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knows too much.” As Baldwin himself once observed, however, “Democracy is hard on the nerves,” which, in turn, evokes Harry Truman’s admonition to those whose nerves might be too delicate to stand the strain—they should “stay out of the kitchen.”
If things are permitted to drift as they are currently, drastic restrictions will most likely be imposed on the press in the next major crisis. That might anesthetize an immediate problem but it will surely lead to far worse long-term problems. The primary responsibility for change lies with the press, yet there is not a glimmer of a
suggestion that the press realizes that it is in serious trou ble. Relentless, informed criticism can change that.
'The description of Hanson W. Baldwin’s role at the New York Times is drawn ^ numerous discussions with him, examination of his papers at Yale Universi > - the transcripts of Baldwin interviews for the Naval Institute Oral History f More detailed references are cited in William V. Kennedy, “Press Coverage War in Vietnam: The Third View,” U. S. Army War College, May 19 •
2See Marguerite Higgins’s papers, the George Arents Research Library for P\^ Collections, Syracuse University and her book, Our Vietnam Nightmare York: Harper and Row, 1965).
pacification could not compel action-packed combat footage human-interest sequences sho
Most adults living in the United States rely upon television as their principal source of news. Television tells them that “star wars” and the federal deficit are issues to be addressed. Television also “gives” them the salient “facts” about those issues. This is an awesome power, because—in keeping with our democratic process—the public opinion shaped by that information tends, in time, to mold governmental policies. Few acts of Congress, judicial decisions, or executive initiatives can stand for long unless they have the backing of the American people, and that support depends a lot on the information provided by television news.
The Vietnam War taught the American military many harsh but valuable lessons. One of those lessons dealt with television news and how it presents war. A review of the networks’ coverage of the Vietnam fighting indicates that the “reality” of television news actually evolved from the essence of the medium. Because it is visual and capable of real-time transmission, it enjoys a public perception of immediacy and accuracy that are unobtainable through other forms of communication. That perception, unfortunately, stems from television’s own false images.
This does not indict those who bring us the news on television. Certainly, many arguments have been made—both during and after the Vietnam War—that broadcast journalists tended to present any news about Vietnam with an antimilitary slant. But even if we could have stripped from television news all the newscasters’ political bias, the networks still would have presented a false picture of the war. The nature of television forces it to alter the form, importance, and relationship of events in order to mold them to fit the mode of transmission. What we see on the nightly news is never really “the way it is,” to quote Walter Cron- kite. We see it the way television presents it to us. Commercial television’s coverage of war will always, necessarily, be inaccurate and incomplete for the following reasons:
Television Is Entertainment- Oriented: The individuals who own and operate the major networks are businesspeople, operating with a profit motive. Much of this profit is accumulated in commercial broadcasting by selling air time— and the amount of money a network receives for any single commercial is a function of the number of people who are expected to view it. Greater numbers of people watching whatever kind of television program mean that greater numbers of people will be watching the commercials, which means that networks can charge higher prices to the advertisers for their air time. But television can be boring. It is restricted to two dimensions and can only stimulate two senses— sight and hearing. To attract an ^ maintain audiences large enoug ensure lucrative commercial con tracts, then, the networks broa c the news events that are the m°s ^ interesting, not necessarily the significant. In fact, many newspeople define news in term® that do not even include the not* of significance. Alan Protheroe BBC TV News, for example, that news “is really something is of interest to people. It *» a. bination of gossip, of fact, of ,rJ,[ formation. It is the exceptions • News is—to some extent ' theater, as well. Newspeople g* visually interesting stories more tention than more important or even more relevant ones having tie visual appeal. This was eSP^ar. dally true during the Vietnam , Camera shots of “talking hea s^( discussing land reform and ha* .,
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Proceedings
/ Apr’1
l9~^f^aPters 13-15 of Peter Braestrup’s Big Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, trgjjon °r evi<knce that the press-induced collapse of will in the Johnson adminis- By jnr Was not representative of the far more stable attitudes of the general public, cover Fence’ was almost certainly the start of the declining confidence in press 0m>„ nat‘onal security affairs that became evident in the aftermath of the enada invasion.
