Abstract
International networks foster solidarity within an information audience by creating
virtual communities. Namely CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera are increasing people’s
awareness in their religion, culture and place in the world. In addition, faster and
easily accessible information within global media had triggered the information wars
among the states which have changed power politics. This article argues that the
involvement of the media in international relations signifies interdependence and
mutual exploitation between the media and politics. In this context, with a specific
emphasise on the concept of ‘the CNN effect’ and ‘the Al-Jazeere effect’, it shows
how the media have become integral parts of the world politics, how they have
transformed international power struggle and have enabled the rise of the rest against
the Western hegemony
Keywords: media; international politics; CNN effect; Al-Jazeere Effect
Introduction
Despite media’s unquestioned importance in the conduct of international
affairs, it seems that the Studies of International Relations (IR) still fail to address the
issue adequately and comprehensively, in addition, less has been done to overcome
absence of understanding the communication dimension of international relations. It
can be argued that three factors might have played a role to the lack of attention given
to the function of media in international relations (Le 2006): a) insufficient abilities to
work in several languages; b) the definition of the international media echo whose
narrowness can make it difficult to collect a large enough corpus; c) and the
international relations approach in which media is considered.
1Assistant Professor Dr., Department of International Relations, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart
University. filizzcoban@gmail.com.
46 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
The first two factors underline the importance of knowing more than one
language to reach different national media reporting on each other’s society, in other
words, ‘the international media echo’, the report in one’s national media of what is
said in another’s national media. The third factor suggests that the dominance of
realism in traditional International Relations approach has contributed the lack of an
improved explanation and understanding of the role of communication and mass
media in world affairs. In the classical realist tradition of international politics analysis,
the state is considered as the main actor in international arena. Foreign policy should
be made by politicians, attuned to the national interest, and free of the influence of
extraneous domestic factors such as the news media (Mermin 1999:147). In this realist
tradition, which was developed in the 1940s, communication and mass media were
not regarded as part of state power, but these were considered as the propaganda
‘tools’ that states used towards ‘others’ in interstate conflicts in the international arena.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there were new actors, non-state actors and forces,
such as multinational groups and corporations in the international arena, particularly
in deal with increasing importance of international political economy. Raising
transnational’s and interdependence theories argued that these multinational actors
changed the traditional balance of power politics by losing state’s dominant position
in international relations (Brown and Ainley 2009). The latter part of the 1980s, the
entry of postmodernism into IR encouraged strengthening the non-state centric
discourses, meanwhile civil society organization and individual citizens were
recognized as new international actors who expanded their influences across borders
to the international level by using the power of new communication technologies and
mass media. Thus, a recently growing amount of literature has emerged in
International Relations approach in which the role of media is considered in
international policy making.
According to the literature of media and politics, the political importance of
media can be evaluated in a variety of ways. First, global media has created a ‘global
village’ that we can point to changes in the way citizens of states view themselves and
others. The media supply information, and at the same time shape people’s learning
process about the world, thus mass media have correspondingly large influence on
individuals’ picture of the world. In this context, the media become important tools
for defining ‘in-group’ identity against ‘out-group’ identity based on representing a
series of contrasts and oppositions.
Filiz Coban 47
By this end, the points of view of others are vital in international relations in
terms of construction of allies and enemies of the state. In other words, the media
help to construct the reality of international politics.
Second, the political importance of media can be identified by the shifts in the
way the state's power configuration. Media are pluralizing forces which work against
power’s ability to influence and control. Essentially, local, national and international
news agencies circulate information and images between countries and form
relationships between people from the local level to the international level (Boyd-
Barrett and Rantanen 2001: 127).
