[2] . "CNN pushed the boundaries of world news: no longer did the network merely report events, but through its immediate reportage, CNN actually shaped the events and became part of them." Lewis Friedland, Covering the World: International Television News Services (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1992), p. 2. CNN became the news source of choice among national elites; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told CNN interviewer Bernard Shaw: "I waited all the time, watching CNN. For five, six hours I didn't move," an apparent case of what doctors came to label "the CNN effect": interminable watching of the war; Bernard Shaw CNN interview, 10 January 1991, cited in Thomas B. Allen, F. Clifton Berry, and Norman Polmar, CNN: War in the Gulf (Atlanta: Turner Publishing, 1991).
[3] McNulty, pp. 78, 82.
[4] Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey Shaffer, and Benjamin Ederington use the term "CNN war" in The Military Technical Revolution: A Structural Framework (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 1993), p. 11, but the term had popular usage prior to this.
[5] Marconi patented wireless telegraphy in 1897; voice wireless was available in 1907; commercial radio broadcasting began in 1920. Melvin L. DeFleur and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communication (New York: Longman, 1989), ch. 4.
[6] Television's role in changing weaponry has unfolded much like radio-based weaponry. The lags in militarization parallel the lags in commercialization and market saturation of both radio and TV technologies. By 1935 nearly every US household had a radio; by 1985 nearly every US household had a color TV. See DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach, also Howard A Frederick, Global Communication & International Relations (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1993), ch. 3. Today's military, however, has nothing to match the technology of CNN, which integrates mobile video, minicams, cellular communications, "fly-away" satellite datalinks, and network control systems to coordinate live video of events, expert analysis, and access to political and military leadership, delivered worldwide.
[7] Bush quote in Friedland, pp. 7-8. Marlin Fitzwater's description of the interplay between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's proposals for possible settlement of the Gulf War crisis and US President Bush's swift rejection two hours after Saddam's broadcast is from McNulty, p. 71. Similar dynamics have been reported during the Clinton presidency. See Eleanor Clift and Bob Cohn, "Seven Days," Newsweek , 12 July 1993, p. 18. "Particularly during crises," McNulty wrote (pp. 67, 71), "television images are deeply imprinted on White House decision-making; they permeate discussions from the earliest senior staff meeting and the president's intelligence briefing an hour later to those meetings conducted at the end of the day in the Oval Office or over drinks upstairs in the official residence. . . The normal information flow into the Oval Office was vastly altered by live video images."
[8] Theodore Postol, "Lessons of the Gulf War: Experience with Patriot," International Security , 16 (Winter 1991-92), 119.
[9] Quoted in David S. Broder, "Looking Ahead in '92," Boston Globe (6 April 1994), p. 15.
[10] Carnes Lord, security advisor of former Vice President Dan Quayle, went on: "The more widespread information is about things like this, the more congressmen you have becoming secretaries of state." Quoted in McNulty, pp. 72, 81.
[11]. Quoted in Friedland, p. 7. Throughout the buildup to the Gulf War President Bush, Saddam Hussein, UN leaders, Soviet intermediaries, and other world leaders used CNN as what Friedland called a "diplomatic seismograph and party line," to signal intent and address messages to one another, bypassing formal diplomatic channels.
[12] Quoted in Dallas Morning News , 18 July 1993, p. 1j. Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, in News That Matters , wrote that TV news offers simplified visions of events "priming certain aspects of national life while ignoring others," and thereby setting "the terms by which political judgments are rendered and political choices made" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 4.
[13] Former Secretary of State George Shultz observed that satellite TV news "puts everybody on real time, because everyone is seeing the same thing." Quoted in McNulty, p. 74.
[14] Former FCC Chairman Newton Minnow, quoted in McNulty, p. 82. Walter B. Wriston, in The Twilight of Sovereignty (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1992), argues that modern communications greatly reduce the traditional control and sovereignty of nation-states.
[15] The news media, Michael Crichton wrote, "have treated information the way John D. Rockefeller treated oil--as a commodity, in which the distribution network, rather than product quality, is of primary importance." Michael Crichton, "The Mediasaurus," Wired (September-October 1993).
[16]See, for example, Richard M. Perloff, The Dynamics of Persuasion (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993); or Anthony R. Pratkanis and Eliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1992).
[17] See, for example, Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1993).
