a picture being worth a thousand words’ (see, e.g., A. Brown, in CNN, 2001bq), o ‘the picture said a lot’ (ibid.), the pictures ‘are all we have’ (R. Putnam in CNN, 2001br). In its last section, Michalski and Gow’s work goes in this direction and reframes Virilio’s Vision Machine and Desert Screen. Virilio focused on the relation between war, speed, technology, and the means of representation, particularly vision machines. He suggested that with progressing military surveillance, cinematic representation has become more and more salient to military strategy now including informatics, computer simulation, and satellite imaging. Images and representations replace the real and weaponry based on the annihilation of time, disinformation, and high-tech military spectacle change the nature of war. Moreover, he feared, media like cinema and television train and constrain vision, leading to degradation of human beings’ vision and experience. By developing these ideas, Michalski and Gow investigate how, in an environment shaped by the discursive power of images, image–environment domination, suppression and contain- ment (Michalski & Gow, 2007, p. 216) become integral parts of any political or military strategy. They even suggest that Western forces are in a weaker position than their enemies regarding the use of images as weapons (ibid., p. 222) because they need to appeal concurrently not only to home audiences, but also to their opponents. PROOF

30 Media Power and the Transformation of War

Another characteristic of television which can help us to understand its power in foreign policymaking and warfare is related to the fact that it creates a visual arena where all the actors of a conflict can exchange visual as well as verbal messages. The political and diplomatic process becomes visible, or better still the audience assists in the creation of another process, which exists primarily on the screen. One could call it ‘virtual’ (Virilio, 1994) or ‘artifactual’ (Derrida, 2002), but the central issue remains the same: neither is it separated by the actual political process, nor is it a mere representation of it, nor is it a mise-en-scène for the audience. On the contrary, this process is part of the actual political process: the same actors make it and it develops in the media environment. According to the political actors’ intention, but also to that of the network, the media arena pushes the agents of politics to new forms of behavior and interaction and therefore it may become a new space of conflict mediation and/or a new field of fighting. In Shaw’s words (2000), the media turn into a new field of conflict: ‘it is clear that all politics is fought out in media as well as in political and military spaces. States, like other actors, require sophis- ticated understandings of the media if they are to complement their political and military with media strategies; without successful integration of the media with other strategies, the latter may also fall’ (Shaw, 2000, p. 36). The constitution of this political arena is made particularly effective by 24-hour TV news networks. By using satellite broadcasting, which guarantees live programming and visibility from long distances, they construct an arena that has the dimension of internationality. Crucial is the authority and the prestige that some networks have slowly gained, so that all the political actors are generally willing to step into this arena. In so doing, political actors end up seeing each other constantly: they see each other’s bodies, neckties, and eyes and they see each other seeing the war. The power of 24-hour TV news networks, therefore, comes not only from the fact that they broadcast live, 24 hours a day, but also from the fact that they are seen worldwide, and their audience is global and includes world leaders. They constitute a truly global arena where politicians come to see and to be seen. Also, 24-hour TV news networks create a new space for war and diplomacy, by presenting on the screen images of fighting and bombing coming from the field; images of official statements by military or political actors; and images of these same actors replying to journalists’ questions. Thus, 24-hour TV news networks have established a space in which the parties to a conflict see each other and send each other messages. If political actors want to push their reasons into the political agenda, 24-hour TV news networks are seen to be the PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 31 fastest and the most effective instrument by which to do it, but they have to work hard to succeed since, ultimately, it is the network that is in control of the vision. It is always the network that decides on the ﬁnal format of the news and which has the ﬁnal control over the mix- ture of images coming from all over the world, and from all the possible sources. Therefore, not only will decision-makers consume a ‘mediated’ image of the war, but they will also interact with other political actors on the basis of a ‘mediated’ vision of ‘the other’ – on the screen and outside it.

5. A four-dimensional deﬁnition

The long discussion started at the beginning of this chapter comes to an almost tautological conclusion here: the media have power in conflicts and wars because they mediate decision-making at various levels. The media interfere in social symbolic interaction by filming the evolution of the conflict and the interaction between politicians: (1) they constitute an arena that is a parallel environment for interaction where actors confront each other semiotically with further repercussions over their traditional/out-of-screen interaction; (2) they participate in the construction of the object which is symbolically exchanged as the selection of what is and what is not filmed. This, together with the noeme of the image, contributes to the constitution of ‘the reality’ of the conflict, which is targeted by statements, policies, and field operations. This can be well described by drawing on a four-dimensional definition of power based on Lukes’ three-dimensional power and Parsons’ structural power: media power is (1) a capacity; (2) having both direct and indirect effects; as well as (3) intended and unintended effects; (4) over the agents and the structure of decision-making; (5) not necessarily conflicting with decision-makers’ own interests; and (6) not necessarily followed by a change of decision. On the basis of such a definition, when analyzing media power in contemporary conflict, a series of hypotheses can be made about some different facets of power and the ways in which power may manifest itself (Table 1.1):

1. Power over the agenda, which derives from some characteristics of the medium, namely, from the broadcasting of images and of discourses about images, and which causes the Agenda Building. This, in turn, can be deﬁned as participation in the construction of the meaning of situations and events as well as in the building of the political agenda. PROOF

32 Media Power and the Transformation of War

2. Power over the timing of foreign policymaking, which still derives from the broadcasting of images and causes the Real Time Policy, the definition of which could be the following: the altering in the timing of the policymaking or of its announcing. 3. Power over the choice of the channel of communication,whichderives from the other characteristic of the medium, which is the constitution of an arena, and manifests itself as the effect of Media Diplomacy. This can be defined as the exchange of messages in the media arena and the media’s mediation between the parties in the conflict. 4. Power over the choice of instruments, which is due to characteristics of the medium and determines the adoption of a media strategy that is integrated into the wider political and military strategy, that is, the effect called Semiotic War.

