Piers Robinson defines the ‘CNN effect’ as ‘the ability of real-time communications technology, via the news media, to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and national events’. Certainly there are significant historical examples of media images shaping and even provoking public and government action, for example, television images of the Ethiopian famine in 1984 mobilized millions to donate money and put pressure on their governments to send aid. After the Gulf War however, the media seemed to have more power to shape foreign policy decisions about interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo and Rwanda. The CNN effect continues to be news media can cause or provoke a policy response, and whether the media only speeds up foreign policy action that were already in preparation