[18]In experiments during World War II a two-sided message (to continue the war against Japan) produced greater attitude change than a one-sided message, especially among those who originally opposed continuing the war. The one-sided message (to continue the war) brought about greater attitude change among those who initially supported that view. Better educated soldiers were more favorably affected by two-sided arguments, while poorly educated soldiers were more responsive to one-sided appeals. See Carl I. Hovland, A. A. Lumsdaine, and F. D. Sheffield, Experiments on Mass Communication (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949), p. 105; Pratkanis and Aronson, p. 165; Shelley E. Taylor and Suzanne C. Thompson, "Stalking the Elusive `Vividness' Effect," Psychological Review, 89 (No. 2, 1982), 155-81; Perloff, pp. 139, 171.
[19]Imagery and emotion figured prominently in President Clinton's 1992 speech accepting the Democratic nomination. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton reflected his deepest emotion when he derided his opponent, George Bush, for "the vision thing." That is, Clinton portrayed his opponent's lack of a vision where the country was going as his greatest flaw. Clinton told the delegates that the thing about Bush that really made him mad was this lack of a defining and guiding image for the country's future, a vision Clinton proposed to provide from the White House.
[20] "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent," Churchill penned in the early morning hours as his train approached Westminster College in Missouri. During World War II Churchill's first speech as Prime Minister in the House of Commons began with emotional imagery: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat." On the Westminster speech and the rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill, see James C. Humes, The Sir Winston Method: The Five Secrets of Speaking the Language of Leadership (New York: William Morrow, 1991), pp. 61-63.
[21] Psychologically extemporaneous remarks seem to audiences more sincere and genuine than prepared remarks since they appear to be more characteristic of the individual's beliefs and emotions than of the social demands of the speech setting. See Edward E. Jones and Daniel McGillis, "Correspondent Inferences and the Attribution Cube," in New Directions in Attribution Research, Volume 1, ed. John H. Harvey, William J. Ickes, and Robert F. Kidd (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976), pp. 389-420.
[22] Coretta S. King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1969), p. 238.
[23] "They [moving pictures] come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. . . . On the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you." Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965, originally published 1922), p. 61.
[24] Stephen Baker, Visual Persuasion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961).
[25] Quoted in Todd Gitlin, "TV & American Culture: Flat and Happy," The Wilson Quarterly, 17 (Autumn 1993), 55.
[26] The public's ideal construct of journalism equates news, objectivity, credibility, and reality. Social construction theory and media dependency theory address the question "Under what circumstances do we believe the political images we see on TV are real?" Social construction of reality theory is associated with Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966), and Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Media dependency theory is associated with Hanna Adoni and Sherrill Mane, "Media and the Social Construction of Reality: Toward an Integration of Theory and Research," Communications Research, 11 (1984), 323-40; and Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs, Mediated Political Realities (New York: Longman, 1990).
[27] These subframes for news were defined by Philo C. Wasburn, Broadcasting Propaganda: International Radio Broadcasting and the Construction of Political Reality (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992).
[28] Typically the actor frame ignores the more abstract, less telegenic processes, forces, power relations, and economic factors that underlie events. We tend to attribute motives and causality to whatever actors we focus on. Darren Newtson, "Foundations of Attribution: The Perception of Ongoing Behavior," in Harvey, Ickes, and Kidd, pp. 242-43.
[29] Detractors from the dramatic evolution of the image story line are avoided in news production: the technical details; histories and legacies; interconnections with other events and stories; and any truly unknown factor, uncertainties, or complexities are eliminated to maintain a "clean story line."
[30] Soldiers' war has been described as interminable periods of "sheer boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror." The soldier frame, however, creates too much media "dead air time;" so media images of war cut to the chase and highlight the action. Media war is motion- and action-filled; things must be happening to be seen. "Soldiers' war" quote attributed to Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy, in Jay M. Shafritz, Words on War: Military Quotations from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 458.
[31] There may be a basic psychological tendency to focus on fewer relevant cues with greater intensity as emotional arousal increases, rather than looking for finer levels of analysis. Newtson, p. 234.
[32] Accepting the official sources frame limits alternative perspectives and polarizes viewpoints as either pro or con; whereas other, different, and distinct viewpoints create distracting and irrelevant images and are excluded from the frame.
[33] Ted Koppel, ABC Nightline anchorman, quoted in Erika Fitzpatrick, "Media, Policy: Koppel Checks Links," Boston Globe, 27 April 1994, p. 8.
[34] Both quotes in Michael Kramer, "The Political Interest: It's All Foreign to Clinton," Time, 18 October 1993, p. 75.