As anticipated, the analysis of the occurrence of media effects relating to each aspect of media power has been at the very basis of the

Table 1.1 Own theoretical framework

Kind of Source of power Effect Effect deﬁnition power

Power over Interaction mediated by Agenda Participation in the agenda the medium–message: the Building the construction of Image plus discursive meaning and in practices around the the building of the image and specific images political agenda Power over Interaction mediated by Real Time Changing of the the process the medium–message: the Policy [push timing of Image plus discursive and pull the foreign practices around the effects] policymaking image and specific images Power over Interaction mediated by Media Mediation the channel the medium–message: the Diplomacy between parties arena and exchange of messages and threats in the media arena Power over Interaction mediated by Semiotic Adoption of a the the medium-message: The War media strategy instrument Arena plus discursive which is integrated practices around specific in the wider images political and military strategy PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 33 empirical research conducted to explore the strength of the hypotheses listed above and has led to the identification of interconnections, interdependencies, and transactions at a system level. This outcome has led to the identification of a macro- and systemic effect that has been called ‘mediated warfare’, which can be defined as follows: a change to politics and warfare which is triggered by the media and can be understood as a multilevel alteration of interaction between the agents of war and politics. As this is one of the main findings of the empirical research conducted to write this book, it will be discussed more extensively in the Chapter 5.

6. Two case studies

The two-case analysis presented in this book has a heuristic, more than a testing, purpose. Its aim, in fact, is to verify if the hypotheses about media power and media effects discussed earlier in this chapter can effec- tively explain what media power over decision-making during conflict actually is and if we can observe media-driven changes to warfare. The selection of the two cases has been made by following the general criterion of comparability. Differences and similarities of the cases had to be consistent with the necessity of exploring certain phenomena and testing the added value of the approach presented here. Thus, both conflicts had to be ‘international’ (taking the expression ‘international’ in its broader sense, including relations between non-nation and non-state actors), they had to involve the international community, and they had to be covered by international news networks intensively. With regard to this last point, in order to make a comparison, it would have been interesting to analyze a war that was not covered by the news media or with low media coverage, or also simply to make the comparison with a conflict which occurred before the emergence of CNN, or even before the invention of television. In all these cases, indeed, it would have been possible to assess the value of the proposed approach on the basis of variations of the independent variable. However, since this is a study about media power and power relations whose aim is to understand precisely how media power functions, the preference here is for two cases of conflicts which attracted intense media coverage. Both NATO’s intervention in Kosovo and the post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan have involved the international community and have led to strong media attention. In the two cases, the international networks have dedicated most of their daily programs to the evolving conflict, and they have, moreover, created ad hoc programs, changing their schedules substantially. Thus, television, as a medium generally, and the international PROOF

34 Media Power and the Transformation of War news networks in particular, have been significantly present in the evolution of both conflicts and have transmitted numerous and various messages, including the one associated with the characteristics of the medium. With regard to differences between the cases, instead, two criteria have been used to select the conflicts under analysis: first, they had to refer to different typologies of war; and, second, the conditions of the media market had to vary. Finally, the specific limits of the theories which have been applied so far to these conflicts as well as the temporal proximity between the two cases have been taken into consideration. It would have been useful to use a taxonomy of conflicts based on the varying intensity of media power over decision-making, but this was not possible as it does not exist.7 The only typologies of conflict for which the literature has considered media power as relevant are Human- itarian Forcible Intervention and Asymmetric War. They are interesting from different points of view: first, they represent two widely supported hypotheses about the answers that the international community will most probably give to what the experts identify as the threats of the future, namely, ethnic wars (see, e.g., Kaldor, 1999) and terrorism (see, e.g., Freedman, 2001; Quiao & Wang, 2001); and, second, they have been scholarly associated with two different forms of media power. The CNN Effect theory, as well as all of the hypotheses which reject or moderate the CNN Effect, have been formulated based on Humanitarian Forcible Intervention. The case of Kosovo, however, even if commonly considered as a Humanitarian Forcible Intervention, has been generally regarded as an example of political control over the media, and has only been explained in terms of the CNN Effect by Bahador (2007). Herman and Paterson (2000), for example, point out that no CNN Effect has occurred since CNN sold NATO’s war globally. Moreover, Robinson (2000b) applies his Media–Politics Interaction Model to the Kosovo example in order to prove that media coverage of refugees did not succeed in forcing the Clinton administration to use ground troops, because the policy line that the air attacks were working and that there was no intention of launching a ground invasion was stated consistently. The distance between Bahador and the rest of the literature can be explained by noticing that while Bahador’s findings are drawn from the analysis of the crisis preceding NATO’s intervention, all others concentrate on the strikes only. No attempt has been made so far at linking the pre- military intervention phase to the air strikes phase in order to identify the repercussions of the previous on the latter, if, indeed, there were any at all. The way the Kosovo case has been studied so far highlights PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 35 the deficit in the existing theories about media power during conflicts. What emerges, in particular, is how weak the existing concepts are in explaining whether the media have power in the conflict and, if so, what kind of power. On the other side, asymmetric war is commonly considered as the context in which political actors, in particular those who are the ‘weak part’ in a conflict, choose the media as both an instrument and a field of conflict. Thus, by using my own categorization of the different forms of media power, it is possible to argue that asymmetric war is the context in which media power over instruments, as well as media power over communication means, are implicitly recognized, but still not explained in an appropriate theoretical framework. On the contrary, examples of asymmetric war are commonly used in studies about propaganda. What makes the case of the post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan particularly interesting, in comparison to other cases, is that it is an extreme case of asymmetry since ‘the remaining superpower, with superiority in every form of military capability, finds itself pitted against a non-state entity of modest means’ (Freedman, 2001, p. 65). It is the first case of a complete asymmetry that involves two belligerents not only ‘of quite different capabilities’ (ibid.), but also of a different international status and with asymmetrical goals. In addition, the post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan, like the intervention in Kosovo, poses important problems to the extant conceptualizations of media power over foreign policymaking. This is due to the fact that, as an example of asymmetric war, it shows the weaker actor in a conflict (from a military and economic point of view) fighting with instruments that are different from those of the stronger actor. In this context, the weaker actor elaborates a sophis- ticated media strategy and forces the stronger actor into a confrontation in this field. The strategy of terrorists is to use limited resources for boundless goals (Quiao & Wang, 2001, p. 83). The war that they wage is thus a combination of violence directed toward civilians, ‘Semiotic War’ directed toward the enemy, and ‘psychological warfare’ directed toward international public opinion (ibid., p. 85). However, to my knowledge, no piece of research has tried to relate this to mediated interaction and Baudrillard’s reading has prevailed, once again leading most of the scholars studying this aspect of terrorism to concentrate on the process of mediatization, destruction of the real, and triumph of the sign. Moreover, the two interventions under analysis occurred in two different international media market situations, meaning that it was possible to work with intervening variables such as the existence of networks with different nationality and ownership. Indeed, during the war in PROOF