Third, global media have integrated its audiences to wars, peace and
diplomacy process. The global media’s efforts to attract public attention bring the
crises and conflicts to the top of the agenda to persuade its audiences to pressure and
influence government policies. At the same time, governments can also use the media
platforms to set their own war agenda to make their views known to the public for
their own purposes. The concept of ‘the CNN Effect’ has referred to this paradigm
since the 1990s. In addition to this, the new paradigm of the 2000s which is the
internet and all other networked information technologies’ influence on the global
politics, including democratization and terrorism is called ‘the Al-Jazeera Effect’ (Seib
2008).
According to these three points, it can be argued that the media’s power is
discussed divisively in the literature of Media and Politics, particularly in terms of their
effects in domestic politics, foreign policy decision-making and distribution of the
images of political actors and building a global civil society, public sphere and political
activism (De Jong et al. 2005). With a departure from this literature, this article aims
to observe the evolution of media’s rising role in international politics with a specific
focus on the concept of ‘the CNN effect’ and ‘the Al-Jazeera effect’.
This observation serves to find out how the media flow from the U.S. to the
rest of the world, so-called CNN effect, constituted a soft power and made the U.S. a
global hegemonic power in the 1990s. In the 2000s, the broader range of information
technology frames and new networks have been taking place in the form of contraflows
against American hegemony.
48 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
In this study, the Al-Jazeera effect is used for conceptualizing this new trend
of counter-hegemony. This effect has contributed to constitute a milestone in
thinking about world history and international affairs. Thus, the point which is
highlighted in this study assumes that new media have pluralized powers in the
international politics and carried the wars to a different level by igniting information
wars. The media are influencing the world politics by creating a powerful arena for
non-Western narratives, arguments and assumptions against the dominant Western
viewpoints in news. In a nutshell, they are accelerating the rise of the rest in
international politics which can be described as the emergence of ‘the post-American
world’ (Zakaria 2008).
The Media’s Power in the Domestic Politics: The Watchdogs?
Without an understanding of the media’s political functions and their
influences on the nations, it is not possible to provide a comprehensive picture of
their impacts on the states and international relations. Thus, this section is devoted to
explain five political functions of the media (Kuhn 2007:21), which include
information provision, agenda setting, public watchdog, political mobilization and
regime legitimating.
In the first function, the roles of media in expressing, reproducing and
spreading information, ideologies and values to wider social and international
structures constitute a crucial relationship between society and the media (Richardson
2007:114). These roles make them ideological instruments that produce meanings and
naturalise power relations; they become the means to realise domination. The
politicians would want to influence the information with the aim of maximizing their
voters in order to promote desirable situations and definitions. Thus, the role of
media discourse is crucial in the expression of ideas regarding how people think about
themselves and other nations. The media select, organize and emphasize particularly
news in order to decide what a significant subject for public discussion is. The media
cannot force us what to think; but they certainly influence what we think about and
how we think about it by their function of agenda building. Sometimes the media act as
a window on the political affairs or as megaphones for the messages of politicians. In
this case, intensive visibility of an issue in the news is an outcome of shaping the
media agenda can be used to persuade or manipulate the public.
Filiz Coban 49
According to Nye (2004:53), increased information flows through the media
have caused the loss of government’s traditional control over information in relation
to politics. The speed in moving information has created a system in which power
over information is much more widely distributed, which means decentralisation and
less official control of government agendas. In that spirit, the media are not just the
means of reproduction of power relations, but also pluralizing forces which work
against the government’s ability to influence and control. The media’s acting as the
public watchdog works out a check on elite behaviour, thus it can help make political
actors accountable to the public, assisting in the empowerment of the latter as citizens
and voters.
Furthermore, the media can be used for political mobilization by political parties
and pressure groups for the purposes of membership recruitment, calling for a public
meeting, local party canvassing, protesting, campaigning or a demonstration. The final
political function of the media, regime legitimation helps to socialize citizens into
acceptance of prevalent social norms and the institutions that embody them; by this
way they contribute to the legitimating of the political system. On the other hand the
media can trigger to increase levels of political cynicism and voter apathy which can
result demobilizing effect or delegitimizing effect at least for some of their audiences
(Kuhn 2007:30).
