Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of Mass Media

* Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing Impact of Mass Media. Walter C. Soderlund, E. Donald Briggs, Kai Hildebrandt, and Abdel Salam Sidahmed. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2008. 380 pp. $75 hbk. $29.95 pbk. In Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing Impact of Mass Media, Walter C. Soderlund and his colleagues in political science and communication at University of Windsor - E. Donald Briggs, Kai Hildebrandt, and Abdel Salam Sidahmed - systematically analyze ten humanitarian crises, most in Africa, that occurred during 1990s. The authors, political science and communication professors at University of Windsor in Canada, provide unique insight into mass media's role in supporting intervention during human crises. While acknowledging that end of Cold War helped resolve a few ongoing conflicts, Soderlund and his colleagues assert that it also gave rise to new ones. Similarly, their comparative information from quantitative and qualitative research findings also raises new questions concerning influence of news media on foreign policy decision making. Reading this book, you sense that effective change in way global community intervenes in humanitarian crises to help people of color will continue to be slow in coming. Witness slow response to recent Pakistan floods, China's landslides, and other natural catastrophes of 2010. The book too tightly packs condensed historical accounts into twelve chapters that explore foreign policy of United Nations and its major members. Interwoven among case studies are discussions of policy motives and contradictions that former colonial powers and Western powers face when deciding whether to respond to crises. The book highlights struggles of poor and developing countries as they strive for self-governance in post-Cold War environment. Moreover, story emerges of how old concept of state sovereignty was challenged in move toward global humanitarian intervention. Soderlund and his colleagues summarize the adoption of responsibility to protect norm approved by United Nations in fall of 2005. In essence, this standard asserts that international community no longer has justification to avoid becoming involved in crises where basic human rights come under attack. Moreover, U.N. members who remain on sidelines now can face allegation of being complicit in violence. The authors argue that readers should be aware of historical context of their quantitative research. Their study focused on two areas: (a) volume of newspaper and television coverage, and (b) evaluating crisis framing found in newspaper coverage, specifically New York Times. Chapter 1 provides a thorough introduction of study and research methods. Scholars examined five independent variables for each crisis: (1) crisis severity, (2) perceived risk, (3) involvement of national interest, (4) mass media alerting, and (5) mass media framing. …

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