36 Media Power and the Transformation of War

Kosovo the media that covered the conflict internationally were all ‘Western’ and, in particular, the two most important networks, CNN International and BBC World, were directly linked to, respectively, the United States and the United Kingdom, which were the two NATO mem- bers most strongly in favor of a policy of intervention. According to the literature, this made the media sensitive to the discourses of the Anglo- American governments about the war. However, it is also arguable that CNN and the BBC supported the intervention simply because they oper- ated in the same cultural environment as those particular governments and shared their views and beliefs. During the post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan, there was an important change: the Arabic network al-Jazeera broadcast exclusive images and information about the conflict via satellite. Thus, for the first time the ‘Western’ international networks were dependent on the information collected and transmitted by a non- Western network. Al-Jazeera neither broadcast new kinds of content, nor did its journalists report news on the basis of news values or routines that were different from those of the Western channels – notably, al-Jazeera’s staff is mostly made up of former BBC employees. All the same, al-Jazeera operates in a different political and cultural environment: its owner is the sultan of Qatar, and it is strongly linked to Arabic countries. Finally, the temporal proximity of the two wars has played an important role in the selection of the cases, as it has made it possible to investigate the presence of learning processes and to understand if the success/failure of media operations had any effect on the way the actors involved in the war in Afghanistan set their own media strategies. Moreover, media operations during the two conflicts are suitable for comparison, since in both cases the same state actor (the United States) takes the initiative and assumes the responsibility for the intervention (even if in two different contexts – that is one within NATO and one within an informal bilateral alliance with the United Kingdom). The selection of the relevant actors for each conflict has also been guided by a comparative rationale together with, obviously, the criterion of histor- ical relevance. In fact, the United States, NATO, Serbia, and the Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës (UCK – also known as Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA) have been selected as relevant actors in the Kosovo crisis, while the analysis of the post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan has focused on strategies and practices of the United States, the Taliban regime, and al-Qaeda. With regard to the media, the analysis has been restricted to CNN International but with a complete awareness that this could cause some PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 37 distortions in the analysis due to the fact that CNN is an American network and that consequently its impact on the US government could be greater than that on any other actor. Nonetheless, this decision was supported by the existing literature and the interviews conducted, where CNN is still seen as the network that policymakers watch most, even if no longer as the only one with a global audience. CNN’s authority has survived the changes in the market because, more than on material conditions, it is historically connected to the stature of CNN founder and owner and to what he thought his mission and the mission of CNN should have been. On the occasion of CNN’s official debut on 1 June 1980, Ted Turner declared that he saw CNN as an instrument of power to be used for the democratization of information (Auletta, 2004, p. 40). On that same occasion, Turner recited a poem by a minor poet, Ed Kessler, which reflected CNN’s mission: ‘To act upon one’s convic- tions while others wait, to create a positive force in the world where cynics abound’ (Turner cit. in Auletta, 2004, p. 41): CNN was born ‘to tie the world together’ (Turner cited in Neuman, 1996, p. 211). As CNN’s internationalism grew, Turner started to be more and more involved in international issues. He became more and more concerned with sav- ing the environment, eradicating poverty, and ending the Cold War. He met and became friends with Jacques Cousteau, the primatologist Jane Goodall, the civil rights leader Andrew Young, and the environmental- ist Russell Paterson. ‘I was hanging around with people that cared about the future of the planet, both of the human race and of the environment. And they had an impact on me’ (Turner cited in Auletta, 2004, p. 48), he recalls. In 1985, Turner established the Better World Society, whose purpose was to subsidize documentaries on the dangers of environmental pollution, nuclear weapons, and the population explosion. In September 1997, he was honored by the United Nations Associa- tion in the US, and he had the idea of donating a billion dollars – then a third of his wealth – to the United Nations (UN). The money was intended to support programs such as those which eliminate land mines, provide medicine for children, and ease the plight of refugees. In December 2000, to solve a long-running dispute between what the United States owed the UN and what the US Congress was willing to pay, Turner joined Richard Holbrooke, then the American ambassador to the UN, to propose to contribute the 34-million-dollar difference. Unsurprisingly, Turner’s creation demonstrated his same idealistic ten- sion in the years when Turner was daily present in CNN’s control room. CNN’s journalists shared this idea of the network’s mission with enthu- siasm: everyone in Atlanta and in the overseas offices wanted CNN to PROOF

38 Media Power and the Transformation of War matter internationally. The 1990s Gulf Crisis provided them with the occasion. Equally unsurprising is that a wave of criticisms about the way CNN covers international news has followed the Turner Broadcasting Company’s mergers, first with Time Warner, and then with AOL as well as the consequent departure of Ted Turner from the CNN board. Herman and Paterson (2000), in particular, have claimed that coverage of the Kosovo crisis has shown that CNN is no longer able to report indepen- dently from the US government. Criticisms have also risen as CNN has faced an increasingly competitive media environment. The more than 70 24-hour news television networks presently around the globe, including al-Jazeera, BBC World, Fox News, and Sky News, have, in different ways, eroded CNN’s space and presented the news world with serious alternatives. Nonetheless, even if sharing authority and reputation with other outlets, CNN is still the channel ‘Western’ politicians tune in to. Both conflicts have been given temporal borders that are those constructed by the discourses of the media and of political actors. As the news media had started reporting about the conflict in Kosovo long before NATO’s air raids, 1992 has been taken as the point of departure, which is when the international community began to consider possible solutions, while its examination ends soon after the raids, when NATO ceased the bombings and Kosovo almost completely lost the attention of the media. Given that the military intervention in Afghanistan is still ongoing, drawing the boundaries of the post-9/11 crisis is more complicated. The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were an obvious starting point, but a less obvious finish point was drawn at the constitution of Karzai’s government, when a first end of the story was written by both politicians and the media. The ten years following that moment could be treated as a completely different case as the length of the US military commitment has altered substantially both conflict and media/politics dynamics as compared to the 2001 phase.