It can be argued that the media’s potential2 is based on to what extent there is
political control in the hands of politicians in policy making process in the linkage of
media-source balance. The key question in this context is who determines what can be
addressed and what cannot. This question is answered in various ways in different
theories, in particular in political communication and political economy (Herman and
Chomsky 2002). The first one focuses on the power of the words, sounds and images
in the media which might have influences on policy. Contradictory, political economy
approach uses the power and ownership relations that determine the structural
constraints and communication to analysis the 'influence' on the decision making
process.
2 Robinson (2004:31) suggests that there are four types in the policy-media interaction: a
supportive media, an uncritical role for official policy; non-influential and non-supporter of
any side of the debate; critical media, having limited influence to change policy; and side taker
media, effective in policy outcomes.
50 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
According to this approach, privately owned media within a liberal state with
legal protection of free speech is different from the press which is owned and
operated by the political parties or state. For instance, pluralist and democratic
governments face more competition in shaping the news than nondemocratic
governments. The media would be used for justifying policy decisions of elites and
having popular support for it (Roselle 2006:9). In democratic regimes, leaders’ powers
rely on the public for votes. Thus, they use media to explain and legitimize policies,
which means media are the fourth estate acting as a protector against unrestrained
power, in other words they are independent watchdogs of the system.
In addition to democracy, unlimited freedom of the news market does not
guarantee the ideal of freedom of communication (Keohane 1991). Marketing justifies
privileging of corporate speech and of more choice to investors than to citizens. Here,
the most important point is the empowerment of citizens and not just the satisfaction
of citizens as consumers. In this context, a third way can be purposed: ‘heterarchy’
(ibid: 150) of communication media which are controlled neither by the state nor
commercial market. Functioning of healthy public sphere can be improved in publicly
founded, non profit and legally guaranteed media institution of civil society.
The rise in non-state actors offers competing views, information, and foreign
policies to government views, information, and foreign policy that may undermine
states’ ability to influence media coverage of foreign policy. The development of a
plurality of non-state media of communication which both functions as permanent
thorns in the side of political power and serves the primary means of communication
for citizens’ living, working, loving, quarrelling and tolerating others within a
genuinely pluralist society. In a nutshell, what is spoken and known in a society
depend on the role of the television, freedom of expression, accession to media and
news values in the society.
In addition, it should be highlighted that there is a media-politicians
relationships into a co-evaluation. Media are not just used by politicians for tactical
purposes and interests, but also media have their own motivation and interests which
they have them into a more complex relationships and interactions with individuals
and institutions.
Filiz Coban 51
The Media’s Power in International Politics: the CNN Effect
The domestic and global public opinion have become key factors in the
formulation of foreign policy in the age of mediation. Before this period, international
politics were carried out mostly behind closed doors in secrecy and covert
manoeuvrings (Mcnair 1998: 177). Throughout the twentieth century, the media have
been used by governments to influence public opinion on foreign policies of states in
their favour. By an examination of the British Foreign Office, Cohen (1986) found
that at the level of policy implementation, government departments, individual
officials and ministers use mass media as direct channels to foreign societies in the
purpose of explaining policy to overseas publics to advance or conceal policy
opinions. Cohen (ibid: 52) noted that politicians use mass media in international
negotiations in order to manipulate international public sphere and other
governments. It can be described as an indirect media impact that mainly depend on
pressure from the government’s supporters and interest groups that can result to
policy change at the planning stage of a decision in foreign policy
Specifically, during the Cold War the United States had used the media in
getting its ideological message out in the rest of the world. Together with its hard
power and economical means, the media had contributed to the empowerment of US
hegemony. The media flows from the US to the other countries worked to spread its
anti-communist propaganda and to provide reassurance to its alliances that the
transatlantic perspective was valid against the Soviet threat. Tactical disinformation
about opposing forces undermined the Soviet attempts and manipulated international
public opinion.
