Presswatch/Desert Air
Eastland, Terry
tive codes of dress and decor (and language), and thereby to create styles of life in precisely the sense that Max Weber originally intended that term. The money came from home—many hippies and New...
...They are available in few hotels outside the U.S., and they don't have the sameinternational programming capability...
...Democracies are weakest when it comes to maintaining a public consensus for sacrifice...
...Hussein well understands that in the modern age television is an instrument of war...
...it broadcasts from points worldwide...
...The pictures Hussein has been able to send to the American heartland aggravated that weakness...
...Mark it down: she will justifiably win a Pulitzer...
...The answer: not very...
...And CNN has yet to agree to an apparent Iraqi offer to provide daily broadcasts of interviews with hostages, already packaged and ready for use...
...The roads are littered with the debris of warfare—burned-out armored cars and trucks—and with dozens of cars abandoned in panic...
...In the right place at the right time, Murphy courageously pursued her story...
...The cynic will conclude that this is why they filmed the dispatches in the first place...
...But has American television been good for America...
...cameras have not recorded the carnage his army wrought in Kuwait...
...Testifying to the medium's keen interest in personal fates, these "Hi, Mom and Dad" notices break battalions down into "real people," and work against an understanding of military strategy...
...Should American television have used any of this footage...
...Awakened by the sound of Iraqi artillery shells the morning of August 2, she went right to work, filing by-lined stories for the Post's August 2 and 3 editions...
...In a marvelously funny essay called "House Lust" Maggie Gallagher says that most boomers, far from moving up financially, are sliding downward...
...You can get CNN not only here but abroad...
...PRESSWATCH DESERT AIR by Terry Eastland rr he "Crisis in the Gulf," as the .i...
...By contrast, the three networks generally don't do continuous news programming...
...What will NBC do when the first author of a "desert dispatch" is killed in action...
...W hile Murphy's work could not easily be contradicted, the same could not be said for much of the early commentary, whether by "experts" in and out of government or by reporters, columnists, and television anchors...
...addam's Video Spot Rated a 1..3 Flop," said a headline in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 33 Washington Post...
...That is why he made the videotape, shown in its entirety by CNN, in which he praised the English-speaking hostages in his presence as "heroes for peace...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990...
...Hussein wanted to reach a mass audience, and he wanted to reach it not on a rational but on an emotional level...
...Hence the most famous of the yuppie passions, the passion to be seen at this week's restaurant of the century...
...But the die may already be cast, which is to say that enough pictures with an eroding effect may already have been run...
...Will it feel obliged to run the message again, as the lead-in to a picture of the body bag...
...ABC, CBS, and NBC, which also made all the available Middle East stops, have enjoyed ratings spikes of their own...
...The print treatment, by the way, is weighted toward analysis...
...The yuppies' problem is that they have no Aldous Huxleys, Reichs, or Marcuses to adorn them with wreaths of moral and intellectual respectability...
...The Persian Gulf story clearly has been good for American television generally...
...A plutographer is one who merely wants to live a life that looks like, that graphically depicts, the life of the plutocrat, without any of the plutocrat's responsibilities...
...Spokesmen for NBC and ABC said their networks would not have run the unedited version, as CNN did, of the Iraqi-taped broadcast of Hussein and the hostages...
...By contrast, he has not allowed the networks and CNN access to images that might strengthen American resolve...
...it's in 250,000 hotel rooms outside the United States...
...Television can indeed assist the spread of democracy, as in the case of Eastern Europe, but it can also impede democracy's military effort to stop a ruthless dictator, especially one as savvy about the medium as Saddam Hussein...
...None did, nor did any complain of censorship...
...That little fact introduces the most important aspect of the Persian Gulf journalism—the television treatment...
...As Walter Goodman of the New York Times concluded in mid-September, television's "inherent fascination with faces rather than causes, with personal loss rather than national gain," has led it to take on "the role of a deterrent to an expanded war...
...Consider this, from her August 11 "eyewitness" piece: "People are burning their garbage in the streets...
...Cheney was right to dismiss Dugan, and it is worth noting that editorial page editors and columnists quickly spoke up in support of the secretary's action...
...Dugan discussed contingency plans for war with Iraq, including massive air raids against Baghdad that would take out Saddam Hussein and his family...
...Good question, indeed the right question, one that acknowledges the medium's responsibilities...
...CNN is what you tune in if you want continuous, up-to-date coverage, especially if the story comes from overseas...
...And you don't have to subscribe to pick it up...
...Ed 'Turner, CNN news director, asks, "Can you imagine the eroding effect on ournational will if we were to put this on day after day...
...It ran them without her byline, explaining to readers: "The following is an eyewitness account of events in Kuwait this week...
...While there was anti-military sentiment behind some of the commentary, the opinion writers seem to have understood the importance of unity in the executive branch when it comes to the conduct of war and foreign policy...
...news organization to position itself for firsthand coverage of what transpired...
...Gen...
...Or this, from her August 22 filing: "Cars driving on the main highways give off a low hum from the washboard-like ruts caused by the tread of heavy tanks that have passed through the city in the past three weeks...
...Dugan, of course, is now the former Air Force chief of staff, fired by Defense Secretary Richard Cheney for public remarks printed in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and recycled throughout the media...
...In my opinion boomers want to be not plutocrats but plutographers...