7. Looking for media effects

In order to identify the different media effects which are related to the proposed four-dimensional deﬁnition of media power and to understand how the media transform war by altering the interaction between the agents of war and politics, different episodes of the conﬂict in Kosovo and the post-9/11 crisis have been studied. The daily evolution of the political agenda, the timing of the decision-making, the actors’ strategy in dealing with the media (either to attract them or to PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 39 space them out), and all the actors’ diplomatic moves which implied the presence of the international media have been identified and analyzed. The intention is, of course, not to reveal new surprising ‘truths’ about Kosovo, 9/11, or the intervention in Afghanistan, but simply to advance our understanding of how the phenomenon that has been previously been called ‘mediated warfare’. Different theories exist about the Kosovo crisis, each one appealing to some kind of ‘interest’ in order to explain why NATO intervened (see, e.g., Mertus, 1999; Daalder & O’Hanlon, 2000; Bacevich & Cohen, 2001; Judah, 2002). Similarly, there is a general agreement on the notion that Enduring Freedom was aimed at important strategic goals of the United States and that policymaking was driven not by the media but by American interests. This book does not want to negate or contra- dict any of those explanations. Nor does it argue for a determinant or deterministic role of the media in the priming of these crises and the ensuing choice of a forcible intervention. The argument made is that the proposed theorization of media power is a necessary compo- nent of a full understanding of the role which the media played in the development of the two crises. In the evolution of the decision-making toward Kosovo and Afghanistan, in fact, what emerges is that the media have power over the transformation of war as they cause the interaction between the agents and the objects of war and politics to be mediated. This phenomenon, in turn, manifests itself as an intricate network of media effects that influence each other and overlap continuously. Real Time Policy, for example, is often the result of a longer and more complicated process of Agenda Building. Similarly, Agenda Building is also influenced by the use that political actors make of Media Diplomacy, while Semiotic War includes a series of activities among which one could even place Media Diplomacy. It is only by considering all different effects and focusing on their linkages that we can start appreciating a sort of macroeffect, that is, a change to politics and warfare, which is stimulated by the media and can be understood as a multilevel alteration of interaction between the agents of war and politics. A major methodological difficulty was due to the fact that in order to search for media effects one has to relate some media activities to ‘extra-media’ data. In particular, since the goal of this book is to consider the impact that not only media content itself but also the mere presence of a given medium exercise on decision-making and warfare, it was necessary to detect long-term effects due to the sum of media activities of a given period as well as the short-term effects due to the specific PROOF

40 Media Power and the Transformation of War content of media messages. This kind of research presents many problems because it is not easy to distinguish media effects from the effect of other actors’ activities oriented to the same outcome, which is especially true with long-term effects. Nonetheless, according to Lang and Lang (1985), the fundamental role of any theory about media power and media effects is to clarify – and not necessarily demonstrate – the processes which influence the final outcomes. It is therefore possible to use a complex set of different methods for both data collection and analysis which, through documentation and interpretation, lead to the identification of those processes which can be considered as effects of media power. With regard to data collection, I examined the transcripts of all daily (and live) CNN shows available both on CNN.com (for the post-9/11 crisis) and on Lexis-Nexis (for the Kosovo conflict). Transcript retrieval from CNN.com was done manually by downloading all shows broadcast between 9 September 2001 and 5 December 2001. Research on Lexis-Nexis was necessary to retrieve older transcripts relating to the Kosovo conflict and no longer (or never made available on) available on CNN.com. A search string (Kosovo AND Conflict AND/OR War) was used in order to collect all CNN shows reporting about Kosovo between 1 December 1991 and 30 June 1999. In the case of Kosovo it was also necessary to collect the bulletins of press agencies and transcripts of press conferences for the period between December 1991 and Decem- ber 1997. During that period, in fact, CNN coverage of the conflict was minimal and it was therefore necessary to collect other data in order to reconstruct the way the issue had entered into the political and the media agendas. Also in this case, a key word research was conducted that used the string Kosovo AND Conflict AND/OR War on all English-speaking sources present in the Lexis-Nexis database. These data have been cleaned in order to eliminate some existing duplications and remove all of the shows where the two conflicts under analysis were treated as marginal issues. The key word search, in fact, isolated more than 30,000 texts. This number consisted predominantly of press agency bulletins about Kosovo, especially by Associated Press, which were issued on average ten times a day, but usually all with almost the same content. Repetitions occurred also in the transcripts of press conferences (as two different agencies distribute them) and in CNN transcripts from one day to the other, since some programs were aired more than once. After cleaning the data, two separate data sets were created: the Kosovo data consisted of a corpus of 1646 texts and the other, for PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 41

Afghanistan, consisted of 451 texts. Different kinds of work have been conducted on these materials: (1) they have been searched for information about the media/government relations as it appears from discourses and declarations of journalists and policymakers; (2) they have been analyzed through semiotic discourse analysis in order to draw out how the narrative of the conflicts was constructed by the different actors; (3) they have been analyzed through frame analysis in order to exam- ine how the conflicts under investigation have been transformed into specific political issues; and (4) they have been considered as indica- tors of the practices through which the role of images and media has been constructed by different actors, assuming that these practices affect policymakers’ perception of media power. Texts from other sources have been less systematically collected and analyzed in order to have a control sample, which consisted of about 300 texts for Kosovo and 500 for the post-9/11 crisis. In particular, opinion pieces and in-depth analyses as published by leading English-speaking newspapers and a magazine (the New York Times,the Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The Economist, and the International Herald Tribune)were collected in order to ascertain interesting declarations of policymakers and find possible references to CNN shows. Also, in this case a key word search was undertaken on Lexis-Nexis by using the same string as above for both conflicts (Afghanistan/Kosovo/September 11/ AND Con- flict AND/OR War) and for all newspapers’ daily editions which were published in the time span of the two conflicts. To the same end and by using the same string(s), a number of US government press releases and press conference transcripts were collected from sources available on Lexis-Nexis such as the Federal Document Clearing House, the Fed- eral News Service, the M2 Presswire, the US Newswire, and the White House Bulletin. US official non-restricted documents were also collected from the official websites of the White House, the Department of State, the Pentagon, and NATO when these discussed media strategies per se or in the context of broader military or diplomatic strategies. Finally, abstracts from the Vanderbilt Archive for News Media were collected in order to acquire a description of the visual content of all CNN programs present in that database, even if these are only a very small proportion of all CNN shows broadcast during the time spans under analysis. Images were not analyzed per se: the analysis was concentrated on discourses produced by politicians, journalists, university professors, and all the kinds of people who were called on to broadcast on CNN and comment on what was happening. These discourses are practices that PROOF

