Reporting Disasters: Famine, Aid, Politics and Media. Suzanne Franks. London: Hurst and Company, 2013. 248 pp. $27.95 pbk.Author Suzanne Franks, professor at City University of London, does not pull any punches in this book-based on her doctoral dissertation-which reports on Ethiopian famine and an aid effort widely believed to be success thanks to agenda-setting efforts of worldwide mass media. The famine, she says, was a textbook case study. Her book serves that purpose.Initially, she spends great deal of time putting famine in context that is unfamiliar to today's readers, who accept instantaneous tweets of breaking news, continuous coverage online, and twenty-four-hour television news on multiple channels as norm. This was still period when television news was restricted to three bulletins day and nothing else. There were no news channels or 24-hour coverage, let alone online news or social media.However, overwhelming coverage of famine and worldwide efforts, including creation of United Support of Artists for Africa and We Are campaign of 1985, was not because media outlets were not aware of famine that resulted in death of 1 million people. A famine is not sudden disaster such as an earthquake. It takes place over many months and years. As result, her focus turns into what made famine huge worldwide news event despite unpopularity of Ethiopian government. An early example of repetitive, almost incessant CNN effect, media coverage leads to changes in policy. In this case, it was one specific broadcast that instigated change, an overnight change in world perception and aid.To this day, it is unfathomable to me why, on that particular date, that particular film created worldwide sensation, says Dawit Wolde Giorgis, chief of Ethiopia's Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, in his own memoir. Still, it was slow news day and day, October 23, 1984, when BBC decided to take chance on an exclusive, longer (seven-minute) documentary piece by Michael Buerk that led traditionally twenty-minute-long standard bulletin containing national and world news. After broadcast, according to John Simpson, BBC's World Affairs editor, the famine in Ethiopia was probably biggest news story BBC Television News broadcast in 1980s until fall of Berlin Wall.There was tenfold increase in coverage by professional media outlets such as The Times of London. Coverage of famine in tabloid newspapers went from 50 column inches in first three weeks of October to nearly 1,200 column inches in last ten days of month. The television pictures sold story. …