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Television: force multiplier or town crier in the global village? by Prof. Taylor Corporate Communications. Bradford: 1999. Vol. 4, Iss. 2; pg. 61 Philip M. Taylor: Professor, Institute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, UK The public message as conveyed by television is surrounded by phrases such as "seeing is believing", "a picture is worth a thousand words", "the camera never lies" - all of which invest television especially with qualities for delivering truth and understanding to all that watch it. And while it is undoubtedly true that television audiences have a clearer idea of what foreign lands and statesmen look like than the generations prior to the invention of the photographic image (moving or otherwise), there is perhaps another phrase of greater pertinence to TV's role in foreign affairs, namely that "In the Kingdom of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King". It is this very inability of television to provide a full or complete picture of the context and complexities of diplomacy that makes it such an erratic and unpredictable player, a crowd pleaser which has signed on for principally two reasons: the speed at which it operates, and the drama which this can convey as a method of increasing the size of the audience it can reach. The new international television environment This concept, however, invests television with powers which it, as a value-neutral technology, does not possess. What we are talking about therefore are people. The relatively lowpriority given to foreign affairs by the media professionals on a day-to-day basis is in fact a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it means that diplomats can usually operate without the media in their hair yet, on the other, they can use the media as a barometer by which to gauge whether a given crisis is going to be seized on by the media which can, in turn, affect their own priorities. Whether either of these aspects is particularly desirable isanother matter, but both have become a fact of modern diplomatic life. Given that the track record of media coverage of foreign affairs is, at best, arbitrary and perfunctory, there is hardly any way that diplomats can predict which crisis will receive media attention and which will not. There are various potential ingredients which any diplomat needs to be aware of, but this requires some appreciation of what constitutes "news" in the minds of professional media organisations and what drives those organisations at any moment in time. Human-interest stories have become particularly compelling, more so than in the past. As the military are only too aware, the question of access is also pivotal. But in times other than war, if the diplomats do ever find themselves in the front line of any media attention, denial of access invariably tends to cause more trouble than it is worth. Any journalist worth his or her salt who is met with a stark "no comment" will merely dig deeper because they assume something is being hidden from them, and when that happens they enter the world of diplomacy less as an observer but as a potential catalyst capable of reordering the diplomatic agenda. This suggests that diplomacy needs to be in the business of crisis management and what is now termed "spin doctoring". If we borrow Chaos Theory's most overused cliche, namely that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in China can affect weather patterns in New York, modern diplomacy in the media age can thus be seen partly as the business of monitoring butterflies by observation, consultation and negotiation to prevent storm clouds from brewing. The media, on the other hand, thrives on hurricanes. While on the constant look-out for human interest stories, in foreign affairs it is not always apparent to the media that there is a story until a storm cloud has already formed: a line of bedraggled refugees, a mass grave, a starving child. The enormous fuss over "Operation IRMA" in 1992, namely the saving of a young girl caught up in the war in former Yugoslavia, was nicknamed "Instant Response to Media Attention" by those who had to implement the rescue. The problem for diplomats is that once the media get interested, their contribution is inherently inclined more to seeing the storm erupt rather than seeing it go away. There is, of course, no hard and fast rule on this; there are plenty of recent examples of stormy crises which have failed to attract mass media attention - Ngorno-Karrabach, the Sudan, the civil war in Afghanistan - not because the media was denied access but because various judgements had been made concerning the costs, safety, or "infotainment" value of the event. But when the mass media do decide, for whatever reason, that a given crisis is worth covering, its potential to disrupt the routine priorities of diplomacy comes into sharp focus. This is felt to be especially true of live television. When, for example, in 1993 a US diplomat described the crisis in the Sudan as "Somalia without CNN" (Gowing, 1994), he was pointing to the entrance of this privately-owned international news channel into the once secret world of diplomacy with its ability to, if not set, then re-order the agenda of internationalpolitics. His message was clear: if TV cameras were present at the scene of a flashpoint, then the international community was more likely to respond than if they were absent. If this is true, then it says a great deal about the sensitivity of modern politicians to a medium which, insofar as diplomatic practitioners are concerned, still tends to be regarded more as a hindrance than a help. This is because, in free societies, the press on a day-to-day basis cannot be expected to be uncritical of government policies. Foreign observers, including diplomats, scrutinise national media reports for clues concerning strengths and weaknesses of a government, including the degrees to which it enjoys domestic popular support. Most diplomatic practitioners would argue that diplomacy has to take a long-term view and not be hamstrung by the short-termism of politicalelections. When politicians do decide to adopt a long-term position in the media age, as for example the Truman Doctrine when anti-communism was used to stir up publicsupport for US foreign policy, then there is a danger that the government can lose some of its subsequent flexibility in diplomatic negotiations. On this occasion, because the government was now expected to be tough oncommunism wherever it confronted