Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of Mass Media

Walter C. Soderlund is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor. He is the author of Media Definitions of Cold War Reality (2001) and Mass Media and Foreign Policy (2003), as well as the co-editor of Television Advertising in Canadian Elections (1999), Profiles of Canada (2003) and Canadian Newspaper Ownership in the Era of Convergence (2005). He has a long-standing interest in intervention, beginning in the late 1960s with research for his Ph.D. dissertation, The Functional Roles of Intervention in International Politics. He has also worked extensively in the area of international communication, where his focus has been on the Caribbean, especially the way in which events in Cuba and Haiti have been portrayed in North American media and the possible impact of this coverage on U. S. foreign policy. Following his retirement in 2002, he served for a year as the founding Director of the University of Windsorrsquo;s Centre for Studies in Social Justice and in 2004 organized Assumption Universityrsquo;s Centre for Religion and Culture.