[35] Chuck de Caro, "Sats, Lies, and Video-Rape: The Soft War Handbook" (Washington: Aerobureau Corporation, 1993), p. 24.
[36] See Ambassador Robert B. Oakley's account, "What We Learned in Somalia," The Washington Post, 20 March 1994, p. C7, and Rick Atkinson's series on the Ranger and Delta Force operations published in The Washington Post in February 1994.
[37] Months after the events in October the print media rediscovered the Mogadishu story and recast it. The revisionist versions became a tale of "amazing valor" by the American Rangers. See, for example, Kevin Fedarko, "Amid Disaster, Amazing Valor," Time, 28 February 1994, p. 46.
[38] "The consensus that drove Congress and the administration to support the deployment of American forces into [Somalia] . . . evaporated when the body of a single American soldier was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. That image, broadcast and rebroadcast by all the media, produced a wave of revulsion across America." James Adams, "The Role of the Media," Conference on Ethnic Conflict and Regional Instability (Cambridge, Mass.: Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, 17-18 November 1993), p. 4.
[39] Commentators have suggested that "image wars" have become commonplace in politics. For example, besides de Caro and McNulty, see Bernard Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963); William Hachten, "The Triumph of Western News Communication," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 17 (Winter 1993); Patrick O'Heffernan, Mass Media and American Foreign Policy: Insider Perspectives on Global Journalism and the Foreign Policy Process (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1991); and Michael J. O'Neill, The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power are Changing the World (New York: Random House, 1994).
[40] "The key to finding meaning in things," Arthur Asa Berger's introduction to semiotics suggests, "is to realize that we live in a world that is full of signs--a sign being something that stands for or represents something else." Arthur Asa Berger, Signs in Contemporary Culture (Salem, Wisc.: Sheffield, 1989), p. viii.
[41] Related to the author by Professor Charles McClintock, at the time a teen-aged participant-observer of World War II map-tracking and fireside chats.
[42] See James H. Doolittle, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again (New York: Bantam Books, 1991). The psychological utility of dramatic special operations in capturing public attention and support, above and beyond any military significance, was fully appreciated and exploited by both Roosevelt and Churchill. The principle they followed was defined by de Tocqueville: "No kind of greatness is more pleasing to the imagination of a democratic people than military greatness which is brilliant and sudden, won without hard work, by risking nothing but one's life." Democracy in America (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 657, quoted in Eliot A. Cohen, Commandos and Politicians: Elite Military Units in Modern Democracies (Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Affairs, Harvard Univ., 1978), p. 50.
[43] Roosevelt frequently conversed with his friend Jack Warner of Warner Brothers about Hollywood's treatment of war themes. Casablanca opened in Hollywood on Thanksgiving Day, only 18 days after the Allied landings in Casablanca. President Roosevelt saw the film on New Year's Eve, 31 December 1942. Soon after, Roosevelt severed relations with Vichy France. In January 1943, when the film was generally released, Roosevelt, linking fantasy to reality, traveled secretly to Casablanca to confer with Churchill and the new leader of the Free French, De Gaulle. The political fantasy of Casablanca," write Nimmo and Combs, "is one of individual commitments that add up to a national commitment against fascism. America must fight, however reluctantly. . . . Casablanca permitted wartime audiences to solidify their own commitment by identification with the character of Rick." See the analysis of the interaction of the film Casablanca and wartime public opinion in Nimmo and Combs, pp. 116-18. On the social context of Casablanca, see Clifford McCarty, Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart (New York: Bonanza Books, 1965), and Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca--Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 1992).
[44] CNN and the networks went live to their reporters in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, depicting a bedlam of news persons, thinking they were being gassed, trying to don gas masks, insert ear pieces, and speak into their microphones at the same time, while images gyrated wildly as camera persons attempted the same juggling feats.
[45] On the night of the first Scud attacks on Israel, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger "had just returned from a weekend mission to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where the Israelis--reluctant to abandon their military self-sufficiency--had rejected an American offer of Patriot missiles. `If they've been hit with chemicals, Katie bar the door because they're going to do something,' Eagleberger predicted. `I know these people. They're going to retaliate. If it's nerve gas, we'll never stop them.'" Related in Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 82.
[46] Allen, Berry, and Polmar, p. 158.