it by the domestic American media, its foreign policy was to some extent pre-determined throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Only the bitter experience of Vietnam allowed Nixon and Kissinger to develop greater flexibility in the era of detente and the "opening to China". Scrutiny of domestic media opinion by foreign analysts makes media criticism all the more irritating to diplomats from the country being scrutinised; it gives away too many "secrets" and such publicity can also undermine negotiating positions. So while official press departments attempt to influence the way in which domestic and foreign journalists cover a given issue, there is a recognition that the extent to which this can be done to the benefit of the source is limited by the unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable nature of the free media. For this reason, governments themselves conduct their own direct media activities designed to influence the image of a nation abroad. Over the years, two approaches have been identified as essential: long-term activity in the form of cultural diplomacy, and short-term public diplomacy in the form of external radio, and now television, broadcasting. Until comparatively recently, the role of television in international affairs appeared limited to providing a "window on the world" for national or local audiences that were anyway assumed to be largely divorced or disinterested in occurrences on foreign fields, except perhaps during international sporting events or when nations went to war. Television, in other words, was traditionally seen more as a passive observer of foreign affairs - and a somewhat arbitrary one at that - rather than as an active participant in them. Now, however, there is a growing debate about the role and impact of television on the foreign policy-making process, especially in light of the Gulf War of 1991 and subsequent events in Bosnia and Somalia. Television is beginning to be regarded as a potentially quite significant player in international affairs. How valid is this and what, if anything, has changed? There appear to be a few obvious answers to the second question. Since the 1980s, the arrival of new technologies which enable pictures and data to be transferred around the globe - instantaneously - in a variety offormats, deregulation in domestic communications systems and their greater accessibility to foreign satellite systems and services, the internationalisation of television news and other services targeted at global audiences, and the increased portability and affordability of those services have all been discernible trends. True, communications technologies have always been characterised by innovation insofar as spatial and temporal compression are concerned, but never quite with the pace and on the scale we are now witnessing thanks to microchip capacity being doubled roughly every 18 months. The current buzz-words of "multi-media" and "convergence" have become every bit as important to media scholars as "globalisation" is to the discipline of international relations. However, we need some disciplinary convergence to appreciate that, above all, it is the end of the Cold War which has coincided with the arrival of live television broadcasting as a norm, creating a completely new and, by comparison, chaotic international environment for both diplomacy and the media. Because its reach is global, instantaneous and virtually unstoppable (it only takes three satellites 23,000 miles in orbit to cover the entire planet with satellite footprints)(Hudson, 1990) direct broadcasting by satellite (DBS) is feared far more than radio ever was as an invasive and destabilising factor by regimes of all persuasions - whether manifesting itself in French concerns during the GATT negotiations over unlimited American programme imports or the Iranian government's decision in 1995 to ban the sale and possession of satellite dishes. Britain banned the sale of decoders capable of receiving the kind of hard-core pornography television services supplied to other Europeansubscribers. Many nations are therefore beginning to see the advantages of cabled systems by which satellite signals are received at a central dish "farm" before re-distribution to customers, thereby making it easier to control than the DBS option. But DBScannot be un-invented, and because the dishes are getting smaller all the time, certain authoritarian regimes, including China, have placed responsibility for monitoring this development under the auspices of their internal security ministries rather than their telecommunications authorities. But perhaps the key word in all this is "fear" rather than "factor". "If knowledge is power then diffusion of knowledge must result in a diffusion of power and the control of this process is, in itself, a form of power" (Freedman, 1996). While it is hardly surprising that governments which fear the power of the media to shape the perceptions of their domestic populations to the point that they exercise strict state control over it, should also fear the power of international communications to undermine that very control, we do need to remind ourselves that the important element here is indeed control, not television. After all, command and control of communications has historically been seen as essential to the maintenance of political power as it has to the achievement of military success. The internationalisation and the commercialisation of the media can therefore appear to be the latest threats to the continuation of that control. But this was precisely the ideological motivation behind the Reagan-Thatcher determination to herald in a new era ofderegulated media and communications. It was also why in the mid-1980s, the USA and the UK both withdrew from UNESCO, which had been the principal forum for the international community's debates about freedom of the press and free-flow of global information. It seemed to them that a new world information order was being called for by states which proved reluctant to practice such concepts within their own societies (Alleyne, 1995). Market forces and consumercapitalism would decide the issue, notpolitical regulation. It is this belief that the media serve as forces for freedom and democracy, a belief consolidated by the role of glasnost in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War, which has given satellite television a new status in international affairs, its role being almost as an instrument of political warfare. But we also need to remember that