P i
Journr Kennedy was graduated from Marquette University’s College of porter f m 'n ^51. He has been employed as a general assignment re- DaiIr ,or tlle Harrisburg Evening News, as Editor of the Mechanicsburg ancl jT. °eal News, public information officer for the Pennsylvania Army news s' ^at'ona' Guard, public affairs officer for the National Guard ureau, and as a free-lance writer specializing in military affairs.
He served as an enlisted man in the Regular Army in Japan and China, and as operational intelligence officer of the 42d Heavy Bombardment Wing, Strategic Air Command; an Armored Cavalry Squadron staff officer; Tank Troop Commander; Tank Battalion Operations Officer; Assistant to the Chief of Staff, 28th Infantry Division; Corps Plans and Operations Officer, 75th Maneuver Area Command; and as Operations Staff Officer in the Strategic Plans and Policy Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, Department of the Army in Army National Guard and Army Reserve status. He retired in 1982. From 1967 to 1984, he was a civilian member of the U. S. Army War College faculty. He is the coauthor of several books, including The Balance of Military Power: NATO and the Warsaw Pact (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).
By Major Michael C. Mitchell, U. S. Marine Corps
jan and suffering within the civil- nj P°Pu'ation that often accompa- ^nt'h war. Thus, many impor- evo Ut visually less interesting wnts if shot at all—often inUnc* UP on the floor of the edit- been00111' ^nc*’ wh'le may have of th tPUe lhat television’s coverage tajn-e Vietnam War proved enter- butinS’ many of the less exciting andm°re important political, social, tyerRec°n°mic aspects of the war eornpletely ignored.
Television News Distorts the Proportional Importance of Events: Every event that occurs during any given day is news to someone. But the television networks could obviously never report all events that happen everywhere in the world. Television newspeople must, therefore, be selective in what they present. They must decide for their viewers what is important. In this context, news becomes what newspeople say it is. It is defined (perhaps even in advance) by those who bring it to us. The only facts presented to the public over the air waves are those that have been selected by television’s reporters, editors, and producers. Such exclusion of all other events raises a philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If important events occur beyond the range of television’s cameras, then a large portion of the American public will never know about them. There is a natural tendency among the public to think of the material presented during television news broadcasts as important. The assumption becomes, “If an item is on TV, it must be important.” But this means that events which fail to meet television’s criterion of visual immediacy are ruled, de facto, as unimportant and are, consequently, lost to the public eye. The effects of this phenomenon were succinctly described by Jerry Mander in his book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television:
“The people who control television become the choreographers of our internal awareness. We
53
footage of th nn on Amonc
give way to their process of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send to us through this instrument of theirs.”2
This culling of information had a significant impact upon the American public’s decisions regarding the Vietnam War. The opinions of those who brought us the news— Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, Morley Safer, et al—became our opinions; and the events they related to us became the ones we used to measure and judge the conduct of the war. Conversely, the material they omitted never helped form public opinion and subsequently passed into the vacuum of unrecorded history. We remember My Lai and the storming of the U. S. Embassy during the Tet Offensive; we remember Marines setting fire to thatched huts; we remember troops having to destroy villages in order to save them. But we cannot remember events that were never shown on our television screens, no matter how important those events might have been.
Television News Changes the Structure of Events: Television news is produced by taking discrete events out of their surrounding contexts, simplifying their presentation to fit into a time-limited broadcast format, and tying them together to make sense to the audience.
A standard network evening news program lasts 30 minutes and includes 15 to 20 stories. After we subtract time for commercials, each of these stories gets about 60 seconds. When an event is first covered by a television camera crew, much of the background information that surrounds that event will be videotaped. However, during the editing into a one-minute news story, much of this contextual information will be deleted. This causes many events to appear as if they are unrelated. Network news broadcasters, therefore, will often provide connective commentary to help the audience understand the story or to tie events together, making the news program “flow.”
David Altheide discussed this in regard to television’s coverage of the Vietnam War. He remarks that “New York producers . . . selected the major topics for presenting the war in a systematic way and link(ed) one brief report to the next.”3 Altheide went on to say,
“. . . it is the newsworker’s task to tell a story about such discrete events by treating facts as evidence of a theme which provides continuity and gives a clear meaning.”4 The final effect of this process, however, is to force complex, multifaceted events into a concise, linear format—which may or may not reflect actual relationships.
