ON TELEVISION

...Yet even TV would not have altered the dominant strain of public discourse in the United States, the continuing debate between those who wanted to enter the battle in Europe and those to whom any such action was anathema...

...Was there an Abu Ghraib to be exposed during World War II, had today's media conditions existed...

...It is hard to imagine...

...All discussion would cease, as in fact it did, with the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...And I heard no scuttlebutt about mistreatment, at our camp or the others...

...Navy base in Hawaii, opinion in the United States was split...

...TV, bringing us Churchill as Prime Minister: "We shall fight on the beaches...

...For television news, the dominant image of the Great Depression would have been shuffling feet, bread lines, soup kitchens, 100 men lined up for one job as a dishwasher, men selling apples for five cents...

...Churchill and Roosevelt could not have defeated Hitler with today's media...

...Or perhaps, in the face of television, they would have found a less drastic solution, one with better public relations potential...

...its King Haile Selassie pleading at the League of Nations...

...Would there have been more if there were television...

...These would have reached U. S. TV screens despite attempts at censorship...

...Astonishingly few men made claims of conscientious objection...

...That charge, which has been rattling around in various forms at least since the first Gulf War, surfaced most recently during a week marked by the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall May 30 and the 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6. Those who express the view, or something like it, are usually, but not always, from the Right...

...Not long after George M. Cohan sang, "The Yanks are coming over there," Eddie Cantor was singing: "If they want a war on some other shore, let them keep it over there...

...He added, irrelevantly, "My parents were Holocaust survivors...

...It might have changed history, but playing "what if" does not answer how...

...Selling the Lend-Lease program to the U.S...

...For those not old enough to remember, Churchill's stature among Americans exceeded that of any foreigner in history, and many famous Americans besides...

...At the time the Japanese bombed the U.S...

...Hitler, too, would have seemed ridiculous, but less so...

...And I was the kid with the drum...

...Nevertheless, recently commentators on the Right have resumed their chorus that the January 1968 Tet Offensive ended in an American victory, despite the media's having convinced the public it was a defeat...

...The Jazz Age and the Great Depression...

...Saddam did lots worse to lots more people...

...It is less an argument than a matter of dogma...

...Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria and the rape of Nanking in 1937...

...But to prove this requires playing a game of "what if"—trying to recast history and guess how events we know happened might have unfolded in front of minicameras, videophones, communications satellites, embedded reporters, and universally available digital cameras feeding photographs to the Internet...

...He had been shown what he did not want to see...

...Aided by Leni Riefenstahl, his executive producer, his rallies would frighten American viewers...

...Therefore, what would have derailed the Allied World War II effort would not have been the messenger's message, but the fact that there was a messenger...

...Not even an hour-long interview with Barbara Walters could diminish his stature in American eyes...

...The world would not have needed Picasso to tell of the horror...

...The assertion is absurd...

...Left-leaning college students would proudly display "The Yanks Are Not Coming" buttons...

...Current media aggressiveness has advanced well beyond what pertained during the Vietnam War...

...When the Japanese sank the U.S...

...I had heard it said just that way on the Fox News Channel the previous evening, but I did not mention that...

...Brother, can you spare a dime...

...Then, as if on cue, "The media is going too far...

...I believe this phenomenon did indeed begin with Vietnam...

...The Japanese attack itself would have been covered intensely and in real time— that is, live—like the planes hitting the World Trade Center towers...

...Those of us drafted later would be told by old-timers how the night air would resonate with calls of "OHIO"—Over the Hill In October...

...This was their finest hour...

...Itwas Al all the time...

...Several years into that struggle, we in television news started showing Americans what they did not want to see...

...There would have been at least four active television stations in the islands...

...Certainly cameras would have caught the thousands of Bonus Marchers camped on the muddy flats of Anacostia in 1932...

...The peacetime draft had passed in the House of Representatives by a single vote...

...From Neville Chamberlain holding up the agreement Hitler signed in Munich—"See, I have it in my hand"—to talk of "missing the bus" in Norway, British history would have been American TV news...

...Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was talking about the scandalous pictures from Abu Ghraib Prison...

...Pictures of goose-stepping, even without context or commentary, would look more menacing than moving...

...blood and toil, sweat and tears...