the medium is not the message. The message is the message. The medium, insofar asforeign policy is concerned, is deeply flawed. The limits of television in foreign policy Although scholarly attention has only recently begun to appreciate it, television is in fact a highly deceptive medium. We are, of course, talking mainly in this context about news, current affairs and other "factual" programming; entertainment or fictional programmes, such as movies and soap operas, whichcommand infinitely larger audiences, are not the main object of attention here. At the most basic of levels, the obvious needs to be reiterated: television cameras can only "see" what they are pointed at. They provide, at best, mere snapshots of reality and, at worst, illusions of reality. For we are dealing with primarily a picture-drivenmedium that requires certain fundamental preconditions for it to operate effectively and simultaneously. These range from the ability of the camera operator to literally turn on his camera (requiring electrical power) at the right time (requiring judgement, experience, light and luck) to capture the right sort of events (i.e. visually or narratively exciting) from the best possible angle (requiring access, professionalism - and, again, luck). What goes on behind the camera operator's back or when the camera is turned off does not constitute part of the visual record. When the right combination of these exacting circumstances come together, there is the chance that the pictures might form the basis of a story for eventual transmission to a wider public - provided they can be sent home successfully, with the necessary equipment working and the satellite time booked. But the process does not end there. For news gathering, likediplomacy, is indeed a process requiring a team of professional individuals making judgements about the available pictures prior to them ever being seen by an audience. In the editorial rooms, the pictures sent in from reporters in the field can be synthesised, chopped about and re-ordered with a new commentary. In other words, they are editorialised until they are whipped into a comprehensible story. Depending on the nature of the target audience, that story may be told in differing editorial styles, prompting accusations that on many commercial, advertising-driven stations, news stories are determined more for their entertainment value rather than for information purposes ("infotainment")[1]. More serious reporters try to combat this by editing their packages in the field - which again is easier to do now thanks to portable equipment - which is giving rise to the "multi-tasking" phenomenon within the broadcasting industry. But whether in the field or back at base, according to differing broadcasting traditions, some pictures may still be omitted on grounds of "taste and decency". During the Gulf War of 1991, for example, close-up pictures of the horribly burned remains of women and children killed in the bombing of the Al Firdos installation in the Amiriya suburb of Baghdad were omitted ("self-censored") by some Western broadcasters for the same reason that they would not use similar pictures of the victims of a plane crash[2] (Taylor, 1992; Morrison, 1992). Pictures of the aftermath of a mortar attack on a bread queue in Bosnia in 1992 were treated likewise, a "sanitisation" process which, according to one analyst, meant that those news reports would "never have the same impact on the political process" Hopkinson, 1993). In other words, the shock value of horrific television pictures is reduced by a broadcasting tradition which is keen to avoid offending or upsetting its audience. Hence "the doings of the world are tamed to meet the needs of a production system in many respects bureaucratically organised" (Schlesinger). Moreover, when all the decisions have been made, often at great speed in order to meet the transmission deadlines of news bulletins, there is the frequently overlooked problem of how individual members of a mass audience perceive the end result. We all too often forget that mass audiences consist of individuals. Hence the pictures may be common to all, but each individual will perceive them differently according to his or her particular background, education, gender, sensibilities, judgement, perceptions and prejudices. Thus, there is a twin process of what psychologists term cognitive dissonance taking place: by the media professionals themselves and then, subsequently, by the audience. Yet all this only becomes possible if the news organisation has made the expensive decision to send its reporters to the scene in the first place (if it has no correspondent permanently, and again expensively, stationed there) usually with costly equipment and hotel bills needing to be justified in terms of the story's significance and attention-keeping capabilities. This in turn gives rise to the "fire-fighting" tendency of the media; capturing the explosion liveon-camera is rare enough - more usually it is its aftermath - but the causes of the fire, the context, are usually too complex for television to convey adequately. The media, after all, concentrate on events and are at their weakest when tackling issues. Reporting an event in an ethnic conflict, such as a tribal massacre, does not automatically help to explain the context of that massacre and thus distorts its significance: how can it be otherwise in 12 column inches or in a three-minute television news item? Equally, when the flames are out and the media exit, the issues still exist. And erratic coverage is further guaranteed by the recent trend towards making economies. "In television, the cutbacks are more dramatic. The three main [American] broadcast networks virtually have opted out of regular, noncrisis coverage of international affairs... CBS no longer assigns a full-time reporter to the State Department. Overseas, television relies increasingly on freelance video footage and stringers, some of whose connections are suspect" (Hoge, 1993). It is often felt that when the resultingpictures are of dreadful scenes, universally perceived (if that ever happens), they can provoke audience outcries and calls to "do something" to stop the slaughter taking place before their eyes. However, this also invests television with a power that it may notinherently possess. Before the plugs were pulled, television images of the student demonstrations in Tianaminh Square tended, in the words of one US official, to demand on the part of the world community "a solution we couldn't provide. We were