Regarding this, Mcnair (1998:178) worked on the examples from the East-
West relations in the Cold war period and claimed that the nature of ‘the enemy’
changed because of manipulating symbols and images in the media. His work
illustrated that the media made an important contribution to international relations as
the tools of distribution of political actors’ images.
CNN began in the 1980s with a goal of the 24 hour span of international
news available with the local reporters from the different parts of the world. During
China’s Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, CNN deserved respect through its 24-
hour report.
52 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
As another remarkable success, in 1991 CNN could broadcast from the front
lines of the war zone during the Persian Gulf War. CNN’s coverage helped the
international society to figure out what was happening in Iraq. It began to take
attention to conflict areas and change people’s minds. For instance, it is known that
the pictures of starving children in the Somalia crisis pushed President Bush toward
action.3
CNN International still remains influential as it broadcasts to a global
audience on TV and via internet. In Taylor’s (1997:58-59) summary of the historical
development of the media and international political relationships, the television
station CNN is presented as being a direct channel of diplomacy among politicians,
the public and the rest of the world:
“Much has already been written by historians about that increasing role, from the Anglo-
German press ‘wars’ in the build-up to the First World War to the role of newspapers, the cinema
and radio in the program of ‘moral rearmament’ prior to the Second World War. A growing amount
of literature also now exists about how the media came to be deployed as a psychological weapon, at
home and abroad, first between 1939 and 1945 and then subsequently during the Cold War.
Today, however, if a statesman wants to make a public statement or send a message across the world,
he has the option of doing so on CNN rather than through traditional diplomatic channels.”
As Taylor noted, government departments, individual officials and ministers
use mass media as direct channels to societies with the purpose of explaining policy to
their nation and overseas publics to advance or conceal policy opinions. Therefore,
the media seems to enable the evaluation of international society by distributing
information that builds bridges between groups and individuals around the world.
This makes the media an integral part of international relations. With a
departure from Taylor’s this summary of the historical development of media-politics
relationship, in the following section the role of mass media is indicated in two fields
of international relations: the studies of war and peace.
3See also: Babak Bahador, the CNN effect in Action: How the News Media Pushed the West toward
War in Kosovo, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
Filiz Coban 53
The CNN Effect: The Media at War and Peace
Since the 1990s, the dominant debate on the media-politics relationships has
centred on the so-called “CNN effect”. Three different approaches of the CNN
effect are defined by Steve Livingston (1997: 4-6). He suggests that the media would
act as a pitfall agenda setting agent in related to the choice and selection for the sake of
national interests. They would become an accelerant in shortening response time for
decision and policy making or they would move as an impediment actor that operates
through the impact of public opinion.
As an agenda setting agent, the news media have an important job in defining
issues, primarily to help the public understand the newest array of priorities and
alliances. In this context, the news coverage can be useful for justifying state actions
by shaping what people around the world think of it. For instance, in 2003 the U.S.
war against Iraq was defined as a war of liberation by the White House and produced
a media campaign to support that idea. In this case, modern media acted as
considerable allies in selling the war and sustaining public support for it.
When the media become an accelerant, they influence the strategies and
behaviour of those in power by creating sense of urgency, increasing public awareness
and anxiety, leading to pressure to “do something”. But media coverage alone does
not guarantee a particular effect on foreign policy, regardless of how or whether the
media may exert a direct effect on policy-making elites both at home and abroad. The
media coverage does not guarantee a policy response. For example, despite the media
coverage of Bosnian atrocities and the genocide in Rwanda, none of the major
Western powers intervened for years.
