“We see that the CNN effect isn’t the idea of the media leading in the dance, but rather you have a circumstance in which some government officials are using the news media to move their agenda items further up the pay scale, to get it to the secretary’s desk.” Steven Livingston, quoted on page 68 of The Media and the War on Terrorism.
A different CNN Effect
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This has been consistently demonstrated for some time, especially in studies by Mermin and Robinson. Of course, as Warren Strobel put it back in the 1990s - CNN changes the context and process by which foreign policy gets made, rather than determining policy. While that may not have changed, I wonder to what degree media (and new media) is increasingly the de facto space where the politics of foreign policy is determined. Put another, how media conditions the rules of debate over foreign policy.