Presswatch/Brainwashers
O'Sullivan, John
PRESSWATCH BRAINWASHERS by John O'Sullivan Imagine a KGB colonel in the Lubianka-the Soviet equivalent of those brilliant backroom dons who supposedly thought up clever wheezes for British...
...And it would be correspondingly relieved and anxious to cooperate when a more reasonable and ambiguous figure arrived on the scene to apologize for his partners, to suggest that the entire regrettable episode was based upon misunderstandings, and to propose that everything could be settled satisfactorily if all their demands were met...
...They were also lurking in Washington...
...And the appearance of the man with the gun served to remind the U.S...
...But surely that was never their aim...
...His problem has been solved...
...But did this affront to the Fourth Estate enrage the American people and prompt demands for retribution...
...We lived in filth," revealed one hostage...
...So they reinforced rather than qualified the false impressions created by the raw coverage...
...He tells the innocent Spectator that at the ceremony to greet the hostages, the President first condemned Amal for its cynical use of television, then reminded them of Stethem's murder, and finally had the band play "The Star-Spangled Banner...
...The evidence for Mr...
...It is based upon the theoretical foundation of the suggestibility of a modern television democracy and confirmed by the Serb-sky Institute's experiments on dissidents...
...Amal then provided the hostages with "adequate shelter, good food, cigarettes," etc...
...Bush's media manipulation seems to be simply that he was in Frankfurt, along with Senator Moynihan, to greet the returning hostages-"not that either Bush or Moynihan had done anything to obtain their release," adds Mr...
...In Mr...
...Certainly...
...Glass manages to convict him of serious crimes all the same...
...Glass played down the outrage lest it should exacerbate the situation...
...Well, it turns out that one such conference was switched to another room at the last moment, after all the television cameramen had set up their tripods and settled comfortably back...
...How can he ensure that the television networks will cooperate...
...that there was muscle behind their threats...
...In the interview itself, however, Mr...
...Capitalists, he reflects, will not only sell you the rope to hang them with...
...To buttress his argument that Amal and Nabih Berri were bad at propaganda, he points out that their press conferences were "disasters...
...Such unanimity is fairly unusual on any topic...
...Surely, however, his suspicions should have been aroused by the very fact that "repeated interviews with a variety of hostages" had them all spouting the Amal line on the Lebanese detainees in Israel...
...Only one snag continues to annoy him...
...But all is made clear by a scene in which television news executives, striving to keep a competitive edge on their rivals, strike a bargain with a small terrorist band that they will be given exclusive rights to terrorist outrages in return for a percentage of the gross...
...He has even invented the basic plot...
...So that's all right...
...The colonel is sure that the project would succeed...
...John O'Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the New York Post and a columnist for the Times of London...
...Accordingly, Mr...
...President Reagan, of course, had done anything to release them...
...This did not win Amal much sympathy with our viewers...
...So much for the adequate shelter and excellent food...
...The American public, in short, was brainwashed...
...Glass put the best interpretation on things...
...And, secondly, the hostages had continued to praise Amal and to spout the Amal line on the detainees in Israel after their release...
...But it reflects reasonably accurately the American public's vicarious experience of being held hostage...
...Glass reports, "to the hostages who stayed with them for two weeks in Beirut, they were saviors...
...It is instructive that, at the press conference in Syria, the hostages were asked by Western reporters if they were "grateful" to Berri and if they "bore a grudge against Israel...
...Suppose the hostile nation in question-let's call it the United States-could be persuaded to identify its fate with that of some of its citizens taken as hostages...
...No doubt Mr...
...Glass censoriously...
...and that terrorism is unbeatable because there is an inexhaustible supply of martyrs among the Shiites who are, however, in all other respects warm lovable human beings just like us...
...Glass has a lot to be defensive about...
...But Mr...
...They were baffled by pictures of the poolside farewell party thrown by Amal ($50,000 for the rights to cover this aspect of the kidnapping, one gathers...
...Charles Glass of ABC has defended the media against such charges in the Other Spectator...
...First of all, the poor dears in Amal were laughably bad at brainwashing...
...Quite primitive methods-the old alternation of hard cop with soft cop-would probably be sufficient to do the trick...
...Glass in his suspicious mood might have covered this manipulative event: "The President is waving a flag...
...To prevent another rnurder" (like Robert Stethem's), he tells Spectator readers, "Amal leader Nabih Berri was forced to intervene...
...And now they are returning to their first mood as the released hostages disavow their praise for the terrorists and denounce them as "animals" and "murderers...