...At bottom, the yuppie is not terribly different from the hippie or the New Lefler...
...The images of the children in the former footage, no less than the images of infants in the latter, tug at the heartstrings, complicating American attitudes toward, and thus public support for, any military movement against Hussein's Iraq...
...The Post asked other news organizations not to disclose who this eyewitness was...
...One way or another it was inhaled from the breathtaking surpluses of the economic boom which began about 1943 and which, despite the heavy weather of the year 1990, has not ended yet...
...Murphy's copy was compelling...
...It is also why he allowed Dan Rather of CBS—and Jesse Jackson, the latest claimant to the title "journalist," who traveled to Baghdad as a talk show host—to interview him...
...CNN, of course, wasn't in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded, nor was anyone else, save the Post's Murphy...
...NBC's "desert dispatches" from young American soldiers to parents, spouses, and children back home serve Hussein's interest in keeping this a sentimental war...
...But does television understand this...
...The quoted remarks are Cheney's, from a public speech...
...The first examinations of television's treatment of the Gulf crisis, performed by Robert Lichter's Center for Media and Public Affairs, show that TV is short on analysis and long on the human element...
...And on CBS's "This Morning" show, New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman said the Tiirks and the Saudis would not close their pipelines...
...While the human element—whether hostages or Iraqi babies or soldiers in the sand—has been central to television's coverage, some television producers nonetheless have shown commendable restraint...
...First, I should acknowledge the unique position of CNN, made apparent by the Gulf coverage...
...After all, Saddam Hussein wasn't hiding his wrath toward Kuwait under a bushel...
...urphy's August 15 story notes that most Americans in Kuwait City got their news from Cable News Network—"via satellite dishes in their buildings...
...Murphy fled Kuwait on August 26 upon learning Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.0 that Iraqi soldiers had stepped up their search for foreigners...
...Some of the vehicles have been crushed by tanks...
...A plutocrat is one who rules through money...
...Television's treatment of the crisis so far suggests that last year's conventional wisdom needs revision...
...It's no surprise that CNN has achieved its highest ratings ever during the crisis...
...Which brings us, finally, to the yuppies...
...providing more footage than anyone else...
...Each has taken a good deep whiff of the surplus wealth of the American economy (to draw from the vocabulary of those late twentieth-century reactionaries, the Marxists) and decided to use it to create a life few young people have ever dared live before...
...In early August, Karen Elliott House wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Saudi Arabia would not allow "an Americanpresence in the kingdom...
...Nevertheless, the money fever remains, and that is what creates the very nearly sensual lust for a house that "House Lust" so lovingly describes...
...The money came from home—many hippies and New Lefters were remittance men—and it came from the government in the form of welfare and entitlements, to use the going word...
...But the media consumer must be extra wary of coverage that has so little hard news to treat, and therefore depends so heavily on opinion to fill the void...
...At the heart of yuppie life—and yuppie was, whether we like it or not, the social term to come out of the 1980s—was not the acquisition of money but the lust for money and, above all, the kind of public display that money makes possible...
...Even after Murphy lost direct contact with the Post when telephone lines were cut on August 3, she continued to move about Kuwait City, gathering information on the Iraqi occupation...
...Also, CNN does international programming...
...if you have a dish, you can get it, since the signal isn't scrambled...
...But in subsequent days, as the story moved through the various diplomatic and military phases, CNN was all over the map—Oman, Jerusalem, Baghdad (everywhere but Kuwait...
...Cheney and other officials had talked at various levels of attribution about possible military plans, including the idea of holding "at risk targets—assets, if you will—that Saddam Hussein holds dear, and specifically, assets inside Iraq...
...Others could easily have done so...
...There was a point to this uncharacteristically open talk—to wear down Hussein psychologically...
...Far be it from me to argue against commentary...
...Eventually, she says, "you come to realize that you will never again achieve the standard of living you had in junior high school," when you lived on a lovely, leafy plot of ground in your own house...
...These warm, upbeat messages are a first for NBC, but hardly out of television's character...
...Murphy was the only reporter on the spot when the invasion occurred...
...Whatever else the media now may do in covering the Persian Gulf story, they deserve at least one cheer for supporting Cheney's actions...
...And by inviting Western television cameras into a Baghdad hospital room to film newborn babies, he managed to use television to show the West precisely where a shortage of milk or medicine—a possible consequence of the trade embargo—might occur...
...Michael J. Dugan learned the difference between "on the record" and "background," and between "authorized" and "unauthorized" speech, distinctions that have been a frequent topic of this column...
...Take Hussein's hostage video...
...Dugan's mistake lay in making remarks more detailed—about going after Hussein and his family, for example—and less politically sensitive than any the administration had intended and authorized...
...Perhaps that's what Hussein wanted us to think...
...media styled it early on, has generated mega-coverage since the August 2 invasion, but the Washington Post deserves special credit for having had the foresight to send its Cairo correspondent Caryle Murphy to Kuwait on July 26, a week beforehand...
...Consider the erroneous predictions of two knowledgeable journalists...
...With his CNN-broadcast video Hussein managed to force the hostage story to center stage...
...After the first two weeks of the crisis, Don Kowet, media writer for the Washington Times, asked devilishly how correct had the commentators been...
...The Post was the only U.S...
...By means not disclosed, she sent several lengthy pieces to the Post...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