42 Media Power and the Transformation of War surround the images: they state what different actors do with those images and how they construct the meaning of those images. Further data collection was undertaken through qualitative interviews. These were conducted with an exploratory scope and no pretence to be representative of any kind of actor. They were intended to help understand how certain key actors may perceive media power, define media–government relations, interpret (and remember) the influence that the media exercised on the political process during the two conflicts under examination and relate it, also, to other factors which had power in the causation of the final outcomes, if indeed they had any. Interviews were conducted with 8 high-ranking decision-makers of various nationalities (2 from the US government, 2 from the US diplomatic service, 1 from the US military, 1 from the British diplomatic service, 2 from the Italian diplomatic service), 14 high-ranking officials of various organizations (2 from NATO, 6 from the UN, 4 from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and 2 from the European Union (EU)), and 10 journalists (1 from CNN, 1 from BBC, 1 from the New York Times, 1 from al-Jazeera, and 6 more from various newspapers and TV networks in France and Italy). These interviews were either face-to-face or telephonic. They were conducted on or off the record, according to the interviewee’s wish, even if the initial request was always for an ‘on the record’ meeting. Each focused, non-schedule-structured interview followed an interview guide which specified topics related to the research hypotheses. In this way, although the encounters were structured and the major aspects of the study were fully explained, the respondents were given considerable liberty in expressing their perception of media power, structuring their account of the conflict, and introducing their own notion of relevance. Finally, since it was not possible to meet some key actors, especially representatives from al-Qaeda or the UCK, some secondary sources, like memoirs and biographies of key political figures in the US government and interviews undertaken by other scholars or published by newspapers and magazines, were also collected and analyzed through discourse analysis. Findings drawn from the analysis of media contents were triangulated with information gathered from the control sample and interviews. Comparison with secondary sources was also necessary in order to produce the longitudinal observations which are needed to investigate long-term effects (Wolf, 1992). In fact, the analysis which is at the very core of this book develops on two different levels: on the one hand, the media have effects on the context of the decision-making toward PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 43

Kosovo and Afghanistan, but on the other hand, there is a higher level which encompasses the conditions which precede or accompany the specific interaction between a particular medium and a particular actor in the conflicts under examination. This higher level is especially apparent in actors’ verbalized perceptions of media power and practices, like media operations or media consumption. Further methodological details will be provided when discussing the strategy used to assess the occurrence of each single media effect relating to the four-dimensional definition of media power. However, some explanations about the reasons why semiotic discourse analysis has been preferred to a more conventional content analysis will be given here in order to avoid any misunderstanding. First, semiotics is not just a method of discourse analysis, but a theory of language which shares the post-positivist epistemology which lies at the very heart of this book. Greimas (1966–1970), in particular, developed a generative and structural theory which could account for the articulation and the narrativization of the semantic universe as a totality of meaning. In Greimas’ theory, language does not represent reality, but instead con- structs reality, because reality is an effect of the production of sense. In this framework, social events are intended not as empirical facts, but as discursive constructions aimed at making ‘the social’ existent in itself and for us (Greimas & Courtés, 1979). Second, semiotics gives scholars in the social sciences the possibility of analyzing not only news, myths, folkloric tales, literary or pictorial texts, but also ‘social texts’, institutional ambits, rituals, interactions between individuals, consumer behaviors, and so on. According to this approach, in fact, there is no actual distinction between material action and action through signs. Semiotics distinguishes between construction and realization of narrative programs of action, on the one hand, and the manifestation of those programs in different substances of expression, on the other hand. This approach therefore allows the analyst to consider war as an action of meaning transformation, that is, as a ‘semiurgical’ activity, where forcible actions, either actual or only verbal, such as NATO briefings, can all be treated as different expressions of the same narrative program (see Philonenko, 1974 and Montanari, 2004). Moreover, semiotics has developed the concept of ‘text efficacy’ in order to conjugate textual semiotics with pragmatics. A distinction, in fact, has been made in the discipline between the ‘meaning effects of a text’, which are the textual mechanisms which produce sense and are within the text, and the ‘efficacy of a text’ or ‘life effects’, which are the results of the practices of vision/consumption/experience of the text by its empirical recipient. PROOF

44 Media Power and the Transformation of War

Through the concept of efficacy, semioticians intend to integrate the context with the text. Semiotics teaches that texts must be studied in relation to the power they exert on their recipients, to the strength with which they are attributed, and to the force which makes them able to transform beliefs, passions, and behaviors. Third, semiotics offers more than a simple method: it provides social scientists with an effective meta-language which one can apply to both ‘text’ and ‘context’. This meta-language is very precise and allows for replication and control of results because each category of analysis is precisely defined (see Greimas & Courtés, 1979–1982) in order to limit free interpretation as much as possible. At the same time, semiotics teaches that eradication of the analyst’s subjectivity is not possible and that the analyst should not hide the degree of interpretation that is inevitable in any enterprise in the social sciences. In the following chapters, two models of semiotic analysis have been used so as to maximize results: Greimas’ Narrative Grammar has been used to codify the entire corpus of texts and produce argumentations about Agenda Building and Real Time Policy, while on the basis of Eco’s Semio-Enunciational Model occurrences of Semiotic War and Media Diplomacy have been coded. In Greimas’ idea of semiotics there is a distinction between the deep structure (semantic structure) and the surface syntax, where the latter can be further divided into narrative structure (surface structure) and discursive structure (the structure of manifestation). The object of semiotics, for Greimas, is to understand the process of meaning production which goes through a series of horizontal conversion from the semantic structure to the syntax and vertical conversions from the surface structure to the discursive structure. This system of different levels of structures is, according to Greimas, a hierarchy that can be subjected to analysis and whose elements can be determined by reciprocal relations (and by communication). As a meaning takes form, it passes through the following levels: (1) the deep semio- narrative structures (including the so-called Semiotic Square – see Chapter 2 when discussing the Bosnia Syndrome); (2) the surface semio- narrative structures (where we find devices used to describe actions: the actantial model, the narrative program, and the canonical narrative schema – see the application of the narrative program in Chapter 2); (3) the discursive structures (including figurative/thematic/axiological analysis and other elements); and (4) manifestation (i.e., the phenomenon that is manifested empirically to some degree, such as atext). PROOF

