Under (Media) Pressure: Ch-ch-ch-changes in American Newspaper Representation of the Geneva Conventions before and after September 11

Transcription

1 Glaun 1 Under (Media) Pressure: Ch-ch-ch-changes in American Newspaper Representation of the Geneva Conventions before and after September 11 Dan Glaun University of Massachusetts Prepared for Submission to Dr. Charli Carpenter in fulfillment of Research Paper Requirement for Rules of War. Introduction The events of 9/11 fundamentally altered American foreign policy, and with it, America's relationship to war law. Within two years of the attacks, the United States was involved in two land wars and the accompanying legal issues of occupation, prisoner detention, interrogation, and civilian casualties. Awareness of these issues was not limited to policymakers or legal experts; rather, a series of humanitarian controversies- prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, detention in Guantanamo Bay, and CIA rendition of prisoners, for example- spurred popular and media debate over the laws of war. This paper will use American newspapers' treatment of the Geneva Conventions as a case study of the War on Terror's effect on public representation of war law, answering the question: to what extent, if any, did American media portrayal of the Geneva Conventions change after 9/11? This question has implications both for popular understanding of the Geneva Conventions and domestic political debate in the United States. By examining how the media portrays the Conventions, as well as how that portrayal has changed since 9/11, it is possible to assess how accurately the media informs the public about increasingly salient issues of humanitarian law. This analysis could also be used to find evidence of framing bias, agenda setting, and other media influences on politics with regards to the debate over War on Terror policies and international law. The literature clearly establishes the media's power to affect both the salience and framing of political issues; it is likely, therefore, that changes in media representation of the Conventions could have led to changes in public perception. Finally, the War on Terror's effect on the frequency, accuracy, positivity or negativity, and context of Geneva Conventions reporting can be quantitatively determined. This paper analyzes 9/11's effect on American media response to the Geneva Conventions by coding a dataset of American newspaper articles. I assembled a representative set of articles by searching the LexisNexis American newspapers database for all articles published between 9/11/1999 and 9/11/2003 containing the subject term Geneva Convention. These articles were then coded for accuracy and precision in descriptions of the law, positivity, negativity, or neutrality of portrayal where applicable, and which states or actors were the subjects of discussion. Additionally, the articles were broken into pre and post 9/11 subsets in order to compare results and determine changes in the media salience of the Conventions.

2 Glaun 2 First, this paper will provide an overview of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, briefly discussing their history as well as the establishment of later protocols. This section will also review scholarship discussing the role of the Geneva Conventions in the War on Terror as well as theories of media influence, in order to establish context and significance for the results. Next will be a more detailed statement of methodology; then, presentation of the results; and finally, conclusions. Background The Geneva Conventions were the first effort to create international treaty law governing the conduct of war, following the 1856 Paris Declaration on maritime war and preceding both the St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 on explosive projectiles and the wide-ranging Hague Conferences of 1899 and These treaties constituted the birth of international humanitarian law- rules which set limits on all states participating in warfare, regardless of the legality or legitimacy of the war itself. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the architect of the Geneva regime, was founded in 1863 on the initiative of private citizens inspired by banker Henry Dunant's account of the horrors of the Battle of Solferino. 2 The Committee launched an effort, unprecedented in its time, to gain the sanction of international governments for private relief organizations to operate on battlefields. After extensive lobbying of European governments, the Geneva Conference of October 1863 ended with unanimous agreement that relief agencies should be granted immunity on the battlefield and that wounded soldiers should be treated regardless of nationality. 3 In 1864 these principles were codified into international law which has since gained virtually unanimous agreement among states. Further Geneva law was passed throughout the 20 th century, further expanding the ICRC's monitoring, interpretive, and enforcement roles: the Second Geneva Convention of 1906, relating to the care of soldiers at sea; the Third Geneva Convention of 1929, which set rules for protection of prisoners of war; the Conventions of 1949, which updated and replaced the first three and introduced Geneva IV for the protection of civilians during war; and finally Additional Protocols I and II, dealing with protection of civilians during international and non-international conflicts respectively. This paper will deal exclusively with Geneva III, Geneva IV, Additional Protocol I, and Additional Protocol II, as the laws of the first two Conventions are so uncontroversial as to produce no media discussion in the dataset studied. Geneva III sets stringent rules outlining the rights of prisoners of war and the responsibilities of their captors during international armed conflicts. Among these protections are several relevant to media debate and confusion in the period: the right to non-coercive interrogation; the requirements for combatants to receive prisoner of war status, including having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance ; the guarantee of a competent tribunal to determine POW status; and Common Article III, which prohibits inhumane treatment of any out-of-combat individual in a noninternational conflict zone. 4 Geneva IV sets out the responsibilities of states with regards to protected persons in international conflicts, including the means of protecting civilian 1 Mansell, W. and Openshaw, K The History and Status of the Geneva Conventions 2 Finnemore, M Rules of War and Wars of Rules: the International Red Cross and the Restraint of State Violence 3 Ibid. 4 ICRC 1949 Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