[47] NBC correspondent Arthur Kent (soon to become celebrated as "the Scud Stud") broadcasting from Dhahran rooftops, gas mask in hand, shouted his description of the mid-air engagement over the air raid sirens. There were striking parallels between the broadcasts of NBC's Kent and CNN's Charles Jaco in the coverage of the Scud-Patriot duels and Edward R. Morrow's graphic rooftop radio reporting of the fires and bombings during Hitler's Blitz of London. Both episodes set new standards for heroic war broadcasting, both used the advantages of the media to the fullest, both mobilized deeply emotional worldwide sympathy and support for stout-hearted and brave civilian defenders, facing up to a tyrant's terror attacks, and both provided extraordinarily captivating drama.
[48] Rather than destroying the coalition against him by his attacks on Israel, Saddam consolidated the coalition by his ineffectual but no less insulting attacks on Saudi Arabia. Allen, Berry, and Polmar, p. 158.
[49] When MIT Professor Theodore Postol, a critic of the Patriot's technical performance, assessed the Patriot's performance in the Persian Gulf conflict, he overlooked the missile's role in CNN war. "Most importantly, the serendipitous political and psychological contributions of Patriot in the specific circumstances of the Gulf War do not appear to offer a basis for further national security planning," Postol wrote in "Lessons of the Gulf War: Experience with Patriot," p. 119. The dominating strategic perception was of Patriots defeating Scuds, vividly and dramatically. This perception shaped and determined the strategic reality of Saddam's Scud offensive, regardless of the technical realities in the skies. The debate literature includes Richard Perle, "Savior from the Saddams," Jerusalem Post, 31 January 1994; Stephen Budiansky, "Playing Patriot Games," U.S. News & World Report, 22 November 1993; Tim Weiner, "Patriot Missile's Success a Myth, Israeli Aides Say," The New York Times, 21 November 1993; and Reuven Pedatzur and Theodore Postol, "The Patriot is No Success Story," Defense News, 2 December 1993. Three articles: Theodore Postol, "Lessons of the Gulf War: Experience with Patriot;" Robert M. Stein, "Response to Postol: Patriot Experience in the Gulf War," and "Postol Replies," International Security, 17 (Summer 1992) carry the technical debates.
[50] See Ernest G. Bormann, The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1985). World culture symbols are often easily leveraged for political effect. See also Frank J. Stech, "Upheaval in Europe: PSYOP Communications Lessons Learned," Special Warfare, 5 (October 1992), for an assessment of the role of symbolic communications in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
[51] Alfred Mahan considered communications as dominating war, "the most important single element in strategy, political or military." For Mahan, the ability to insure one's own communications and to interrupt an adversary's is the root of national power. Mahan was thinking primarily about sea lines of communications, but he meant not just trade but communication of information and knowledge as well. Trevor Royle, A Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989), p. 123.
[52] The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington: GPO, August 1991), p. 14.
[53] The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington: GPO, January 1993), p. 5.
[54] Les Aspin, Annual Report to the President and Congress (Washington: Department of Defense, January 1994), p. 9.
[55] Mazarr, Shaffer, and Ederington, p. 11. Emphasis added.
[56] The military's view of the press as either enemy or public relations organ was recently expressed by Judson J. Conner: "The media represent a frustrating mixed bag of opportunity and grief. Ever ready to criticize, condemn, abuse, and send careers spiraling downward, these same organs of information can applaud, congratulate, sing praises, and carry careers onward and upward." Meeting the Press: A Media Survival Guide for Defense Managers (Washington: National Defense Univ. Press, 1993).
[57] The Air Command and Staff College Air Campaign Course Research Project has produced several recent studies on "information dominance" (other slogans include "soft war," "soft kill," and "information warfare"). None of these studies mentions CNN war, reflects an appreciation of the role of real-time media coverage of military events, or assesses the effects of televised news images on military and political decisionmaking. They do, however, reflect an appreciation of the central role of information flows among military and policy users on the planning and conduct of military operations and the need to influence the flow of information in peacetime and to dominate it in war. See Gregory A. Biscone, James R. Hawkins, and Anthony M. Mauer, "Campaigning for Information Dominance;" Paul DiJulio, Bernie Kring, K. C. Schow, and Mark Williams, "Communications-Computer Systems: Critical Centers of Gravity;" and Alan L. Smith, "Infopower: Information Engineering Methodologies, Infowar, and Infopeace" (Maxwell Air Force Base: Air Command and Staff College, 1993); also see Mazarr, Shaffer, and Ederington, p. 27.
[58] William Hatchen, "The Triumph of Western News Communication," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 17 (Winter 1993), 32.