Media Power: A Radical View 45

In the case of Media Diplomacy and Semiotic War, a different method was needed as the focus was not on narratives, but instead on linguistic markers of communication and communicative strategies. To this end, Eco’s Semio-Enunciational Model provided an appropriate instrument for textual analysis (Eco, 1979). Following Eco’s theory, a text is a type of machine which is activated only by the cooperation of the reader. It is for this reason that Eco’s interpretative semiotics has often been considered as opposed to Greimas’ structural semiotics, even if Greimas never denied the importance of the reader in the process of meaning production, and Eco never denied the existence within the text of some structure producing meaning. In his Semio-Enunciational Model, Eco claims that every text is the result of its author’s strategy to make the reader undertake a succession of cognitive operations. This strategy is a textual arrangement called ‘model author’ and it is inscribed within every text. The cognitive operations of the reader too are inscribed in the text and named ‘model reader’. Neither the model author nor the model reader are empirical subjects, but are instead textual strategies decided upon by the empirical author on the basis of his/her communicative intention and on the basis of the possible empirical target of his/her message. It is worth underlining that this method does not allow us to recognize the communicative intention of the empirical author of the messages examined or the interpretation of the textual meaning by the empirical reader nor does it provide us with a precise procedure to follow for the analysis. Nonetheless, this concept is useful for the detection of Media Diplomacy and Semiotic War because it teaches us that it is possible to infer the author’s communicative intention from the textual meaning which the text itself legitimates, and to identify the possible empirical target of the message from the model reader which lies within the text. Finally, Greimas’ narrative analysis has been integrated with the analysis of the framing. Framing does not lie outside Greimas’ understanding of narrative; on the contrary, it corresponds, in Greimas’ language, to the production of the thematic structure (see above). Preference was given to the use of the wording and methods typically associated with frame analysis, as these are more familiar to scholars in IR, media studies, and sociology than is semiotics. In fact, the concept of framing is used in various disciplines to identify the mechanism by which some social phenomenon is constituted as a political issue by the mass media or political actors, movements, or organizations. In this framework, framing is conceived as a set of rhetorical devices which favor a speciﬁc interpretation (or perception) of a given social phenomenon and discourage others. Its PROOF

46 Media Power and the Transformation of War functioning is based at the same time on the Foucauldian idea that social power stays in all those discursive practices that constitute the ‘reality’ we live in and on those cognitive theories arguing that human beings are by nature ‘cognitive misers’ (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) who prefer to do as little thinking as possible and need some shortcut to process information and make sense of what happens around them. As a consequence, applications of the concept have been so far aimed at understanding who social ‘framers’ are and how much power they have. In the ﬁeld of research on social movements, for example, framing is conceived as one of the main activities of social activists as it is by framing that they exercise ‘advocacy’. By framing a given phenomenon in a certain way, in fact, social movements transform it into a political issue and push it (or rather a speciﬁc interpretation of it) onto the political and public agendas (see, e.g., Snow & Benford, 1988). The use of the concepts of framing and frame analysis was in a way unavoidable also because it brings us back to Goffman’s idea of symbolic interaction which is one of the theoretical pillars of this book. In fact, framing is not just a mechanism for explaining how political issues are created and communicated by certain actors and imposed over others: such a mainstream perspective about framing appears misleading and reductionist. Framing is part of cognition and of interaction: it takes place in the discursive acts of any agent acting in the public sphere as well as in closed technocratic circles and implies a continuous interaction between different kinds of agents as well as between structures and substructures of the political system. PROOF

Index

9/11, 65–9, 71, 78, 93, 95, 118, BBC, 36, 38, 116 168, 172 bin Laden, Osama, 69–78, 94, 113–25, 151, 156–8, 160, 166, 171, 176, advocacy, 46 180 agency tapes of, 113, 117–18, 120, 125, 137, press, 40, 64, 108, 134, 136 158, 166, 176, 180, see also agenda building, 31–2, 39, 47–83, videos 108, 128, 168–70, 178, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 11–12, 53–62, 180–2 64–5, 71–2, 74, 77–8, 83–5, 87, agenda setting, 10–13, 15, 17–18, 89–90, 103, 106, 108, 117, 20, 47–8, 163 128–30, 132, 140, 144–5, 160, agent, 1–2, 5–6, 14–15, 21, 30–1, 33, 162, 170, 172, 178, 180 38–9, 46, 51, 53, 91, 99, 126, 153, conﬂict of, 33–7, 53–64, 82–91, 163, 182 101–12, 128–45 airstrikes, 127 brieﬁngs, 71, 91, 96, 103, 105, 107, NATO, 34, 88, 91, 103–4, 114, 123, 146, 148, 160, 174, 181 108, 111, 124, 129, 132–46, of NATO, 43, 91–2, 133–4, 138, 141, 176 146, 151, 179, see also NATO over Afganistan, 120, 158 Bush, George W., 18, 66–79, 114–15, Albright, Madeleine, 56–7, 83, 85–8, 117–19, 121, 127, 146–9, 168, 101, 104–5, 109–12, 119, 128, 171, 174, 177–9, 185 130–2, 144, 177, 181, 184 speeches of, 66–79, 93–8, 114–15, al Jazeera, 19, 21, 36, 66, 71–2, 76, 117, 168, 171 113, 117–18, 120–2, 125, 147–8, 150–3, 156–62, 166–8, 171, 176, CART, 138 179–80 casualties, 5, 19, 128–30, 151, 172, 178 al Jazeera effect, 19 civilian, 6, 129, 133–5, 139–41, 150, al Qaeda, 36, 42, 69, 72, 74–5, 152–5, 160, 179 115, 119–22, 151, 156, 159, Cheney, Dick, 147, 149 171 civilization(s) Amanpour, Christiane, 54, 102–3, 109, clash of, 74–6, 78, 117, 172 123, 131–2, 138 Clark, Wesley, 13, 87, 105, 112–13, analysis 129–30, 134, 150, 161 discourse, 41–3, 48, 79 Clinton, Bill, 57, 60–1, 67, 90, 92, frame, 41, 45–6, 81 104–7, 110–11, 128–31, 139, narrative, 45 141–2 arab spring, 9, 25 CNN, 21, 33–4, 36–8, 40–1, 55, 59–63, arena, 23 65–74, 76–9, 81–5, 87–91, 93, 95, of media, 25–6, 30–2, 67, 78, 97, 101–3, 106–9, 111–14, 99–102, 107–8, 111, 123, 147, 116–25, 128, 131–2, 134–6, 138, 165–6, 168, 174–5 143, 147–8, 150, 152, 156–7, 159, Arkan’s tigers, 83, 97 167–9, 171–3, 176, 180, 186