3 Glaun 3 populations as a whole. 5 Additional Protocol I contains more extensive protections for civilians and extends, in certain circumstances, prisoner of war status to forces operating from civilian areas. It also includes guarantees of rights and due process for non-protected persons in international conflict- including the unlawful combatants which some Bush administration officials and media sources claimed were not entitled to any Geneva protections. 6 Finally, Additional Protocol II set further protections for protected persons, detainees, and civilian populations in non-international armed conflict. 7 The United States has signed but not ratified both Additional Protocols; however, the ICRC has stated, in an unfortunately vague manner, that many of the rules found in API and APII constitute customary law valid for every State, whether or not it is party to the Protocols. 8 There has been significant debate in academic and policy circles surrounding the applicability of the Conventions to the War on Terror and America's operations in Afghanistan. Ryan Goodman identifies the confusion and ambiguity characterizing the debate over the United States classification of civilians as unlawful combatants. 9 The direct role that the US government played in undermining international humanitarian law and humanitarian norms was very significant in the years following 9/11. In a case study of this effect, Edward Greer examines publicly available testimonies, statements, and legal documents, finding conclusive evidence that the Bush administration deliberately sought to circumvent the Geneva Conventions' restrictions on coercive interrogation and torture. 10 There has also been significant normative debate on role of the Geneva Conventions in unconventional conflicts. Renee de Nevers argues that while new wars pose challenges for the Geneva regime, it is strongly in the interests of the United States to strengthen the Conventions in the face of asymmetrical conflicts against non-state actors. 11 On the other side of the debate, former Bush administration legal official John Yoo argues that not only do Geneva III's prisoner of war protections not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees, the president has the right to make that determination unilaterally- a clear attack on Geneva III Article 5's guarantee of a competent tribunal to determine detainee status. 12 The literature on representation of international law in the media is next to non-existent. One in-depth study addressing similar concerns to this paper is Rigmor Argren's analysis of the portrayal of international law in leading Swedish newspapers at the beginning of the 2003 Iraq War. 13 Argren coded references to the UN Charter, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law for levels of concreteness or abstraction. The study finds that the media represents the UN Charter and international human rights law in largely abstract ways, and 5 ICRC 1949 Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War 6 ICRC 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts 7 ICRC 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts 8 Summaruga, C Appeal by the International Committee of the Red Cross on the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Additional Protocols of Goodman, R Editorial comment: the Detention of Civilians in Armed Conflict 10 Greer, E "We don't torture people in America": coercive interrogation in the global village 11 de Nevers, R The geneva conventions and new wars 12 Yoo, J The Status of Soldiers and Terrorists under the Geneva Conventions 13 Argren, R Reporting about Iraq: International Law in the Media during Armed Conflict

