We have embarked on a project, under the aegis of the Nearby Stars (NStars)/ Space Interferometry Mission Preparatory Science Program to obtain spectra, spectral types, and, where feasible, basic physical parameters for the 3600 dwarf and giant stars earlier than M0 within 40 parsecs of the sun. In this paper we report on the results of this project for the first 664 stars in the northern hemisphere. These results include precise, homogeneous spectral types, basic physical parameters (including the effective temperature, surface gravity and the overall metallicity, [M/H]) and measures of the chromospheric activity of our program stars. Observed and derived data presented in this paper are also available on the project's website http://stellar.phys.appstate.edu/.

During the 1980s the proliferation of new technologies transformed the potential of the news media to provide a constant flow of global real-time news. Tiananmen Square and the collapse of communism symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall became major media events communicated to Western audiences instantaneously via TV news media. By the end of the decade the question was being asked as to what extent this ‘media pervasiveness’ had impacted upon government – particularly the process of foreign policy making. The new technologies appeared to reduce the scope for calm deliberation over policy, forcing policy-makers to respond to whatever issue journalists focused on. This perception was in turn reinforced by the end of the bipolar order and what many viewed as the collapse of the old anti-communist consensus which – it was argued – had led to the creation of an ideological bond uniting policy makers and journalists. Released from the ‘prism of the Cold War’ journalists were, it was presumed, freer not just to cover the stories they wanted but to criticise US foreign policy as well. The phrase ‘CNN effect’ encapsulated the idea that real-time communications technology could provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to global events.

This article details the results of a plausibility probe of a policy-media interaction model designed to identify instances of media influence. If sufficient evidence is found to support the model, it can be used as part of a wider study examining the impact of media coverage on decisions to intervene during humanitarian crisis, the so-called CNN effect. The model predicts media influence when policy is uncertain and media coverage is framed so as to be critical of government and empathizes with suffering people. In order to test the model, it is applied to two cases: US intervention in Bosnia in 1995 in order to defend the Gorazde `safe area' and Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999. In the first case, the model highlights the impact of critical, empathizing media coverage and policy uncertainty in effecting the US decision to defend the Gorazde `safe area'. In the second case, the failure of critical newspaper coverage to change the Clinton Administration's air-war policy highlights the limits of media influence when there exists policy certainty. Overall, it is argued that the plausibility probe supports the prediction that media influence occurs when policy is uncertain and media coverage is critically framed and empathizes with suffering people. And that when policy is certain, media influence is unlikely to occur. As such, the policy-media interaction model should prove a useful tool in testing the claim that media coverage causes intervention during humanitarian crisis.

Noam Chomsky argues that, while the US news media are adversarial towards the US government on foreign policy, institutional filters operate to ensure that the criticisms made generally stay within narrow bounds set by the US political elite. Chomsky's research in this area is largely ignored even by academics who agree with this conclusion. The institutional tendency to filter out anti-elite perspectives applies not only to the news media but also to academia. Consequently, Chomsky's work is marginalised due to its emphasis on corporate power, principled opposition to US foreign policy and the role of academia in buttressing elite power.

In this article, the authors draw upon the results from a substantial content and framing analysis of the British media's treatment of the 2003 Iraq War to show how Britain's national press managed their coverage of the initial combat phase of the war against the background of substantial public and elite opposition. They show that reporting was dominated by coverage of the ongoing battle, that newspapers offered a similar subject agenda to one another and that coalition actors were prominent and likely to be reported neutrally. But the article uncovers a substantial diversity of opinion and tone across the British press and identifi es fi ve different editorial approaches to the confl ict which are sustained across the news and editorial pages of different newspapers. Through a closer examination, the authors attempt to account for the existence of these approaches in relation to the effects of public opposition to the war, patriotism and newspapers' longstanding political allegiances. Finally, they suggest that, in the British press at least, this plurality of opinions and forms of coverage offers a challenge to longstanding assumptions about the extent to which the media have tended to offer support to offi cial positions in relation to war.