powerless to make it stop" (Henry, 1992). This strikes at the very heart of the problem, and one that continues into the 1990s. As one scholar has written, "The projection of images of deprivation and suffering onto television screens creates a clamour for action which cannot be satisfied without exertions or risks that go well beyond those justified by any sense of national interest or even reasonable humanitarian concern" (Freedman, 1996). This was why, despite months of shocking pictures from Rwanda, beginning in April and May 1994, including scores of bodies floating down rivers and the hacking to death of a woman, for 12 weeks of "terrifying tribal genocide theClinton administration and other Western governments... actively resisted the flow of horrific pictures that documented the mass slaughter" (Gowing, 1994). The crisis in Zaire in late 1996, was aperfect illustration of how the phenomenon now works. People on the move in their tens of thousands attracts the concern of the NGOs and other aid agencies which issue press releases, attracting the interest of the media with the prospect of a human tragedy of enormous proportions. This after two years of relative media disinterest in Rwanda.Suddenly, Zaire starts to feature nightly on the television news bulletins and the pictures of lines of innocent women and children start to harrow, especially when border clashes caused by the huge movement of people threatens to engulf them in war. Concerned politicians, on this occasion from Canada, offer to lead a humanitarian force while the UN bungles through its cumbersome bureaucratic procedures. Just as it makes a decision to intervene, pictures emerge of people returning home as the crisis on the ground alleviates. Local politicians say there is no longer any need for military intervention, the journalists go home and the crisis evaporates from the media - and therefore from the international political - agenda. Until the next time, that is. When television does manage to cover a story that is unpalatable to those in authority - such as the Amariya bombing in February 1991, during the Gulf War - there is a disingenuous tendency to shoot the messenger[3]. I say disingenuous because blaming themedium for the message it carries not only deflects attention away from the story itself but also because, once again, it disguises fears about the impact which the message may have on the general public. In the Gulf War, for example, the fear was that by showing pictures (even sanitised ones) of what modern weapons can do to real people, audiences might be sufficiently shocked into doing something to stop the war (Pilger, 1992). This is a remarkable, and deeply flawed, testimony to the continuing influence of the "Vietnam Syndrome", namely the belief that the US military could have won the war in South East Asia had it not been "stabbed in the back" by a hostile media back home (Hallin, 1986). There simply is no evidence to support the assumption that critical television coverage can change public opinion en masse from a pro-war to an anti-war stance, during the Vietnam War or any other war. But the belief that it can has given rise to the enormous efforts now being expended by military establishments on "public affairs" or "public information" activity to shape via the media the outside public perception of what they do at times of war and crisis (Aukofre and Lawrence, 1995). When individual members of the audience do decide to do something - whether it be sending food parcels to the hungry, organising pop concerts to raise money for famine relief, or protesting to their elected representatives or in the streets - it invariably therefore depends more on the motivations of those individuals as individuals rather than the pictures themselves. But even when one man watches a news report of a famine in Ethiopia and is sufficiently disturbed by it to organise a pop concert attended by 100,000 people, which, in turn is watched live on television by tens of millions of people around the world, the power of the medium cannot be simply dismissed. Just because we do not yet know how precisely to measure media effects does not mean that there are none. This becomes even more complex if one considers the view of Benjamin Netanyahu, while deputy foreign minister of Israel, who invoked the Heisenberg Principle "whereby if you observe a phenomenon, you actually change it":" Television is no longer a spectator... We now have the Heisenberg physics of politics. As you observe a phenomenon with television, instantly you modify it somewhat. And I think (therefore) that what we have to make sure of is that the truth is not modified, and that it is constantly fed to the leaders and the publics in democratic countries (Allen et al., 1991; Fiske, 1989)." This may well be so but it is also a justification for official "information management". Because the assertion behind it is difficult to prove at an empirical level, even with public opinion polling, attention has been forced consequently to focus on television's role not as a catalyst but as a participant. Douglas Hurd, while British Foreign Secretary, even suggested that "the public debate is no longer run by events, but by the coverage of events" (Tett, 1993). Similarly, Marlin Fitzwater, President Bush's press spokesman, claimed that in international crises "we virtually cut out the State Department and the deskofficers... Their reports are still important, but they don't get here in time for the basic decisions to be made... The normal information flow into the Oval Office was vastly altered by live video images" (McNulty, 1993). If this is so, especially given the flawed nature of the medium, then small wonder that there is growing concern. Hurd went on to admit that "working with the media has added a steadily growing extra dimension to the business of government, and in particular to the business of diplomacy" (Serfaty, 1990). But we have to ask whether this is because officials recognise that the media really have become participants or because they fear that they might become so? Moreover, does this fear say more about them than it does about television? Some months earlier, Mr. Hurd had said that, "like it or not, television images are what forces foreign policy makers to give one of the current 25 crises in the world greater priority"(Hopkinson, 1993). This was dubbed "Hurd's Law" by one critic who felt that because "there were no TV cameras in southern Iraq during the [Shia] uprising [in the aftermath of the Gulf War, there was] therefore