4 Glaun 4 makes a very limited contribution to promoting informed public opinion on these topics. However, Argren's results for international humanitarian law- the subject of this paper- are much less conclusive. He finds both a much smaller sample of representations and greater concreteness within that sample, and concludes that international humanitarian law tends to be either ignored or discussed in significant detail. 14 Argren's focus and methodology are significantly different than those of this paper; he analyzed a smaller sample of articles over a single time period, whereas my emphasis is on comparison between two contiguous time periods divided by the September 11 attacks as well as a broader range of coding categories. However, his findings do constitute an intersection of international law and media studies which appears to have been largely neglected. Lastly, the theoretical bases of this paper can largely be found in communications theory. McComb's and Shaw's landmark 1972 study on the media's agenda-setting capability demonstrated the power of the media to define the salience of issues by correlating stated voter perception of issue importance with the content of their mass media. 15 Bitzer (1968) and Vatz (2009) offer competing theories on the foundations of rhetoric. Bitzer suggests that rhetoric is based on the underlying reality of a situation, while Vatz argues that it rather creates the perception of a situation out of a speaker's rhetorical choices This debate is applicable to media representation of the Geneva Conventions, as it offers possible explanations as to changes in the salience of Geneva law as a newspaper topic- whether it is a reaction to external situations, or a constructed choice of media voices. Entman (1993) offers an explication of framing theory, which is applied in this paper to the normative representation of the Conventions. 18 Kahneman and Tversky's 1984 experiment illustrated the power of framing by presenting subjects with morally fraught yet equivalent situations that generated widely divergent responses solely because of how the situations were framed. 19 Methodology This paper examines the changes in American media representation of the Geneva Conventions by analyzing newspaper articles from September 11, 1999 through September 11, I assembled a set of articles by searching the Lexisnexis database of American newspapers for all articles containing the subject term Geneva Convention within that time period. The set was then divided into pre- and post-9/11 subsets in order to determine both the change in frequency of representation and changes in accuracy, precision, normative framing, and referenced international actors. I used four codes for accuracy and precision: accurate and precise, accurate and vague, inaccurate and precise, and inaccurate and vague. The distinction between accuracy and precision was important for effectively distinguishing between different qualities of 14 Ibid (107) 15 McCombs, M. and Shaw, D The Agenda-setting Function of Mass Media 16 Bitzer, L The Rhetorical Situation 17 Vatz, R The Mythical Status of Situational Rhetoric: Implications for Rhetorical Critics' Relevance in the Public Arena 18 Entman, R Framing: Toward the Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. 19 Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A Choices, Values, and Frames

5 Glaun 5 representation. Two articles may both be generally accurate; however, if one only references overarching principles of the Conventions, while the other cites specific legal requirements or specific articles, the overall representation is significantly difference. In evaluating the articles, I used a holistic but consistent process to determine accuracy and precision. Accuracy was the simpler category to code for; if an article, however vaguely, articulated the Conventions in a manner consistent with their text then it received an accurate coding. If it contained any misrepresentation, it was coded as inaccurate. Such a misrepresentation could have been an materially incomplete or confused statement- for example, the conflation of prisoners of war and civilian combatants- or an outright falsehood. One example of such a statement were claims that the President had the authority to determine prisoner status, despite the requirement for competent tribunals in Geneva III. Articles earned an inaccurate coding if they either actively endorsed such inaccuracies or quoted sources who made inaccurate claims yet treated them as authoritative and implicitly accepted the validity of those claims. Precision required more flexibility. If an article contained significant quotes from the text, cited specific conventions or articles, or described legal principles which require a thorough reading of the Conventions to uncover, then it was marked precise. An common example would be the distinction between an article stating that the Conventions provide protections for prisoners of war and an article stating the requirement for a competent tribunal to determine detainee status. In that case, the first would be coded as vague and the second as precise. Finally, the seemingly incongruous category of accurate and precise was somewhat rare but did occur. In such a case, an article would evoke specific legal principles which are based on a misreading or distortion of the Conventions. In coding for normative framing, I used four categories: positive, negative, neutral, and non-normative. A non-normative article was one which represented the Conventions in a purely descriptive manner, without discussing either their moral content or the desirability of their application. Positive articles either explicitly endorsed the application of the Conventions, or framed them in a predominantly positive light- through primarily quoting supporters, for example, or portraying them as moral safeguards against atrocities and abuses of human rights. Negative representations were those which argued against the Conventions' application or predominantly quoted sources criticizing their desirability or usefulness. Neutral representations either adopted a position of uncertainty as to their application or attempted to balance viewpoints by quoting both supporters and detractors. Results The most readily apparent feature of the data is the difference in number of stories referencing the Conventions in the two years before and after September 11. Pre 9/11, there were nine such stories. Post 9/11, there were 52 a 578 percent increase. Examination of the subject matter of the stories confirms that this is no coincidence, as almost all the post 9/11 stories reference the Conventions in the context of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or War on Terror detention policies- all events directly linked in administration rhetoric to the September 11 attacks. This drastic increase in coverage has implications for the salience of the Conventions and the agenda-setting decisions of newspapers. Two competing theories of salience can be found in Bitzer's 20 concept of situational rhetoric and Vatz's 21 critique of said concept. Bitzer 20 Bitzer, L The Rhetorical Situation

6 Glaun 6 argues that rhetoric is born out of reality- that, as applied to this paper, the increased media salience of the Conventions is due to external factors such as 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vatz would argue that increased salience is due to the decision of rhetors- in this case, American newspapers- to strategically promote saliences and meanings in order to create the appearance of important situations. This theoretical debate, as applied to the data, raises questions about the media's treatment of different war crimes. Were atrocities in Kosovo inherently less salient than War on Terror abuses, as Bitzer's theory would suggest, or is the 21 Vatz, R The Mythical Status of Situational Rhetoric: Implications for Rhetorical Critics' Relevance in the Public Arena

