ABSTRACT
Overview During the 1990s the emergence of global news media providers such as CNN, coupled with dramatic shifts in the global political landscape and an emerging discussion over the concept of humanitarian intervention, helped to underpin a new debate about the role of media in foreign policy formulation. For many commentators, officials and academics the news media had become a pivotal actor during responses to humanitarian crises around the world, helping to generate pressure to intervene in order to alleviate suffering (Robinson 1999). Since then, although new types of media have emerged, accompanied in turn by new phrases such as the ‘Al Jazeera Effect’ (Seib 2008) and the ‘You Tube Effect’, and whilst issues such as the ‘war on terror’ have tended to deflect attention away from humanitarian intervention, interest in the power of media to shape foreign policy and instigate humanitarian responses has persisted (e.g. Cottle 2009; Hutchison, Bleiker and Campbell 2013; Livingston and Klinkworth 2010; Meier and Leaning 2009; Otto and Meyer 2012). At the time of writing, the powerful images of a dead Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, on a Turkish beach, who drowned along with his brother and mother whilst attempting to cross from Turkey to Greece, have appeared to play a role in forcing a more meaningful response by European countries to what has been described as the worst refugee crisis since WWII. Belief in, and the debate about, the power of images and news media to transform humanitarian responses is as pertinent today as it was during the 1990s.