no serious pressure on Western governments to intervene" (Mortimer, 1993). The uprising to the north, by way of contrast, was different because John Major saw the plight of the Kurds on TV news reports, prompting him to suggest Operation Provide Comfort to the Americans (Mortimer, 1993). Again, in October 1993, when pictures taken on a portable hi-8 video camera - not, significantly, by a professional journalist[4] - of a dead US serviceman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, "switchboards to the White House [were] jammed with callers, most favouring tougher restrictions on the media and calling for an immediate US withdrawal from Somalia. President Clinton dulyobliged. Operation Restore Hope, which had been launched amidst a media blitz on the Somalian seashore, collapsed on the sword of unpalatable media images from a back street in a place few of those callers to the White House had heard of before. So television can serve as an occasional catalyst in foreign policy - but only when politicians allow it to do so. Restore Hope essentially failed because American forces on a humanitarian mission turned it into amanhunt for General Aideed. That policy decision, combined with the proliferation of methods for collecting images about itsconsequences, was the source of the failure, not television. Nonetheless, Boutros Boutros-Ghali's view is that "today, the media do not simply report the news. Television has become a part of the event it covers. It has changed the way the world reacts to crises" (Brock, 1994). If it really is being allowed to set agendas for diplomatic initiatives (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) again given its limitations, this is a recipe for disaster. "We are under no pressure to do something about crises that are not on TV", one British official has admitted. Yet if it is difficult enough for psychologists to establish a direct causal link between television and human behaviour generally, how can we talk with certainty of a "do something factor"? One might only conclude that television's "power" to set the agenda is determined more by those taking notice of it - or who are afraid of it - or who are willing to grant access to it - than it is by any inherent qualities which it may possess as an instrument of mass communication and persuasion[5]. There is more evidence that such people are more likely to be the politicians and the officials in the audience than members of the general public at large. And despite the argument that decision-makers simply do not have the time to watch television, and are therefore not influenced by it - and how many busy diplomats and politicians have the time to sit and watch the evening news? - no matter how hard they try, television does intrude into their daily routines. If wives, sons or daughters do not tell them over the dinner table about the shocking pictures they have witnessed in that night's news programmes, their press officers almostcertainly will the next morning. It does not matter whether the reports were accurate, balanced, contextualised or even significant - which they might not be - but rather that they have been transmitted and that they might have provoked a reaction. George Stephanopoulis gave the game away when he admitted that "in the White House... We have 24 hour news cycles... CNN assures you that you are forced to react at any time, and that's going to happen throughout the time of the Clinton presidency" (Stech, 1994). The journalist, Nik Gowing, has written that "officials confirm that information often comes to them first from television or text news services well before official diplomatic and military communications channels can provide data, precision, clarification and context" (Gowing, 1994). President Bush even went so far as to say that "I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA" (Friedland, 1992), while his press secretary claimed that "in most of these kind of international crises now, we virtually cut out the State Department and the desk officers... Their reports are still important, but they don't get here in time for the basic decisions to be made". Here, then, is the real source of the change. The speed at which modern news-gathering can - though not always - occur places increased pressure on the decision-making process, which in turn complains that it cannot cope sensibly with the kind of knee-jerk solutions demanded by the pictures. Agenda setting in real time If, in the traditional world of diplomacy, television is still regarded as a nuisance, real-time coverage adds a further threat: it means that the public is often made aware of an event at the same time as the politicians who are accordingly forced to respond in a manner which runs counter to the diplomatic traditions of working methodically, systematically and slowly. According to Lee Hamilton, "television also encourages policy-makers to react quickly, perhaps too quickly, to acrisis... Television, critics say, leads not to sound foreign policy but sound bytesmasquerading as policy" (Foreign Affairs Committee, 1994). Hamilton was Chairman of the US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, when it examined this issue in 1994. His view was that "there can be little doubt that television has had an impact, perhaps a profound impact on the conduct of US foreign policy". He continued:" Spurred by technological advances ranging from satellites to cellular phones, vivid images of conflict and deprivation are sent instantly to American homes from the world's trouble spots, whether in Haiti or Somalia or Bosnia or the Persian Gulf. These televised images quickly become a central part of the foreign policy debate. They affect which crises we decide to pay attention to and which we ignore. They affect how we think about those crises, and I have little doubt these televised picturesultimately affect what we do about theseproblems (Foreign Affairs Committee, 1994)." Once again, therefore, we appear to confront a contradiction. There is more information available today than ever before, moreeffective ways of gathering and distributing that information and, thanks to portable communications technology such as the satellite phone, camcorder and laptopcomputer, greater opportunities for non-professionals to input the traditional flow of communications. Yet there are several indications that people cannot handle this information overload. Instead, people make choices about which pieces to absorb - through the choice of a newspaper or the selection of a