[59] John Fialka, quoted in Trevor Thrall, "The Gulf in Reporting the Gulf War," MIT-DACS Breakthroughs (Spring 1992), pp. 10-11. The Marines even commercially marketed a CD-ROM disk of their performance in the Gulf War, with photos, reports, briefings, and other miscellany. The disk is "bundled" in many personal computer CD-ROM add-on kits.
[60] Thrall. Scott Simon of National Public Radio reported (in an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation, October 1993) that several members of the press were fully briefed before the ground offensive that the Marine amphibious landing was an allied deception. The Marines briefed the press to prevent them from inadvertently blowing the story by naively covering it. The witting members of the press, sworn to secrecy, maintained the security of the deception, and supported it with continued press coverage of the practice Marine landings.
[61] Thrall, p. 11, quoting Marine Colonel John Shortwell.
[62] Marc D. Felman, The Military/Media Clash and the New Principle of War: Media Spin (Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air Univ. Press, June 1993).
[63] Judson J. Connor rightly observes that manipulating the press, is "a crime which ranks, in the eyes of the media, right up there with murder and mayhem." Meeting the Press: A Media Survival Guide for the Defense Manager, p. xii. Politicians and military leaders have long understood that public support is essential for successful military operations, certainly since the rise of mass armies in Napoleon's day and the beginning of industrial warfare in the time of Lincoln and Grant. Public support is largely a strategic, not a tactical or operational responsibility. Commanders must conduct tactics and operations consistent with strategy. Considering the evening news "media spin" in campaign planning does not offer the most constructive basis for planning operations in the next CNN war, and puts strategic goals in the place of tactical and operational objectives.
[64] See Colonel John Mountcastle, Director, Strategic Studies Institute, foreword to Charles W. Ricks, The Military-News Media Relationship: Thinking Forward (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 1 December 1993), p. iii.
[65] Ricks, p. vi. One hopes that this proposed military infrastructure will be well-schooled in the guidelines for creating compelling and persuasive visual images, in the requirements for framing credible news stories, and in the semiotic uses of signs and symbols--i.e., that they practice tactics and operational arts developed explicitly for CNN war-fighting needs.
[66] Ricks, p. iii.
[67] Speech in the House of Commons, 30 September 1941, in Shafritz, p. 338.
[68] Charles Krauthammer, "Intervention Lite: Foreign Policy by CNN," The Washington Post, 18 February 1994, p. 25; see also Lance Morrow, "In Feeding Somalia and Backing Yeltsin, America Discovers the Limits of Idealism," Time, 18 October 1993, pp. 37ff. James Adams of The Sunday Times (London) lamented "with [a public] attention span so short and a world view so limited, it is difficult to conceive how consistent policy for crisis management can be developed by the world's leading democracies." Adams, p. 9.
[69] Morrow, pp. 37ff.
[7] Krauthammer's assessment of the origins of Persian Gulf War totally discounts the role of such images as the smuggled home videos of Iraqi tanks rolling through the streets of Kuwait City, Iraqi firing squads executing "looters" in the streets, a sanctimonious Saddam Hussein asking a terrified five-year old British hostage, Stuart Lockwood, "Are you getting your milk, Stuart, and corn flakes, too?" and related incidents. With all that has been written of the role of CNN before, during, and after the Persian Gulf War, one would think anyone who watched CNN might perceive the importance of pictures in leading the United States to that conflict.
[71] Lippmann, Public Opinion, pp. 226-29.
[72] Adams, p. 9.
[73] McNulty, p. 73.
[74] The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington: GPO, January 1993), p. 5.
[75] Czech President Vaclav Havel's address to the US Congress in 1990 opened with this observation: "The human face of the world is changing so rapidly that none of the familiar political speedometers are adequate. We playwrights, who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era into a two-hour play, can scarcely understand this rapidity ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the trouble it must give to political scientists who spend their whole life studying the realm of the probable and have even less experience with the realm of the improbable than the playwrights."
[76] The late Joseph Campbell, professor of mythology at Sarah Lawrence, discussed the idea of "human face" and the compelling images in the Star Wars films of the "light side" and the "dark side" as symbols for good and evil. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 144.
More Winning CNN Wars Media Coverage and Public Perception
-
Introduction
The Psychology and Sociology of Visual Persuasion
Somalia and CNN War Image Exploitation
Signs, Symbols, and Presidential Semiotics
Perspectives on CNN War
The Pentagon and the Media
To Win CNN Wars
Footnotes
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