Some decades ago already the phrase “CNN effect” was coined, referring to a concern that the emotional power of pictures might generate such popular sentiment as to overwhelm the calm and careful deliberations of governments during crisis decision points nested in humanitarian debacles. The concern actually predated the name, since CNN set up shop only in 1980: It arose around the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive. It then reappeared as the “CNN effect” early in the post-Cold War world in a new context: would U.S. foreign policy as “armed” social work, in other words, as a meliorist substitution for a policy rooted in geopolitical strategy—since that seemed to many to have been rendered obsolete—blossom in a unipolar world?
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