newscast. Very few people watch CNNcontinuously; people want access to news 24 hours a day, but they do not want to watch it for 24 hours at a time. And what they do watch, thanks to another piece of portable technology, the channel-hopping zapper, has to interest or concern them or else they tune out, or rather tune in to a 200-channel choice universe. Foreign policy remains the interest of relatively small numbers of people; it always has, despite talk of global villages and information superhighways. But live coverage of foreign policy issues makes it more exciting for more people which merely makes it all the more likely that control over those issues will be diffused to an audience beyond thetraditional elites. It is often assumed that the public are prone to responding emotionally to dramatic events by clamouring for something simply and quickly to be done - to stop the horror before their eyes - while the politicians in the audience have to weigh up the options in a more considered way. However, politicians who believe in the power of television are increasing in number and they, too, aremembers of the audience. Of the massive amount of live information now available, one senior White House adviser has noted that "there's really no time to digest this information, so the reaction tends to be from the gut, just like the reaction of the man on the street" (McNulty, 1993). The arrival of electronic news gathering (ENG) since the 1980s, of instantaneous news reports and live coverage from once remote places, does therefore appear to have transformed diplomatic practice. This is still most acutely felt in the USA where CNN has emerged as the most dynamic development of the US media scene prior to the arrival of information superhighways. Once lampooned as "Chicken Noodle News" - reflecting the audacity of the experiment barely two decades ago - CNN has defined itself as the "town crier in the global village" (Downmount, 1993). Its external arm, CNN International, had revenue in 1994 of $100 million, as compared to $13.6 million at the time of the Gulf War (Harvesin, 1994), and has made it an unavoidable player in international affairs. CNN executive Tom Johnson, maintains that "our goal at CNN is neither to assist nor inhibit the diplomats of any country as they seek a solution for this or any crisis. It is our goal to provide fair and balanced reporting of all news and all views that are relevant to the events of the day... Diplomats aside, all of us can only benefit from this open access to information". Not everyone agrees. Real-time reporting exacerbates all those inherent weaknesses of television as a medium for conveying complexity. One need only recall CNNjournalists donning their gas masks in Jerusalem as they reported live of a chemical attack during the Gulf War to see theproblem. As Edward Bickham, a former special advisor to the British Foreign Office, has pointed out:" The power of television in foreign policy is a mixed blessing. As a medium it plays too much to the heart, and too little to the head. Itpresents powerful, emotive images that conjure strong reactions... Anecdotes about individual suffering make compelling television, but they rarely form a good basis to make policy... Foreign policy should be made by democratic governments, accountable to parliament, not in reaction to which trouble spots the news gathering organisations can afford to cover from time to time... Reactions to the priorities of the news room are unlikely to yield a coherent or sustainable foreign policy (Bickham, 1993)." Yet a senior presidential advisor has admitted that this is precisely what can happen in the White House. "High-level people are being forced essentially to act or to formulate responses or policy decision on the basis of information that is of very uncertain reliability" (McNulty, 1993). Are they, however, being forced, or are they merely allowing this to happen? Either way, this cannot be right. We are being presented with a scenario of Washington's agenda being determined by Atlanta, rather than vice versa, which - if correct - will in turn be determined more by CNN's ability to break stories first with pictures rather than by any sober calculation of US national interests! This scenario also fails to take into account the recent attention which governments like the USA are spending on "spin doctoring" and media agenda-setting on the part of US politicians whose growing skill at this was all too evident during the Gulf War (McArthur, 1993). One State Department official even admitted that the Clinton administration's strategy before 1995 was "to keep Bosnia out of the headlines. Every day it's not in the news is another day of success" (Church, 1994), even though it took two mortar attacks on Sarajevo's marketplace and the lines of fleeing refugees fromSrebrenica - all in full glorious technicolour - to expose the strategy as a failure. At least on this occasion. Traditionally, public diplomacy was paid for by governments to ensure that their views were projected to the wider world as a corrective to any media misrepresentation, and in the past five years both Britain and the USA have extended this into television (BBC World Service Television and WORLDNET).Public diplomacy has, if anything, therefore become an even more essential function of governments to provide calm as a corrective to the chaos frequently caused by real-time fire-fighting reporting "as it happens" on the part of commercial news organisations. The precondition of this, however, is a coherent foreign policy. "If an administration has thought its foreign policy through and is prepared and able to argue the merits and defend the consequences of that policy, television and all its new technologies can be dealt with" (Stech, 1994). CNN has been described as "a common frame of reference for the world's power elite... A kind of world-wide party line, allowing leaders to conduct a sort of conference call heard not only by the principals but also by their constituents across the planet" (Henry, 1992). The televised interviews between Presidents Bush and SaddamHussein during the build up to the Gulf War would certainly appear to confirm the validity of this. However, it has been pointed out that "when politicians wish to mediate they use diplomatic channels, secure and private; when they wish to confront they use open forms of mass communication" (Wood, 1993). But the clearest indication of the dangers of them relying on live television for their information came on 15 February 1991, when news