...PRESSWATCH BRAINWASHERS by John O'Sullivan Imagine a KGB colonel in the Lubianka-the Soviet equivalent of those brilliant backroom dons who supposedly thought up clever wheezes for British intelligence during the war-leafing idly through Western magazines and dreaming up his next project...
...In what way...
...As the interview went on, we learned that Testrake was being treated well, that the food wasn't bad, and that he and the other hostages were opposed to a rescue attempt or retaliation by the U.S...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Glass's mind that something like brainwashing had occurred...
...the hostages are frowning...
...Well, ho, ho, ho...
...And it was false to argue that the hostages must have been brainwashed when they "supported the release of the Lebanese in Israel and opposed U.S...
...Then they responded to Nabih Berri's "moderation" shown in respectful interviews...
...Glass can argue that they did, after all, make the earlier more favorable remarks...
...But then Mr...
...Glass's modest view, this was a public relations disaster for the hijackers: "Throughout the interview, which should have been a propaganda coup for Amal, a bearded thug waved a revolver in the face of the hostages...
...They sought to instill in the American people a paralyzing combination of hope and fear and they largely succeeded...
...All the views expressed by Captain Testrake, notably his appeal against retaliation, were exactly what they wanted the American people to hear...
...But the hostages are frowning...
...Glass joins the many other victims of early deadlines in the history of journalism...
...Glass's interview...
...It surfaced in Frankfurt where, he tells us, "the real media manipulators" were waiting...
...But then, he went on reassuringly, "Captain Testrake is smiling at us...
...The next day at his office, he sends for the Beirut telephone directory...
...The technical term is dramatized documentary...
...I can imagine how Mr...
...It should have provoked at least a hint of suspicion in Mr...
...A fanciful invention...
...Had he denounced the cuisine and called for swift punishment of his captors, it might have been a case of: "And, smiling, the boy fell dead...
...They were horrified by Robert Stethem's murder at the hands of the original hijackers...
...He is still puzzled that night when he goes to a private KGB screening of the film Network...
...It is astonishing on a Middle Eastern subject from a random group of people like the passengers on a TWA plane...
...The germ of that project is a simple one: to apply to a hostile nation the same techniques of interrogation and brainwashing that have proved so reliably disorienting when inflicted on individuals...
...Other media themes were that terrorism is generally a response to "injustice...
...But for the networks a light rinse was all that was required...
...Glass sees none of this...
...military action in Lebanon...
...He was the correspondent who, by arrangement with Amal, carried out the television interview with the TWA captain under the supervision of a.gun-toting hijacker...
...They already shared many of the presuppositions that Berri and Amal wished to inculcate...
...Indeed the entire scene-thug waving gun, hostage praising his treatment, and reporter pointing out that he seems happy enough-encapsulates the "hard cop, soft cop" kicks and kindnesses approach that the terrorists employed and that the media lent themselves to...
...Nor is it clear that the terrorists gained no propaganda victory from Mr...
...To be sure, he told us that a gunman was "waving a pistol...
...For he is generally adept at discovering favorable interpretations of Amal's and Berri's motives...
...Watching television, one gradually got the impression that Israel was responsible for the hijacking...
...They must have been furious...
...A few days later the hostages, having shaken off the mesmeric effect of being captives and in the power of their abductors (the "Stockholm Syndrome"), had a very different account of the experience...
...It occurred to few reporters to wonder if the hostages bore a grudge against their captors or were grateful to Israel for taking steps that secured their release...
...They were naturally confused by statements praising Amal's hospitality from some of the hostages in still more "exclusive" interviews courtesy of the Amal Militia News Service...
...that "simplistic" responses to it, such as retaliation, are doomed to failure...
...Another denounced his "saviors" as "thugs, thieves and murderers...
...The nation would be shocked, horrified, and frightened when ruthless and seemingly "irrational" hijackers seized hostages, beat them, killed one or two as examples, and threatened to kill the rest if all their demands were not met...
...That might not gain the terrorists undiluted sympathy...
...These sinister people turn out to be Vice President Bush and President Reagan...
...they will finance the hanging by purchasing an option on the film rights...
...I think not...
...It may be that these were the Captain's genuine opinions, but there was no way of knowing since he was speaking with a gun at his head...
...For his brainwashing to succeed, he has to be certain that the networks will portray at least one leading hijacker as a sympathetic figure...
...But Mr...
...Then one might subject the nation to brainwashing by subjecting the hostages to it...
...Glass is not wholly lacking in suspicion...
...In fact, though, he actually hatched the scheme when reading about Orson Welles's radio dramatization of "The War of the Worlds" in which fictional news reports of Martian landings prompted mass hysteria throughout America...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
