Starving children in Africa. Civil strife in Haiti. Bombed villages in Bosnia. These compelling news images can activate governments and humanitarian agencies to quell human suffering.
Other times these images do not.
"My own sense is that ... if there are no national interests involved, the media treatment of a crisis can be important," said Thomas Weiss, associate director of the Watson Institute for International Studies. "On the other hand, if there are national interests involved, the media coverage of a crisis is irrelevant to what a government might do. It is those areas where nothing is at stake that the media have the greatest potential for helping those in need."
In a soon-to-be-published book titled "The News Media, Civil War and Humanitarian Action," Weiss and Brown associates Larry Minear and Colin Scott examine the relationships among the news media, governments and humanitarian organizations during international crises. The project was sponsored by Brown's Humanitarianism and War Project.
The notion of the "CNN effect" - people at the Pentagon have their television sets tuned in to CNN, therefore CNN must be a determining factor in public policy - "permeates the discourse of international relations," said Weiss. "But when we looked at this subject, there was very little besides anecdote floating around."
The authors say the news media, particularly television, do influence the pace, scale and duration of action mounted by humanitarian actors, including governments and non-governmental agencies. Conversely, those actors alert the media to breaking stories, provide them with first-hand accounts of what is taking place and even arrange access for journalists to otherwise unreachable destinations and overnight accommodations in war zones.
But the dynamic among the government, humanitarian agencies and the media occasionally does more harm than good, Weiss said.
"The former Yugoslavia is a perfect example of media treatment being necessary, but insufficient in changing policy," he noted. "For four years, we had a daily bill of affairs about ethnic cleansing, refugee camps looking distinctly like World War II prison camps, mass rape brought to you in living color each evening. It certainly contributed to a widespread recognition of the problem. It contributed to the rhetoric and what economists call the confetti of paper resolutions at the United Nations: `We are going to do something. We must do something.'
"After all was said and done, it could be argued that the media treatment made matters worse. Because the reaction was not strong enough to bring out robust military or diplomatic action, what ended up happening was the media were pulling on our humanitarian strings. There was a sense that we were doing something, which was true. We were responding to massive suffering. But this was a palliative for doing what was necessary. Rather than doing what was necessary, we did something in between, which made us feel good, and made governments feel good that they were doing something. But, in fact, they were doing nothing at all besides feeding people so they could be exterminated later."
In some instances, the humanitarian agencies themselves make matters worse by their need to display their logo at every international crisis for the news media to see.
"The long-run impact of this kind of imagery, in which you have white knights charging in to save hopeless, hapless, barbarian local folks, is that you create an image that helps you save people in the short run," Weiss said. But in fact, that image "makes it harder to raise resources for investment dollars which ultimately are more important," Weiss said.
Instead of just reporting "when the bodies start floating down the river to the lake," many journalists and humanitarian agencies alike would like to see more in-depth coverage of such root causes of crisis as poverty, poor distribution of resources or local corruption, Weiss said.
"The frustration is that no one is interested in in-depth treatments of the root causes of war until they blow up," he said. "Even when they do make these other documentaries or write these stories, their producers and editors could care less."
Logistics, safety and interest all contribute to whether a particular crisis is covered by the media. "It also seems that we have a tolerance for one crisis at a time," he said. So when Liberia blew up at the same time as the Gulf War, the situation in Liberia received no attention. "By the time we got around to looking at Liberia, it was out of control and helpless," Weiss said.
The media must not serve as an early-warning signal, the authors caution. Instead, they urge reliance upon government intelligence agencies and a closer working relationship with humanitarian agencies for intervention before a crisis erupts.
"The next step is for journalism schools to take a look at this issue," Weiss said. "They are far better places than we to take this to the next step."