Events in war are not simple and seldom “flow” in the manner presented by television news. Vietnam should have taught us about the reality of war. It is a complex phenomenon. Its causes are often obscure and insidious. Its events may be intricately interconnected or completely disjointed. Pluralistic concepts that must be taken into account concurrently might include macroeconomics, political philosophies, and international strategies. When these complexities are narrowed to convenient 60-second packages or are rearranged in order to fit a newscaster’s pat story line, much will be lost in the translation.
All of these shortcomings were found in television’s coverage of the war in Vietnam, and that coverage was wholly inadequate as a foundation for public opinion concerning that conflict. As one author subsequently stated, “To explain these aspects to the public required a degree of sustained effort and subtlety that was totally incompatible with the format of network news.”5 A foreign critic goes even further:
“If there are one people in the
world who are never, but abso
lutely never, going to understan the war in Vietnam it is the Americans who watched it on television. The war was meaningless to them; they don’t kno* what happened at any single stage of that war and they never will and they are a lost generation as far as that is concerned. . . ,”6
If we learned anything from tele vision’s coverage of the Vietnam War, it should have been that a superficial acquaintance with on y some aspects of an affair as large and complex as war is complete y inadequate to use as a basis for
shaping public consciousness-—3 ’ thereby, national policy. As a me dium for transferring comprehensive and accurate information, te vision is extremely limited. The pictures that entered our homes each night during that war were only television’s version of reah y* shaped by the quirks of video tec nology. How well have we learnc that lesson? Our manner of handling television news during P°s Vietnam military operations see to indicate that if we did learn an thing, we have not applied it-
Grenada: On 25 October 1983. U. S. forces occupied the Can bean island of Grenada and de- j dared the operation off-limits to journalists. Official reasons g‘vent0 for this action were the necessity maintain information security c ceming the military conduct ot operation, and a desire to ensUfC. the physical safety of news rep° ers. Many among the press, n° ever, believed that the reasons their exclusion were far differe ' Both Newsweek and Time mag3 zines editorialized on this iSSLie the weeks following the invasio •
“The immediate gain for the^ administration was the absen of any bloody
Grenada invas___
television screens . . • • ij0 trouble is that the generals w now run the Pentagon were colonels in Vietnam and b 3 the press in large part for that war.”7
54
Avulsion it created.”8
T°<*edi
^ bviously, the White House or Y ^entagon remembered the th'et ‘living-room war’ and
Th
/\](. e P^ss was right, to a de Met Vice Admiral Joseph rrrancT *’ U. S. task force c quite Cr at Grenada, may have for e Sl,ncere in his official rea
battw Uc^n8 Press from h
rniiit 16^’ ^ere were rnany in actiQar^ W^° secret*y applaude by tL S h)r the very reasons : Wrest? aevvs weeklies. Having HewsCla w'lh twisted televisioi J’°Vera8e during the Viet ’ any veterans of that con
,n8s / April 1986
believe that the absence of press coverage during the Grenada operation was far better than the inaccurate and incomplete coverage that would have been provided. This attitude says much about the military’s current approach to the news media, in general, and television, in particular.
In the past, the military has dealt with television’s coverage of armed conflict in one of two ways: either through outright censorship—as in Grenada—or by reacting to each instance of news misinformation or incompleteness—as we often saw during the Vietnam War. It is a sad fact, however, that such a defen-
sive approach to television by the Department of Defense has helped to develop a siege mentality among senior commanders that is both draining and unnecessary. This “mind-set” must be changed if we are to deal effectively with the media in the future. As one Navy
55
officer states, . on the evidence from Vietnam, both the Government and the press are capable of twisting the facts, and the sickly atmosphere of confrontation and distrust that occurred then is not one that serves the public interest to repeat.”9
In the wake of the news media’s outcry over censorship at Grenada, General John W. Vessey, Jr., convened the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Media-Military Relations Panel (known as the Sidle Panel) and tasked it with developing recommendations for conducting military operations in ways that preserved operational security while keeping the public informed by the media. The panel established a basic statement of principle:
“The American people must be informed about United States military operations and this information can best be provided through both the news media and the Government [emphasis added].”10
If television cannot provide an accurate and complete picture of warfare, then something more must be done to provide our citizens with the information necessary to form intelligent opinions. Both civilian and military officials bear responsibility for refocusing television’s distorted images. Achieving this is no simple matter and, in fact, the development of a comprehensive program for effecting this is probably beyond the capability of any single individual.