216 PROOF

Index 217

CNN effect, 10–12, 15–17, 19, 34, 89, ethnic cleansing, 58–9, 82, 87–8, 90, 163, 167 105, 136, 145 communication, 6, 8, 14, 19–20, 22–3, 25, 35, 44–5, 48, 96, 101, 107–8, framing, 25, 45–6, 77, 81, 91, 165–6, 116, 147–8, 157, 183 168–70, 172, 181 channel of, 6, 9, 14, 32, 99–100, 105, 107, 111, 113, 123–4, 126, genocide, 82 177 prevention of, 57 political, 2 visual, 165, 182 Holbrooke, Richard, 37, 89, 91, 103–6, conference 111–12, 119, 144, 179, 186 press, 40–1, 49, 57, 60, 64, 71, 81, Holocaust, 90, 132 84, 93, 101, 103–7, 114, 116–17, 121, 123, 130, 148, image, 3, 6–8, 13–19, 22–3, 25–32, 36, 166, 175, 178, 181–2 41–2, 47–8, 57–8, 61–2, 65–7, consent manufacturing, 10, 15, 71–2, 78–83, 85–6, 88–9, 91, 95, 185 100, 106, 109, 121, 125, 128, consumption 130–3, 135, 137–60, 166–70, 173, of images, 7 176, 178, 180–1 of media, 24, 43, 47, 100, 130, 167 see also under photography; pictures contact group, 85–6, 88, 103, 109, 111 indexing, 10, 13 coverage, 13–14, 38, 67, 76, 107, 127, interaction, 1–2, 9–11, 21–6, 30–5, 129–30, 133, 140, 148, 155, 173 38–9, 43, 46, 99–100, 107, 118, media, 2, 10–12, 19–20, 23, 33–4, 120, 123–6, 164, 169, 175–6, 48, 77, 87, 89–90, 128, 132, 181–3 149, 186 symbolic, 22–3, 31, 46, 164 TV, 2, 10, 18, 40, 72, 81, 134, 141, intervention 168, 180 humanitarian, 6, 12, 34 culture, 6, 9, 20–2, 27–8, 52, 154, 166, military, 5, 7, 18, 34, 38, 69, 77, 82, 168 87, 93, 95, 97, 128, 148, 172, organizational, 101, 129 185 visual, 28 NATO, 15, 33–4, 90, 110, see also airstrikes diplomacy, 6, 14–15, 26, 30, 107, 124–5, 174, 177, 182 journalists media, see media diplomacy embedded, 161, 180 public, 99, 113, 117, 123, 125, 147, 160, 168, 179 Karzai, Hamid, 38, 98, 116, 159 traditional, 14, 101–2, 113–14, Kosovo 123–4, 175–6 conﬂict of, 33–7, 53–64, 82–91, 101–12, 128–45 effects Kosovo Information Centre, 84, 102, body bags, 11, 19, 88 175 bullying, 19 Kosovo Liberation Army, 36, 64, 86, media, see media effects; 109, 186 reality, 26–8, 47 see also UCK efﬁcacy of text, 43–4, 100, 123–4, 138, 173 lesson learnt, 55, 57–8, 127–9, 148, enunciation, 49, 51, 99 160–3, 175, 177, 179–80 PROOF

