Sheltering the president from blame: Drone strikes, media assessments and heterogeneous responsibility 2002–2014
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118762303 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118762303
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2018, Vol. 20(2) 477 –496
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118762303
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Sheltering the president
from blame: Drone strikes,
media assessments and
heterogeneous responsibility
2002–2014
Graeme AM Davies1, Marcus Schulzke2
and Thomas Almond1
Abstract
This article presents the first systematic analysis of how location of drone strikes and the
identification of civilian or terrorist casualties in newspaper reporting affect media assessments of
operational outcomes and elite responsibility. Conducting a content analysis of several hundred
newspaper articles, we evaluate the likelihood of these newspapers identifying the civilian
casualties, the role those casualties play in media assessments of operational outcomes, and who
they blame for failure. We found that there were significant differences in the likelihood of the
two newspapers reporting civilian casualties. We demonstrate that political elites including the US
President tended to avoid blame for failure, with much of the focus of newspaper dissatisfaction
being directed at the intelligence agencies. We believe these findings have serious ramifications
for the democratic oversight for future warfare and have the potential to undermine the ability of
public to constrain elites from launching military operations using drones.
Keywords
casualties, civilian, drones, heterogeneous blame, media, responsibility, terrorist
Introduction
Drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)) are one of the primary weapons in the War
on Terror. They have been used to carry out hundreds of targeted killings since 9/11 and
have been credited with eliminating high-ranking members of some of the world’s most
dangerous terrorist organizations (Woods, 2014). Moreover, the rapid proliferation of
drones cross-nationally and across various military roles is evidence that the use of drones
is likely to increase in the future (Joshi and Stein, 2014; Krishnan, 2009; Mayer, 2015;
1School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
2Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
Corresponding author:
Graeme AM Davies, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: g.a.m.davies@leeds.ac.uk
762303BPI0010.1177/1369148118762303The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsDavies et al.
research-article2018
Original Article
478 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20(2)
Singer, 2009). Based on the prototypes in development, we can soon expect to see
unmanned vehicles fighting in the air, on land, and at sea, in the service of dozens of
states and even some violent non-state actors.
The rise of drone warfare is marred by persistent disagreement over how these weap-
ons are being used, how they will affect the conduct of future wars, and whether they
could disrupt democratic accountability. For their defenders, drones are justifiable weap-
ons that can be used to kill enemies while also reducing the risk to military personnel and
civilians (Schulzke, 2011, 2014; Strawser, 2010), but critics contend that drones lower the
threshold for carrying out attacks, hinder oversight, and foster public indifference to vio-
lence (Enemark, 2011, 2013; Kaag and Kreps, 2014; Kreps and Kaag, 2012).
Efforts to resolve the debate over drone warfare have largely focused on two areas of
research: what immediate effects drone strikes have (e.g. whether they kill civilians or
terrorists; Boyle, 2013; Smith and Walsh, 2013) and public attitudes toward drones
(Kreps, 2014; Walsh, 2015). Research in the former domain can be used to determine
whether drones are fulfilling the promise of being more discriminate and proportionate
than other weapons, while research in the latter examines whether drones are likely to
lower inhibitions against using violence or undermine democratic accountability.
However, we have little understanding of the mechanism that links drone strikes that take
place in faraway countries to mass attitudes about them in the United States and we can-
not fully understand attitudes toward drones unless we have some sense of what informa-
tion is presented to the public. We provide a first step in rectifying this gap by examining
how drone strikes are presented in ways that have the potential to influence individuals’
attitudes. We focus on casualty representations and the attribution of blame to key actors.
There are two reasons for this focus. First, drones are generally justified with claims that
they can kill important terrorists while still limiting civilian casualties. Second, the pros-
pect of maintaining democratic accountability in covert operations depends heavily on
whether individuals can be linked to use of force decisions.
In this article, we investigate one point on Entman’s (2004) frame cascade model,
news frames, with a focus on the role that the identification of terrorist/militant and civil-
ian casualties plays in newspaper estimates of drone strike outcomes. We are specifically
interested in whether the media replicate elite framing of targeted assassinations using
drones as both effective and accurate. To understand whether the media simply index elite
messages or whether they take a counter-hegemonic position, we examine their reporting
of casualties associated with drone missions. Reporting that highlights the deaths of ter-
rorists/militants supports elite messages of effectiveness and accuracy, whereas discus-
sions of civilian casualties undermine those messages. Alongside media representations
of casualties we also examine media assessments of the drone strike outcomes and the
apportionment of blame and praise to different actors involved in the drone programme.
We have three objectives. First, we explore differences in the way papers of record, the
Washington Post and New York Times, report civilian and terrorist deaths. Is one newspa-
per more likely to mention civilian losses than the other? Does the location of the drone
strike make a difference to the likelihood of reporting civilian deaths? Second, we are
interested in estimating the role of those casualties in newspaper assessments of drone
strike outcomes. Do civilian casualties reduce the likelihood of drone missions being seen
as effective, and is this mitigated by identifying terrorist deaths? Our third objective is to
examine the effect of both casualty type and location of strike on media attributions of
blame and praise to key actors. Does the secretive nature of the drone program involving
a diffuse array of actors, potentially including the pilot, the Department of Defense, and
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