The best solution would be for the President to establish a White House commission and task it with developing methods for correcting or countering television’s inadequacies during times of armed conflict. Because the findings of such a panel, if acted upon, would have such a great potential for impacting upon a wide range of American life, members should be bipartisan and should come from a variety of professions, including not only the military but also the television industry. Their deliberations should include a review of methods by which the administration could work both independently and in conjunction with the networks. The panel might study the following:
- Offer military public affairs representatives to the major television networks to work in their editing rooms. These individuals would have to be fairly senior with a high level of experience both in the military and in broadcasting. They would work with the networks on a strictly advisory basis. By being on the scene when most of the news editing is accomplished, these military representatives could provide advice to their civilian counterparts concerning the relative importance of military events, their impact upon other events, and whether or not other circumstances should be considered when these events are viewed in a broad context.
- Develop a Department of Defense-coordinated education program for members of the media. Much progress has been made in recent years by the services in educating military personnel about the potentialities and limitations of network news, but very little has been done to educate members of the media about the complexities of the military. A program could be developed by the Department of Defense to teach members of the media what the military considers important during armed conflict.
- Provide a weekly, one-hour Department of Defense-sponsored television news broadcast during times of conflict. This news program would assist the American public in understanding military affairs more in depth than has been possible.
The show could be broadcast either by PBS or CNN and could be funded either by the government or by private grants. Using military television news to correct the inaccuracies of commercial television news may sound like using “a bit of the hair of the dog.” Done properly, however, it would be more akin to the employment of a second lens to correct visual distortions caused by a first lens—as in telescopes and microscopes.
Television’s mode of transmission forces events into unnatural forms and relationships and presents to the viewing public picture that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality. This is a dan gerous situation during wartime* the public depends upon the infer mation it receives via television t° aid it in forming opinions. Because governmental policies depend upon those opinions, it is important tha they be based upon a complete an accurate version of world events, our national policies are played ou^ in a world where miscalculations misperceptions can lead to catastrophic results.
We as a nation cannot allow t e simplistic illusions of television t0 displace the complex realities ol war, nor can we let national war time policy be translated simply from the idiom of television. 1° 3 nuclear age, the survival of the world may depend upon our abi1 to receive and understand compie and relevant information. We 11111 act now to fill the information gaP created by the networks and to re focus television’s distorted picture-
'Alan Hooper, The Military and the Media shot, England: Gower Publishing Company ited, 1982) p. 14. -na.
2Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the E W1 tion of Television (New York: William Morr and Company, Inc., 1978) p. 266.
3David L. Altheide, Creating Reality:
News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills, CA- Publications, 1974) pp. 22-23.
4Ibid., p. 155. . The
5K. C. Jacobsen, “Television and the War- Small Picture,” Naval Institute Proceeding5’ March 1975, p. 58.
‘Hooper, p. 116. , jo2.
7“An Off-the-Record War,” Newsweek,
No. 19 (7 November 1983) p. 83. % flo.
8“Trying to Censor Reality,” Time, Vol. ’
20 (7 November 1983) p. 102. Amend'
9Wayne P. Hughes, “Guarding the I nst ^ ment—for and from the Press,” Naval lege Review, Vol. 37, No. 3/Sequence 303 l June 1984) p. 35. . chiefs
10Final Report of the Chairman of the J°>a. of Staff Media-Military Relations Panel ( 1 Panel).
Major Mitchell graduated from the U- . Naval Academy with a BS in ocean en^ neering. He received an MS in opera ^1 research from the Naval Postgraduate g^n and an MA in government from University. Major Mitchell is an arti ^jj. officer and has served as combat carg a[1d cer on board the USS Dubuque (D>*'. gg as Fleet Marine Force Logistics Rea 1 jS Officer, Headquarters, Marine <--orPs' 2nd now the Logistics Officer (S-4) f°r 1 Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment.
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Proceedings
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