218 Index massacres news management, 8–9, 15, 24–5, 98, Belacevic, 87 126, 133, 149–50, 160–1, 167, Donji Prekaz, 85 174–5, 177–81 Drenica, 64–5, 83–6, 89, 91 Obrija, 88 operations, 31, 69, 117, 127, 129–30, Racak,ˇ 112, 172 134, 140 Srebrenica, 54, 57, 82 determined falcon, 108–9 mass graves, 54, 143, 145–6 enduring freedom, 39, 71, 149–60 media inﬁnite justice, 94, 118, 174 electronic, 23 media, 14, 36, 43, 49, 98, 126–7, new, 2, 4, 20, 25, 155, 161, 165, 183 133, 160 media diplomacy, 8, 10, 14, 17, 21, 32, military, 82, 104, 133, 150 39, 44–5, 49, 59, 99–125, 157, PR, 24 166, 168–9, 175–7, 181–2 OSCE, 88, 90–1, 172 media effects, 1, 3, 8, 9–10, 12, 15, 17–20, 24–5, 32–3, 38–40, 82, patriotism, 149, 161, 167, 187 164–5, 169–70, 173, 177–8, peace accords 180–1, 185 Dayton, 108 see also under agenda building; peace talks agenda setting; al Jazeera Effect; Rambouillet, 102, 112 CNN effect; consent Pearl Harbor, 67 manufacturing; indexing; Pentagon, 38, 41, 67, 71, 78, 92, 94, media diplomacy; real time 97, 135, 139, 141, 146, 148–55, policy 159, 162, 167–9, 172, 174 media market, 19, 23–5, 34–5, perceptions, 2, 8–9, 24–5, 29, 43, 53, 125, 169 100, 127–8, 160, 163, 172, 175, mediation, 2, 4, 9, 15, 25–6, 32, 80, 177–8, 180, 184 99–100, 102–3, 163, 166 photography, 26–8, 185 of conﬂict, 9, 14, 30, 49, 99–100, noeme of, 26–7 118, 123–4, 164, 176–8 see also pictures; image mediatisation, 7–9, 22, 35, 164, 183 pictures, 10, 13, 18, 27, 29, 57, 60, 62, Milosevic, Slobodan, 55, 60–1, 83, 86, 73, 83, 89, 93, 95, 106, 111, 91, 100, 103–6, 109–13, 136, 145 135–6, 138, 141, 143–6, 153, Mullah Omar, Muhammad, 115, 120, 155–7, 168, 181–2 154 polls, 82, 92–3, 142 postmodernists, 7 narrative grammar, 44, 50 Powell, Colin, 69–70, 74, 94, 117–20, narrative programme, 43–4, 50–1, 128, 147–9, 157–8 62, 74 power narratives, 6–7, 41, 43–5, 47–54, 58, four-dimensional, 31, 38, 43, 49 62–3, 65–6, 68–78, 92, 96, 98, media, 16–20 127, 141, 144–5, 147, 150, 160, relational, 16, 21 165–73, 176–8, 181, 184 source of, 20, 32, 165–6 NATO, 4, 13, 15, 33–4, 36, 38–9, 41–3, structural, 21, 31, 43 53, 56–7, 84, 87–92, 103–14, 127, three-dimensional, 21, 24, 31 129, 132–46, 152, 160–1, 172, press, 18, 20, 47–8, 64, 68, 87, 94, 101, 180, 186–7 106, 134–8, 143, 147–51, 154, NATO activation order, 89, 91, 104 157, 159, 178 NATO activation warning, 87 prevention, 55–7, 89 PROOF

Index 219 propaganda, 9, 14, 16, 18, 35, 98, 113, Taliban, 36, 70–4, 76, 78, 113–16, 126, 149–60, 168, 174–5, 177, 119–20, 124, 150–5, 159, 171–2, 179, 185, 187 176, 178 black, 159 target list, 139, 140, 180 propaganda model, 16, 185 terrorism, 34–5, 68–9, 71, 86, 93, 95, public opinion, 6–7, 10, 12–15, 17–18, 118–19, 122, 153, 172 20, 35, 47, 59, 80, 82, 92, 99–100, terrorist, 25, 35, 63–6, 69–72, 74–5, 110, 127–8, 153, 155, 175, 183, 77–8, 84, 95–6, 109, 113–16, 119, 186 121, 153, 157–60, 169, 171–2, 180 theory, 16, 17, 22, 34, 40, 131, 164–5, real time policy, 10–11, 13, 17, 173 20–1, 32, 39, 44, 49, 80–3, hypodermic, 19 90, 92, 96–8, 124, 146, 166, IR, 3 170–2, 177, 182 of language, 43, 45 refugees, 34, 37, 88, 110, 132, 136, limited effect, 8, 19 142, 144–5 medium, 20–1 Rice, Condoleezza, 70, 117–18, 146–8, Turner, Ted, 37–8, 101 158 TV network Rugova, Ibrahim, 60, 84, 102–3, 111, 24-hour, 21, 25, 30, 38, 94, 137, 169 175 international, 25, 108 Rumsfeld, Donald, 69, 74, 96, 116, TV screen, 26, 73, 121, 144 118, 121, 148–9, 152, 154, 158 TV shows, 41, 70, 82–3 Rwanda, 12, 56–8, 130 Larry King, 69, 111, 123 twin towers, 67, 71, 172 semiotic guerrilla, 126 twitter, 169 semiotics, 22, 43–5 semiotic square, 44, 50–2, 55–6 UCK, 36, 42, 63–4, 77, 101–3, 106, Serbian national television (RTS), 103, 109–10, 132, 169, 175 110–11, 132–6, 140–1, 160, 180 UN, 37, 42, 57, 82, 85, 87–9, 104, 128, Solana, Javier, 105, 111, 134, 139 130, 132, 152–3, 155, 169, 185–6 Somalia, 9–12, 60, 71–2, 74, 117, 128–31 videos, 27–8, 121, 135, 144 spillover, 61 of bin Laden, 117, 151, 157–8, see spinning, 9, 24–5, 73, 148, 168, 179 also bin Laden, Osama strategies, 8, 11, 13, 29–30, 32, 35–6, Vietnam, 76–8, 97, 128–31, 148–9, 38, 41, 43, 45, 64, 68, 76, 78, 80, 151–2, 160, 162, 170, 179 97–8, 100–1, 103, 119, 126–9, see also war; syndromes 132–3, 136, 138, 145, 147–8, 154, 157, 160–4, 166–7, 176–9, 181 media, 19, 30, 32, 35–6, 41, 97, 126, Walker, William, 90, 112 133, 147–8, 161, 166–7, 177, war 179, 181 asymmetric, 34–5, 177 surveillance, 6, 8, 27, 29 Balkan, 54, 58, 89 syndromes, 24, 78, 160 Gulf, 7, 9, 18, 140, 147, 149, 151, Bosnia, 44, 54–6, 58, 78, 82, 90, 128, 160, 179 132, 141, 171, 181 low-risk, 173 Vietmalia, 128–9 new, 2, 5–6, 68, 74 Vietnam, 76, 149, 179 postmodern, 5–7, 48 PROOF

220 Index war – continued virtual, 5–6 semiotic, 32, 44–5, 49, 69, 80, 86, virtuous, 5 97–8, 126–8, 146, 166, 173, warfare, 1, 4–5, 8–10, 14, 17, 20, 26, 175, 177 30, 33, 35, 39, 49, 55, 127, 164–5, spectator-sport, 5–6 174, 176, 185 on terror, 6, 66, 77–8, 151, mediated, 33, 39, 164–5, 182 171–2 warning, 81–2, 84, 87, 96, 105, 123–4, Vietnam, 76–8, 97, 128–31, 149, 175, 179 148–9, 151–2, 160, 162, world trade center, 66–7, 71, 94 170, 179 world wide web, 4, 9, 25–6, 169, 183