As the third approach of the CNN effect, when the media act as an
impediment actor, they help to spread multiple frames, bring third parties into conflict
and help to shape public opinion which in turn affect policymakers’ decisions on
political conflicts. The opposition to government’s foreign policy can be an outcome
of the media coverage which is sourced by the domestic political division. In this
circumstance, the media’s power to distribute the reaction against official policy in
public, pressure and interest groups can led the change of balance of power due to
administration fail into control the process of the crises management (Wolfsfeld
2004:69).
54 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
For an illustration, it can be argued that the collapse of America’s will to fight
in Vietnam resulted from the media’s reporting of foreign policy. In this case, the
media coverage was affected by the domestic political divisions and spread a
demoralisation of involving in an unsuccessful limited war. The media caused the
Johnson administration’s failure to explain to the American public and Congress why
the U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam; thus the strong public reaction occurred
against the government's foreign policy.
It can be argued that in the linkage between the media and foreign policy,
public opinion is the key component in the media’s effectiveness on a certain foreign
policy decision. The media’s contribution in conduct of policy is its power to create a
favourable climate for the officials in decision making by the coverage of certain
issues which can attract large audience attention to gain public support. This
proposition is however rejected by some scholars who argue media influence on the
public is not adequately clarified by a theory.4
As it is given with the examples, “the CNN effect” concerns mainly situations
of media influence on international interventions. In addition to these, the news
media can serve as a forum for peace building in which a wide and representative
proponent and opponent set of voices are encouraged to express their views in an
open and democratic public debate involves the perspectives of leaders, activists, and
citizens. Therefore, the media’s impact on creating an environment that is conducive
to compromise and reconciliation is important for the political atmosphere
surrounding the peace process (Wolfsfeld 2004:12).
Otherwise, the media can also serve as destructive agents in the peace process.
They can emphasize the risks and dangers associated with compromise, raise the
legitimacy of those opposed to concessions, and reinforce negative stereotypes of the
enemy. In addition, the media can influence peace process in a negative way. This
would be by decreasing public support for key peace objectives, by decreasing the
secrecy needed for delicate foreign policy initiatives, or being a tool of carrying out
war or genocide.
4See also: Ien Ang(1996) Living-room Wars: Rethinking Audiences for a Postmodern World. London:
Routledge; Catherine Murray and Kim Schroder (2003) Researching Audiences: A Practical Guide
to Methods in Media Audience Analysis, Bloomsbury Academic; John L. Sullivan (2012) Media
Audiences: Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power, London: SAGE Publications.
Filiz Coban 55
Thus, giving too much access to the news media can reduce the chances for
success of resolution. It should not be forgotten that the media are not the neutral
communication channels due to they have their own motivations which define the
frame through which they present the coverage of an issue.
Hammond (2007:11) contributed a remarkable point by noticing the changing
character of war since the Cold War. He argues that the politics of fear and 'risk
society' have provoked the new understanding of war. Particularly, the 9/11 terror
and the images of the planes hitting the World Trade Centre towers and their
collapse, were mediated repeatedly by the mass media and the media coverage of this
traumatic event increased the feeling of insecurity and war hysteria (Kellner 2003:
144).
In the academic literature the role of American media in the Bush
administration’s “the war on terror” and how the national media constructed a link
with the events and Saddam regime in Iraq were indicated in the various attempts
(Bennett et al. 2007; Rampton and Stauber 2003). Washington’s surge morality tale
(King and Wells 2009: 158) offered all the components of a complete and substantive
frame to gain the public support for the Iraq war. The era of post- 9/11 has provided
Western leaders a preventative measure to pre-empt possible risks and threats which
has produced rationale new forms of humanitarian and human rights based
intervention. In doing so, they hoped to recapture a sense of purpose and meaning
for themselves and their society. Therefore, it can be argued that the staging war or
acts of terrorism as the media events feed the change in the character of war. This
fundamental shift in the politics of Western societies has given rise to importance of
media coverage by intensive emphasis on image, spectacle and media presentation.