7 Glaun 7 Pre 9/11 Data Accuracy Actor: Framing

8 Glaun 8 Post 9/11 Data Accuracy: Actor: Framing:

9 Percentage Percentage Glaun 9 Comparisons: Pre- and Post-9/11 Datasets Pre-9/11 Post-9/11 0 Accuracy Precision Pre-9/11 Post9/11 0 Positive Negative Neutral Non-normative

10 Glaun 10 increased salience of the Conventions attributable to deliberate media representation of events? These questions are beyond the scope of this paper, but the sharp divide in salience pre and post 9/11 is suggestive of a decisive change in media treatment of Convention law. Further, McCombs and Shaw's study on agenda-setting in the media suggests that this greatly increased media focus on the Conventions translated into much greater public awareness of the Conventions as a politically salient issue. 22 The differences in accuracy and precision are also significant. In the two years preceding 9/11, there was not a single story which misrepresented the Conventions. However, only 11% of the stories were precise as well as accurate. The pre-9/11 newspaper reports tended to engage in generalities about civilian protection and war crimes, rather than citing specific sections of the Conventions or quoting significant excerpts from the texts. Post 9/11, however, the profile of accuracy and precision changed significantly. Accuracy declined from 100 to 65 percent, indicating an increase in media misrepresentation of the Conventions. Simultaneously, precision increased from 11 to 54%, including both accurate representations and specific, precise claims which were in actuality false. Among accurate articles post 9/11, 58% were precise and 42% vague. For inaccurate articles, 44% were precise and 56% vague. This demonstrates an acrossthe-board decrease in accuracy following 9/11. It also shows a universal increase in precision, both in accurate and inaccurate accounts. There are several possibilities as to why this occurred. The increased salience of the Conventions may have led newspapers to write in greater depth and precision about the Conventions, making it easier to have errors than when writing in simple generalities. This explanation places the causal force of inaccuracy on increased precision of reporting. Another explanation is that the issues being covered had more ambiguous and complex relationships with the Geneva Conventions than the clear-cut war crimes in Bosnia which had been the focus from Issues of unlawful combatancy versus prisoner of war status, executive determination versus competent tribunals, and international versus non-international armed conflict are much more contested areas of law than prohibitions on ethnic cleansing of civilian populations. Finally, it is possible that inaccuracy could have increased due to the Bush administration's contrarian interpretations of Geneva III. Some articles used administration officials as sources and took their claims, no matter how specious, as fact without verifying against the actual text of the conventions or independent experts. The 'Actors' category of analysis coded articles based on which international actor's behavior was being compared to the standards of Geneva law. From September 1999 through September , 83% of discussion was centered around Serbian and Croat crimes in the Kosovo conflict, with one article on NATO bombardment making up the remaining 17%. Post 9/11, the United States was the subject of 57% of articles, with Iraq next at 23%, the Taliban at 6%, and Israel and al Qaeda tied at 4%. The Palestinians were the subjects of 3%, and the UK 1%. It seems clear that this shift in focus to the United States and Iraq reflected the events of the War on Terror, with the treatment of detainees and prisoners of war receiving the overwhelming majority of attention. Both Iraq and the United States were portrayed as potentially in conflict with Geneva III's guarantees of detainee and POW rights. The War on Terror essentially pushed other Geneva concerns into irrelevance for American newspapers, as conflicts in which the United States was directly involved received the overwhelming majority of references. 22 McCombs, M. and Shaw, D The Agenda-setting Function of Mass Media

