Cluster Munitions and the Media

Author's Note: I wrote and posted this late, after I had had a chance to discuss results and methodology with the rest of the class and should be viewed with that in mind.

In order to determine what the effect the media had, if any, on efforts to ban cluster munitions I conducted a LexisNexis Academic search using the following terms:

Cluster Munitions Ban OR Cluster Bombs Ban OR Ban Cluster Munitions OR Ban Cluster Bombs OR Cluster Munition Ban OR Cluster Bomb Ban OR Ban Cluster Munition OR Ban Cluster Bomb

For my first search, I searched six English language "Papers of Record" between January 1, 1970 and October 11, 2008. These papers were The International Herald Tribune (France), The Times (United Kingdom), The Globe and Mail (Canada), The Irish Times (Ireland), The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand), and The New York Times (United States). I chose these papers because I was looking for a sample of English language papers from countries leading the international effort to ban cluster munitions, countries who were major manufacturers and users of cluster munitions, and Canada, which was involved heavily in the campaign to ban land mines.

This resulted in 37 articles, including 1 duplicate. I determined if the article was a letter to the editor, and opinion/editorial, or a news article. Of the articles, twenty-three were news items, seven were opinion/editorial articles, and six were letters to the editor.



Changing the search parameters to include all major newspapers contained in LexisNexis between January 1, 1970 and October 11, 2008 using the same terms reveals 165 total articles written between 1996 and 2008. Notable is the spike in articles in 2003, coinciding with the foundation of the Cluster Munitions Coalition, which then drops off until the Oslo Conference of 2007, which began the effort that lead to the current Convention on Cluster Munitions.



75% of all the articles written were written within a month before or after a major international conference on cluster munitions. Of the papers of record, all but six, or 83% of articles were written within a month of a conference.



One can conclude that, except during international conferences, the movement to ban cluster munitions was not significantly engaged with the media. Within the papers of record, the majority of the articles regarding cluster munitions were reporting on the conferences, with only one third of the articles being opinion pieces or editorials.

Additionally, changing the LexisNexis search terms to Ban "Landmines AND Cluster Bombs" results in an additional 50 news paper articles regarding cluster muntions. (1970-2000)