The New Media’s Power in International Relations: The Al –Jazeere Effect
As a fact of the 21st century, the evaluation of power is dependent on
information, which is supplied through communication and mass media. Whilst the
dependency of the international system on developing information and
communication technologies is regularly and rapidly increasing, the army, politicians,
state officials, international institutions, NGOs and other international actors are
making use of communication as a power source.
56 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
In the new millennium, the statesmen are aware of performance in
international politics can change the image of state in the eyes of global audiences and
even their voters. The success in foreign policy can affect the popularity of the leaders
and their re-election chance in domestic politics. On this literature framework, this
study highlights that beside the military and economical power, the media are vital to
gain power and influence over other states in international relations. More
importantly, by focusing on the concept of “Al Jazeere effect”, this section argues that
the United States’ global hegemony has been challenged in the power struggle on
information.
First of all, Seib (2008) used the concept of the Al Jazeere effect in reference
to its impacts on the Arab world. In particular, the trend of empowering the silenced
or marginalized nations and groups is called as Al Jazeere effect. Subsequently, this
notion has been used to indicate the effects of new transnational networks and
internet-based news media on international relations (Seib 2012).
In 1996 Al Jazeere was founded by the emir of Qatar in order to spread
uncensored and critical coverage of news in the Middle East with the slogan of ‘the
opinion and the other opinion’. It aimed to break the hegemony of the pro-western
international news gathering of CNN and BBC World. By offering a counterhegemonic
resource and power, it claimed to provide a new perspective to the world
reached beyond the lens of the West. In 2003 Al Jazeere became accessible through
its website for English speakers in order to reach greater audience and greater
influence.
Al Jazeere has played a major role providing a platform for discussing the
problems of Arab societies and has trigged the demands of democratic change which
means it has a power to impact policy and public opinion. Moreover, it has challenged
American perspectives and actions around the world with extensive local news
networks as it was seen during the Iraq War. The non-Western journalists and
networks brought the Iraqi perspective to the discussion; hereby the world simply
could see what was going there from different viewpoints. Broadcasting the events
internationally broke the monopoly of Western media on reporting and defining the
war. In 2012 Al Jazeere America began to broadcast to American audiences in New
York to secure access to cable and satellite distribution in the US.
Filiz Coban 57
Despite the fact that all these are the aspects of a new post-American world’s
reality, Zakaria (2008:74-78) notes that the West still offers a role model for
advancement and modernity which the rest of world have admired and emulated. For
instance, Al Jazeere English follows a CNN model with its political talk shows,
anchors, on-air experts and debates. The rest of the world is challenging the US
hegemony in a Western-looking way.
Not just Qatar’s Al Jazeere English, but also China Central Television (CCTV)
and Russia Today’s (RT) English broadcasting distribute different views on global
views which serve to reduce the West’s monopoly on information and in particular
the hegemony of the U.S. (Xie and Boyd-Barret 2015: 71-73).CCTV, the state
network in China started to work as the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party
in 1958. But, it enjoyed rapid development toward an ambitious global expansion with
its Chinese Mandarin, English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian languages
services. In addition, CCTV officially launched to its service of CCTV America
headquartered in Washington DC, and CCTV Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya in 2012.
Today’s CCTV reflects Beijing’s policy preference for non-interventionism and
inoffensiveness. Unlike CCTV, RT has provided international news from a critical
perspective to the U.S. economy and politics since it came out at the end of 2005 to
supply a Russia-friendly view point in English. Furthermore, Kremlin fund to
establish the Arabic language channel Rusyia Al-Yaum in 2007, the Spanish language
channel RT Actualidad in 2009 and RT America in 2010.
This plurality of sources reveals the information war among international
broadcasters and countries. Beyond the cable and satellite carriers, Al Jazeere English
and all other new international networks actively use the advantages of broadband,
social media and mobile applications to reach wider audiences. They have remarkable
popularity both on Facebook and YouTube. This is to say that new media has taken
the information war to another level by Al Jazeere effect.