networks around the world rushed to break the story of Saddam's offer to withdraw from Kuwait before his speech had even finished, let alone considered, prompting premature celebrations of war's end before the full details of the Iraqi president's offer (including the withdrawal of Israel from the Golan Heights) become known (Taylor, 1994). Therefore, it is hard not to agree that "instant access from the battlefield to the conference table and back again has enormous political implications, both good and bad" (McNulty, 1993). It is for this reason that many analysts are beginning to call on the media to reconsider their role within a global real-time society, and one that is not a slave to commercialism or technological wizardry:" The news media's greatest challenge is to explicate a concept of globalism and global news coverage with dedication to the idea that all parts of the world should be represented, lest we lose the chance to be fully informed. It is no longer satisfactory in a global society to attend only a few countries at a time. The educated and informed person who is conversant in the global society must know not only what is happening in all parts of the globe, but also across thematic topics such as global economics, environment, technology and ideology." Idealistic words, perhaps, and desirable ones certainly, but how realistic this is doubtful. Besides, is it not simply a call for propaganda on behalf of globalisation? Certainly, as the drift from print to television continues, it might appear that a medium inherentlyincapable of conveying complexity is being asked to do the impossible - unless, that is, drastic restructuring of news and current affairs takes it away from the trends ofcommercialisation and back to a public service ethos. For, as it has been pointed out:" This is a good place to debunk the much repeated idea that television is a medium best suited to transmitting emotions, and that it either "cannot" or is not "good" at transmitting ideas... The answer to why we see what we see on television lies in a combination of how audiences have come to conceive of the medium, what audiences want to watch (or have grownaccustomed to watching), and what the people who control and sponsor television believe needs to be created and broadcast in order to maximise profit (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)." Restructuring the way foreign news is reported, however, may simply produce a mass turn-off or switchover because, as a former publisher of the New York Times put it, "the fountain serves no purpose if the horse refuses to drink" (Hoge, 1993). Broadcasters remain convinced that they understand their audience best, and thus are best placed to cater for their needs. As Ed Turner, of CNN, has argued, "We continue to collect evidence that television news does have an impact on the conduct of foreign policy, but no one knows how much" (Turner, 1991). And because CNN is an all-news channel, he defends it as fuller coverage than that which the entertainment networks are able to provide:" If we were to take a strong story-line, compress it into a formal documentary, pre-empt the news hours, and run it for say two hours on any night, chances are quite high that very few people would watch. That is the way of the world, rightly or wrongly. But if you take the same information, the news and opinion and build it around a live-from-the-scene reporter or anchor, and inject proper live shots from other aspects of the story, I believe you cannot only attract a sizeable audience but also perform some important and effective services for the viewers (Turner, 1991)." So, on the one hand, we have CNN as a force for increasing popular interest in foreign affairs by making it exciting, while on the other hand the argument is that this is merely placing undue pressure on politicians into making over-rapid decisions. To this, Ed Turner's argument is simple: "If no comment is proper for our satellite signal, then an intelligent policy-maker will tell us no comment. If this limited stress is unacceptable, thenperhaps we need some new leaders" (Turner, 1991). As has been suggested, the "no comment" approach is that which is most likely to arouse journalistic suspicions that something is being hidden. It also leads to massive speculation on what might be going on by the endless parade of "talking-heads" that CNN and stations like it need to fill their airtime with. Such speculation can often do more harm than good, especially if foreign leaders are watching it and misreading the signals of so-called informed "experts". It therefore is simply not an option for diplomats or politicians any more. Yet at least Turner conceded that journalists, too, face a major challenge in the age of real-time television, namely "Will we be smart enough to use the technology wisely? Will we be astute and honest as programmers and as editors of this journalism? It will be expensive and it will be difficult, but given the track record of the free world's journalist, I believe the answer is yes. We are cranky and we are impertinent and not infrequently wrong in this elusive search for truth. But taken as a whole, the answer is yes" (Turner, 1991). An analysis of the track record of the free world's journalist in recent times of war and international crisis does, however, suggest a different answer. Conclusions - Television, especially live or "real-time" television, has become a participant in international events rather than merely an observer. - It can also serve as a catalyst - but only when politicians susceptible to swings in public opinion, allow it to do so. - Because of television's erratic, emotional and simplistic coverage of foreign affairs, it is essential for governments to maintain their public diplomacy apparatus. Because of increasing commercialisation and the "dumbing down" of newscoverage, non-specialised "hacks" are confronted increasingly with specialised information officers. - The speed at which live television operates means that politicians often receive information about foreign events at the same time as the public. - Live television thus becomes an important means of sending messages to influence the course of those events, and indeed becomes an extension of public diplomacy activities because those messages are no longer mediated by editors, journalists and other media professionals. - By these means, official agendas in foreign policy matters are easier to impose on the media agenda, rather than vice versa. - When the media agenda does intrude into official business, the command and control of the media environment has broken down. - Because of TV's special characteristics, it is not in the interests of officials to let this happen. - The danger is that this gives rise to a growth in propaganda and the use of the media in ways which raise questions about the relationship of truth in democracies. Notes 1 For example, the use of the "News Bunny" on the Mirror Group's cable services "Live TV". 