Gerner and Schrodt: The Effects of Media Coverage on Crisis Assessment

Gerner, DJ, and PA Schrodt. 1998. The effects of media coverage on crisis assessment and early warning in the Middle East. Early Warning and Early Response.

Media coverage is not uniform, and many point to phenomena such as "media fatigue" to highlight the unevenness of reporting. This piece explores these questions by specifically looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict. It explores media fatigue, finding that it is in fact measurable.

Media fatigue occurs when conflict events are not as heavily covered in regions where conflict events are more likely to occur; as conflicts continue for long periods of time, the media does not report as frequently as when conflicts occur on a more stochastic time horizon. This piece argues that large scale news sources are useful, but that they are more prone to media fatigue. For example, instead of just relying on The NYT for event coding, researches must also look to more specific news sources that deal more clearly with the conflict at hand.

Additionally, media fatigue is not entirely a product of boredom, but also may reflect a kind of competition between different events. For example, the article argues that coverage of the Israeli-Arab conflict was overwhelmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

In the end, however, exploring media fatigue is quite difficult, as it requires counterfactuals.