Winning CNN Wars

Media Coverage and Public Perception

Introduction

by Frank J. Stech, Lt. Col. U.S. Army Reserve

On the night the Gulf War air attack began, a senior officer in the Pentagon Command Center, watching the TV transmissions from Baghdad, checked his watch and consulted those planning the air attack on the Iraqi central telecommunications tower: "If the cruise missile is on target . . . the reporter will go off the air right about . . . (he counts down the seconds) . . . Now!" [1]

ABC and NBC network reports from Baghdad, routed through the Iraqi communications network, went dead. CNN reports continued, carried over a dedicated telephone circuit to Jordan installed before the air attacks.

For more than two weeks CNN provided the only American reporting from Iraq. CNN's coverage of the Gulf War was unique and completely redefined live satellite television news.[2]

The Gulf War opened the possibility that new forms of war and diplomacy were being born. "Television imagery transmitted by satellite," wrote one observer, "is irrevocably altering the ways governments deal with each other, just as it makes traditional diplomacy all but obsolete in times of crisis. . . . Instant access from the battlefield to the conference table and back again has enormous political implications both good and bad."[3] The TV coverage of the Gulf War created a phenomenon that has come to be termed "CNN war."[4]

The unique experience of real-time feedback at war's outbreak from the opponent's national capital offers a useful place to start thinking about conflict in the global TV age. Radio, invented near the turn of the 19th century, led to new arsenals of electronic weaponry that radically changed military operations three decades later. Radio technology spawned new approaches to strategy (propaganda, strategic bombing), operations (navigation, electronic warfare), and tactics (mobile communications and improved command and control).[5]

Television, invented in the 1920s, began a similar cycle of innovation and adaptation in military operations in the 1970s, leading to the weaponry of the 1990s and beyond. TV and video are poised to change warfare as extensively and dramatically in the 21st century as radio changed conflict in this century, for policymakers as well as for combatants. To think of video as exclusively the province of the media would be as shortsighted today as thinking in 1930 that radio was merely for news broadcasts.

The effects of TV, video, and global communications on conflict management in the 21st century will extend far beyond the relationships of TV news and the military. CNN war provides the first and clearest signs, however, of the implications of global TV for national policymaking and military operations.[6]

Real-time video on the battlefield and images of conflict transmitted by satellite to TVs around the world already have altered government decisionmaking and military operations in several ways. TV news carries information directly and immediately to top leaders, bypassing the entire apparatus of intelligence, diplomacy, and national security. "I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA," President Bush told other world leaders; his press secretary observed, "In most of these kinds 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."[7]

Images of Patriot missiles intercepting Scuds in the night skies of Tel Aviv helped dissuade the Israeli government from attacking Iraq and fracturing the Gulf War coalition. Wrote one observer, "Patriot was given center stage on television for a significant part of the Gulf War, having a magical effect on the public's perception of events."[8]

TV viewers, including leaders, react emotionally and forcefully to images, and public pressure forces policymakers to respond quickly; President Clinton's advisor George Stephanopoulis has noted, "In the White House . . . we have 24-hour news cycles. . . . CNN assures that you are forced to react at any time, and that's going to happen throughout the time of the Clinton presidency."[9]

Everything speeds up, and emotion competes with reason: "There's really no time to digest this information," observed one senior advisor, "so the reaction tends to be from the gut, just like the reaction of the man on the street. . . . High-level people are being forced essentially to act or to formulate responses or policy positions on the basis of information that is of very uncertain reliability."[10]

The image of a single American helicopter pilot being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu almost immediately caused the Clinton Administration to announce the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia. Leaders communicate directly to each other through CNN and shape events through a dialogue of images: "You end up hearing statements for the first time," President Bush said, "not in diplomatic notes, but because you see a foreign minister on the screen. I really mean CNN. It has turned out to be a very important information source."[11]

The House Foreign Affairs Committee recently held hearings on whether media coverage influences foreign policy and forces hasty judgments and decisions. The concerns are many. CNN war leads publics and leaders to define political events in terms of the video clips and sound bites that compose TV news images. Conflicts that fail to generate good video fail to be politically real: "What I'm concerned about is what happens in the non-CNN wars," observed UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, mentioning crises in Angola, Sudan, Mozambique, and Ngorno-Karabakh -- "Those are not on CNN. The question is how the international community deals with that."[12]

Through CNN "everyone is seeing the same thing": publics see events when leaders and elites see them, as they happen, and "for the first time in history, the rich and poor, literate and illiterate, city worker and peasant farmer are linked together by shared images of global life," joined through "a hot line from self to self."[13]

Spectators become participants while participants in televised events become spectators: soldiers in the Gulf War, watching TV, saw the folks back home watching the soldiers, watching the folks, watching. . . .

In January 1994 Yassar Arafat addressed, via CNN, crowds of Palestinian demonstrators, who in turn conversed, through the on-scene reporter, with Arafat, both sides watching themselves in dialogue. TV images become directly tied to political mobilization because "satellites have no respect for political boundaries, they cannot be stopped by Berlin Walls, by tanks in Tiananmen Square, or by dictators in Baghdad," and watching becomes participation.[14]

Political groups "capture" images that serve their purposes and reuse them, creating new events to be televised. News media compete to broadcast dramatic events, which are repeated and echoed from one news channel to others, until supplanted by newer images. Consequently, the media emphasize event coverage, exclusiveness, and distribution of images rather than the quality, nuance, substance, and interpretation of news content.[15]

Given these concerns and the characteristics of real-time video, globally broadcast live from the battlefield, what can policymakers and military leaders do to adapt their policies, strategies, campaign plans, and tactics to support their goals in a CNN war? The remainder of this article examines the persuasiveness of video images, how leaders have employed images to gain support for their goals, and recent perspectives on CNN war and Pentagon-media relations. It concludes by suggesting ways to win CNN wars.

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© Copyright 2001 by David W. Tschanz.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com