2 There is a further consideration to all this. On 5 February 1996, the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, monitored horrendous pictures of the clear-up operation following the Peruvian air crash on a village sent over the Reuters feeds. Here the issue was not so much whether such pictures could ever be broadcast, but that the story itself - another Third World disaster - received minimal attention in the Western media, a few lines in the "World in Brief" section. 3 As when the Daily Mail accused the BBC of being "the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation" when it transmitted even the heavily self-censored pictures of the dead at Amiriya, or when Peter Arnett was accused of being an "Iraqi sympathiser" when he stayed in Baghdad during the war to cover such stories as the notorious "baby milk plant" bombing. 4 The media had largely left the country because it was getting too dangerous. A departing Reuters crew handed over their camcorder to the driver of their "technical" with instructions to film anything of interest. 5 This assertion, derived from audience research finding, recognises that TV can have an impact on some people at any given time, say, in advertising or on violent behaviour or on Bob Geldhof - but that, despite 30 or more years of research it is still not possible to determine how, and how many, of the audience will be affected. Many watch, but few act. This is as great a problem for democrats wishing to increase electoral turn-out during elections as it is for politicians trying to get people to vote for their party as distinct from another, let alone advertisers getting people to buy one brand of soap powder rather than another. References 1. Allen, T.B., Clifton Berry, F. and Polmar, N. (1991), CNN: War in the Gulf, Maxwell International, New York, NY, p. 13. 2. Alleyne, M.D. (1995), International Power and International Communication, St. Anthony's/Macmillan, London. 3. Aukofer F. and Lawrence, W. (1995), America's Team: The Odd Couple. A Report on the Relationship Between the Media and the Military, Freedom Forum First Amendment Centre, Vanderbilt. 4. Bickham, E. (1993), "Playing to the heart of the nation", Spectrum, Autumn, p. 3. 5. Brock, P. (1993/4), "Dateline Yugoslavia: the partisan press", Foreign Policy, Vol. 48, No. 1, Winter, p. 155. 6. Church, G.C. (1994), "This time we mean it: NATO's pull-back-or-we-bomb ultimatum to Bosnia's Serbs looks genuine, but will it help end the war?" Time, 21 February. 7. Downmount, T. (1993), Channels of Resistance, BFI, London, p. 1 8. Fiske, J. (1989), Remote Control: Television Audiences and Cultural Power, Routledge, London. 9. Freedman, L. (1996), "The media and foreign policy", Dispatches: The Journal of the Territorial Army Pool of Information Officers p. 141. 10. Friedland, L. (1992), Covering the World: International Television News Services, 20th Century Fund Press, New York, NY, pp. 7-8. 11. Gowing, N. (1994), "Real time television coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: does it pressure or distort foreign policy decisions?", Discussion Paper 94-1, JFK School of Government, Harvard University, June, p. 4. 12. Hallin, D. (1986), The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam, Oxford University Press.. 13. Harveson, P. (1994), "A leader in Global TV News: aggressive expansion by CNN Television Network", The Financial Times, 1 November. 14. Hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Impact of Television on US Foreign Policy (1994), Transcript supplied by the Federal News Service, Washington DC. 15. Henry, W.A. (1992), "History as it happens", Time, 6 January. 16. Hoge, J.F. (1993), "The end of predictability", Media Studies Journal, Fall, p. 5. 17. Hopkinson, N. (1993), The Media and International Affairs Alter the Cold War, HMSO, p. 18. 18. Hudson, H. (1990), Communication Satellites, Collier Macmillan, New York, NY. 19. Kubey, R. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990), Television and the Quality of Life, Erlbaum Associates, Hilllsdale, NJ, p. 189. 20. MacArthur, J. (1993), Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, University of California Press, Berkely, CA, 1993 edition. 21. McCombs, M.E. and Shaw, D. (1972), "The agenda-setting function of the mass media", Public Opinion Quarterly, pp. 176-87. 22. McNulty, T. (1993), "Television's impact on executive decision-making and diplomacy", The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 17, Winter, p. 71. 23. Morrison, D.M. (1992), Television and the Gulf War, John Libbey, London. 24. Mortimer, E. (1993), "No news is bad news: in the absence of TV cameras, victims of aggression can be left to suffer", The Financial Times, 27 October. 25. Pilger (1992), Distant Voices, Vintage, London. 26. Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together, p. 47. 27. Serfaty, S. (Ed.) (1990), The Media and Foreign Policy, The Free Press, New York, NY, p. xiv. 28. Stech, F.J. (1994), "Winning CNN Wars", Parameters, Autumn, p. 38. 29. Taylor, P. M. (1992), War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War, Manchester University Press.. 30. Taylor, P.M. (1994), "Back to the future? Integrating the media into the history of international relations", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 14 No. 3 31. Tett, G. (1993), "Hurd hits at role of journalists in Bosnia: success of media-free negotiations gives diplomats food for thought", The Financial Times, 10 September. 32. Turner, E. (1991), "The power and the glory", in Young, C., The Role of the Media in International Conflict, a report on a two-day seminar at the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, December. 33. Wood, J. (1992), A History of International Broadcasting, Peter Peregrinus, London, p. 235. Further reading 34. Cohen, S. and Young, J. (1976), The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and The Mass Media, Constable, London. 35. Schlesinger, P. (1987), Putting Reality Together, Routledge, London. 36. Willis R. and Baran, S. (1990), The Known World of Broadcast News, Routledge, London. |