Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of the ‘CNN Effect’

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an alternative understanding of media—policy relations or the ‘CNN effect’ to that which has dominated existing political science approaches. In doing so, we show how our alternative ethnomethodological approach can shed more light on the original matter of concern. Hence, before we analyse media events, we must take a step back into sociological method. Through our ethnomethodological analysis of one case study — Fox News’ coverage of Hurricane Katrina — we examine how the television coverage was achieved. We explore the televisual construction of the event. It becomes clear how messy the coverage is, and therefore how any attempt to map out causal relations between ontologically discrete units, ‘media coverage’ and ‘policy decisions’, is problematic. In addition, we suggest that this messy, chaotic coverage creates uncertainty about what was happening and that terror was amplified by Fox News offering representations of connections between Hurricane Katrina and terrorism, economic insecurity, and health hazards.