11 Glaun 11 The question of framing is an issue of major importance in studying the influence of media on politics. Entman defines the act of framing as to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation. 23 The aspect of framing dealt with in this research is that of treatment recommendation- whether an article endorses, criticizes, or remains neutral on U.S adherence to the Conventions, or whether it discusses them in a purely descriptive manner. The data shows a marked change in such framing before and after September 11. Prior to the attacks, the admittedly limited newspaper discourse on the Conventions reflected no controversy about their implementation. 2/3 of the articles actively endorsed the Conventions, while 1/3 discussed them in a non-normative way. After 9/11, positive representations still maintained a 51% majority; however, significant opposition and discomfort with the Convention's application to combatants captured in Afghanistan was reflected in increased negative or neutral portrayals. Kahneman and Taversky's experiment demonstrating the effect framing has on subjects' opinions about even empirically equivalent choices is relevant in demonstrating the significance of this change. 24 Different normative framing of the Geneva Conventions can lead consumers of media to very different opinions on the application of the law, even when presented with the same factual information. Conclusion The results of the paper demonstrate the influence of the September 11 attacks on U.S. media discourse about international humanitarian law. The dramatically increased salience of the Geneva Conventions, the increased negativity, increased precision, and decreased accuracy of their presentation, and the shift towards the United States as the dominant referenced actor all point to the significance of 9/11 in altering the discussion. It seems safe to label 9/11 as a defining point in US media representation of the Conventions; a point where the moral and legal ambiguity of the War on Terror inspired a debate on the desirability of international law which was simply absent from newspapers in the years leading up the attacks. While the tenor of representation was still generally positive, confusion about the content of the Conventions and America's legal and moral responsibilities established shades of gray in the debate a journalistic zone of equivocation, unsurety, and stridency centered around the facts and applications of international humanitarian law. These changes were significant, and, as the literature suggests, fraught with the potential to affect popular discourse and opinion on Geneva law. 23 Entman, R Framing: Toward the Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. 24 Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A Choices, Values, and Frames

12 Bibliography Glaun 12 Argren, R. (2005). Reporting about iraq: international law in the media during armed conflict. Essex Human Rights Review, 2(1), Bitzer, L. (1968). The rhetorical situation. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1, 1-14 Entman, R. (1993). Framing: toward the clarification of a fractured paradigm Journal of Communication, 4(4), Finnemore, M. (1999). Rules of war and wars of rules: the international red cross and the restraint of state violence. In J. Boli & G. Thomas (Eds.), Constructing world culture: international nongovernmental organizations since 1875 (pp ). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodman, R. (2009). The detention of civilians in armed conflict. American Journal of International Law, 103(48), Greer, E. (2004). "We don't torture people in america": coercive interrogation in the global village. New Political Science, 26(3), International Committee of the Red Cross, (1949). Convention III relative to the treatment of prisoners of war. Geneva. International Committee of the Red Cross, (1949).Convention IV relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war. Geneva. International Committee of the Red Cross, (1977). Protocol additional to the geneva conventions of 12 august 1949, and relating to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts. Geneva International Committee of the Red Cross, (1977).Protocol additional to the geneva conventions of 12 august 1949, and relating to the protection of victims of non-international armed conflict. Geneva Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1984) Choices, values, and frames. American Psychologist, 39(4), Mansell, W. & Openshaw, K. (2010). The history and status of the geneva conventions. In S. Perrigo & J. Whitman (Eds.), The geneva conventions under assault (pp ). New York: Pluto Press. McCombs, M. & Shaw, D. (1972) The agenda-setting function of the mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly 36:

13 Glaun 13 de Nevers, R. (2006). The geneva conventions and new wars. Political Science Quarterly, 121(3), i Sommaruga, C. (1997). Appeal by the international committee of the red cross on the 20 th anniversary of the adoption of the additional protocols of International Review of the Red Cross, 320 Vatz, R. (2009). The mythical status of situational rhetoric: implications for rhetorical critics' relevance in the public arena. The Review of Communication, 9(1), 1-5 Yoo, J. (2004). The status of soldiers and terrorists under the geneva conventions. Chinese Journal of International Law, 3(1),

14 Glaun 14 Appendix I: Code book Full explanation of codes found in methodology section Category 1: Normativity of representation Positive Contains a positive viewpoint of the Conventions, or suggests that the United States should follow them 1 Negative Contains a negative viewpoint of the Conventions, or suggests that the United States should not follow them 2 Neutral Discusses desirability of Conventions, but presents both sides of debate as equally valid 3 Non-normative Does not discuss desirability of Conventions or suggest whether or not they should be applied 4 Category 3: Accuracy and Precision Accurate and precise Article both accurately describes Conventions and includes citations or references specific requirements of law a Accurate and vague Article accurately describes Conventions but does so in terms of general principles, rather than specific requirements s Inaccurate and precise Article references specific aspects of law but attributes them incorrectly to the Conventions d Inaccurate and vague Article inaccurately describes Conventions in terms of general principles f Category 4: Subject of discussion- which actor's behavior is being compared to Geneva law. United States/NATO U.S. is subject of discussion Taliban see above al Qaeda see above Israel see above Serbs/Croats see above Iraq see above UK see above Palestinians see above