It is clear that the new system of communication has impacts on politics
(Street 2011). The citizens are no longer just consumers of communication, thanks to
the internet they also create their own coverage of politics and create new aspects of
political activism and leadership by using social network sites. It can be said that one
of the crucial areas in which the internet’s impact has been felt is that to be enabling
new forms of social and political activism (ibid: 263).
58 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
Another area where the impact of new media is seen in journalism by the rise
of the blog and so-called blogosphere where enable every citizen to act as journalist,
interpret and distribute news reports.Also, the network communications and
organizations empower the ways of text messaging, micro-blogging and blogging for
the campaign and propaganda has emerged the impact in the conduct of politics. As
another considerable area in which the new media impact on politics is that using
internet technologies are configuring the state-citizen relationship. Internet is
changing the operation of government in delivering services, distributing information
and consulting citizens and implementing policy. However, it enables the authorities
monitor and control to ever more effectively act as an Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ (ibid:
264).
According to Nye (2004: 53) increased information flows through new media
cause the loss of government’s traditional control over information in related with
politics. The speed of internet and the speed of information create a system in which
power over information is much more widely distributed that means decentralizing
and less official control of government’s agenda. The private armies or arm industry
too evoke the decentralization. The information revolution has enhanced the role of
markets in the means of to accelerate the diffusion of power away from governments
to private actors (ibid: 51). Nye describes power relations today as a three-dimensional
chess game, comprising from the top down, the military board, the economic board
and, at the bottom, the ‘soft power’ of information.
The new communication and mass media revolution are increasing the
importance of soft power, namely the ability to achieve desired outcomes in
international affairs through attraction by convincing others rather than coercion.
Thus, it can be argued that in the 21st century world politics, the new communication
and mass media, so-called Al Jazeere effect, are significant channels for the
empowerment of states and citizens in setting the political agenda in politics,
distributing a particular discourse and convincing people to improve cultural, political
and economic cooperation among nations.
Conclusion
In a summary, the media’s CNN effect function as the channels of
communication can be used to give a response to foreign affairs by politicians or they
can be used to gain public support for policy as well.
Filiz Coban 59
The exchange of information occurs between the sides of politicians, public
and media. It is therefore media’s power to influence the political process depends on
their relations to and impacts on the public’s perception of foreign affairs. On the
other hand, the governments need the media for the achievement of publicity. The
aspects of this relationship tie the media with politicians and public in reporting of
political issues. This serves to provide a particular understanding of the media's profile
as a player in the shaping of foreign policy.
If we are to discuss the impact of media coverage on policy, we should ask
whether a particular decision would have been made if media coverage had been
different. What is more, argumentation of media caused making a particular decision
is to claim that it was one of the necessary factors (not only one) in multiple factors in
the process. It cannot be said that all policy is driven by the media, however, the
question that it may affect it. How the public opinion can affect governmental policy
making provides a crucial place to look in order to find out whether it has happened
for analyzing the influence of media.
In the 21stcentrury, the internet is changing sovereignty while transnational
communication is opened to many millions of cyber communities. Moreover, national
security is changing, states are facing a growing list of threats and attackers may be
states, groups, individuals or some combinations. Some states are weaker than the
private forces within them. The private organizations, the NGOs, industry and unions
can compete for the attention of media from major countries in a transnational
struggle over the agenda of world politics.
In this context, this research highlighted that beside Al-Jazeere, Russia’s RT
and China’s CCTV have challenged with CNN International’s hegemony in
international news coverage. Both this trend of information struggle between the
states and the new media’s impacts in international relations is called as the Al Jazeere
effect. With a departure from these aspects, it is argued that the media and its soft
power in the world politics have been displaced the American hegemony in the last
decade which can be characterized by the notion of post-American world. In a
nutshell, it revealed how the new media have been contributed to change power
relations in the 21st century.
60 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy, Vol. 4(2), December 2016
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