Reviews

Ekaterina Balabanova (2007) Media, Wars and Politics: Comparing the Incomparable in Western and Eastern Europe

Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate. 172 pages. ISBN 9780754670698. £55 hardback.

For anyone interested in the relationship between media and foreign policy, this is definitively a must-read book. Balabanova presents an analysis of the media coverage of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, which was justified as an action to protect the human rights of the Albanian population in the autonomous province of Kosovo or Kosova (the Albanian name). NATO claimed that the operation was in conformity with international law and existing UN Security Council (SC) resolutions, but it was never sanctioned by the SC. The book makes three contributions: first, an empirically rich analysis of influential British and Bulgarian newspaper coverage of the crisis; second, an application of a policy-media interaction model to see whether or not media influenced the policy-making by framing the crisis in a certain fashion; third, based on the empirical results, a thoughtful problematisation of the model: was it helpful in discerning a relationship between media and policy? An underlying question is whether or not the Post-Cold-War era, with its supposedly new types of wars and ‘new humanitarianism’ generates media-driven policy decisions? 

The applied policy-media interaction model has been developed by P. Robinson. It is based on a hypothetical-deductive rationale: if A, then B. If policy is not yet fixed, i.e., if governments’ treatment of X is characterised by uncertainty, then under these conditions media might influence the direction of policy-making. The model is associated with the so called CNN effect, and the assumption that CNN has, on several occasions, influenced policy. The CNN effect has been observed in various US contexts, while Balabanova’s purpose is to test this in a European media and policy context – looking at two European countries with separate histories: the UK and post-communist Bulgaria, which borders on Yugoslavia/Serbia.

The empirical study involves content and framing analyses of leading newspapers and tabloids in the UK and Bulgaria. Two time periods from the spring of 1999 are selected, 24 February-25 March (pre-phase) and 15 April-15 May (intervention period). The news material consists of several thousand articles which, in a second phase of analysis, are reduced to a smaller number for qualitative interpretations. Balabanova’s study shows that despite some variations between the two time periods and the two countries’ media, both UK and Bulgarian media primarily exhibited a journalism driven by neutrality and balance, supporting and criticising NATO. The study cannot confirm any media influence on policy-making, as policy was characterised by certainty. The Blair administration in the UK was the most outspoken defender of the military intervention, while the Bulgarian government, despite the Bulgarian people’s sympathy with the Serbs, supported NATO for strategic reasons. In the British case, the ad-hoc explanation is then that this was another case of ‘elite consent’ – when there is elite consensus on a matter, mainstream media is unlikely to challenge it – while the neutral and balanced stance bore witness to at least some degree of independence. But this kind of reasoning cannot explain the Bulgarian media. Here, the striving for balanced reporting had to do with the aim to liberate journalism from its communist past when the media were entirely in the hands of the State. In other words, here Bulgarian news media wanted to ‘prove’ that they were becoming more like ‘objective’ Western media. Balabanova draws two conclusions, which are formulated as a critique of the policy-media interaction model: first that the model is less able to explain situations in which media act ‘neutrally’; and second, that the model is unable to take into account historical-political and cultural contextual factors, in this case, the communist past of Bulgaria – hence the contradictory subtitle of the book: Comparing the Incomparable…

In response to Balabanova’s concluding critique, I completely agree with the emphasis on the importance of context. But when it comes to her first conclusion, could one not stress that the policy-media interaction model is perhaps not intended to be able to explain cases where media demonstrate ‘balanced’ reporting? Furthermore, the model is only supposed to ‘work’ when there is uncertainty in policy. In order to understand the hegemonic role of liberal media, and their production of ‘objective’ news, what are at our disposal are theories which do not deal with causal relationships, but interdependent relations, such as Gramsci’s theory on the role of cultural institutions in a hegemonic system, or Bourdieu’s work on the relationship between the economic, political and journalistic fields. The problem with the policy-media interaction model is instead of another kind. While reading Media, Wars and Politics, the following critical thought occurred to me on several occasions: to what extent could media materials themselves really confirm interaction between media and policy-makers? I think that no matter how many news articles one collects, or how detailed the analysis of these articles might be, with only media materials it will still be very difficult to really ‘prove’ media’s influence on policy, including cases with much uncertainty. Even if governments and military officials might publicly state that media affect their policy-making, how do we know that this is really the case? These kinds of analyses would thus also need empirical access to the closed rooms where policy is shaped, to the kinds of concealed activities on to which popular culture imaginatively opens a window, such as in The West Wing.

Ekaterina Balabanova is obviously a skilful researcher, both in theoretical and empirical terms. Hopefully she will deal with this complex issue in the future, and continue to contribute fresh knowledge on the complex relationship between media and policy. To begin with, why not create a more context-sensitive policy-media interaction model based on the results from Media, Wars and Politics?