...Under the conditions postulated he would have already been an established television star—the way John F. Kennedy was and Gerald R. Ford was not—and videotape of his "day of infamy" speech on December 8 would have been replayed constantly, in whole and in excerpts, for months and years to follow...

...The unique rhythms ofhis speaking style, his determined eyes and jutting jaw— these would have been saluted even as they were imitated by the late night comedians...

...Remember the aftermath of 9/11, and how shared national outrage, combining vengeful and patriotic feelings, bestowed a nimbus on the President...

...Too many young men were lost in a conflict Americans did not fully understand...

...A survey would surely purport to show that most journalists favored intervention, rendering them so insecure and gun-shy that their reporting would tilt to the other side, for which they would then be scolded in the New York Review of Books...

...After the Wannsee Conference, when the Nazis started building death camps in Poland, photographs would inevitably have leaked to the Internet...

...For television alone opened the sluice gates of immorality, destroyed literacy, and reduced journalism to a shallow voyeurism of celebrities, violence and humiliation...

...There would of course have been tape and still pictures made by and for the Axis powers: of combat and the victims of Allied bombings, of placid and prosperous Quisling Scandinavia...

...How would the populace's reaction to Pearl Harbor as seen through modern communications have changed things for President Roosevelt...

...The 1928 election pitted Herbert Hoover promising "a chicken in every pot" against Al Smith and his working-class English...

...What would television have recorded in this country...

...Pundits would have emerged from the wide front formed by the union of those who came to be called "isolationists" and those who opposed all war, led by Socialist Norman Thomas and Charles A. Lindbergh's America First Committee...

...Live coverage of the debates in the House of Commons would have been standard fare on U.S...

...But in fact there were few deserters...

...Nor does anyone say explicitly why he or she believes the current "media atmosphere" would have interfered with the course of the War...

...Don't you think the media is overcovering that stuff...

...No one who makes the claim betrays the slightest hint of doubt...

...There was also the self-proclaimed "American Fuhrer" Fritz Kuhn, and his German-American Bund...

...Our foray into the political and dynastic complexities of the Old Country was distasteful...

...In France, GIs mumbled that General Eisenhower's supply chief, expecting victory by Christmas 1944, had neglected to store up enough cold weather uniforms and boots for the bitter winter that followed...

...Europe would not concede how we had saved it and refused to pay its War debts...

...Once Pearl Harbor came, the nation was in a state of almost perfect unity...

...Can one imagine the impact pictures from Margaret BourkeWhite and the other combat photographers at the liberation of Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald would have had if they had circulated not in the wake of victory but during the fighting...

...The oratory, perhaps spellbinding to the avid crowd overfilling a large arena, would be disturbing and disgusting on the small, glass rectangle in the living room...

...General Mark Clark's campaign at the Arno River in Italy, for instance, ended in an excessive casualty count that would have been more widely reported than it was...

...It is necessarily a guessing game...

...The hit video on MTV would have been Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell Full ofthat Yankee doodle de dum Haif a million boots went slogging through hell...

...Sixty years later, a frustrated United States Secretary of Defense would complain of "the information age, when people are running round with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and passing them off to the media...

...hyperinflation, Weimar and the rise of Adolf Hitler...

...The biggest television star of the day, though, would have been Winston Churchill, a man born to heroism...

...The StalinHitler Pact—actually the RibbentropMolotov pact—would muddy positions on all the cable channels...

...the Spanish Civil War—how would all these have "played" on ubiquitous television...

...If pictures and stories of the Dust Bowl had been shown every day for several months on the networks' nightly newscasts, would John Steinbeck have bothered writing The Grapes of Wrath...

...General Douglas MacArthur with his aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, at his side, sending in the troops to drive them off, burn their shacks, clean the place out...

...Mussolini speaking in the Piazza del Popolo inflamed local crowds with his emphatic rhetorical gestures...

...Universally available digital still-picture cameras would produce at least a few images from the pre-War concentration camps, leaked by dissidents risking jail or guards peddling them for cash...

...Reporting on the run-up to the War in Europe would have concentrated on the English-speaking UK...

...Less than 21 years after the Armistice that ended hostilities in the Great War, Hitler invaded Poland to inaugurate World War II...

...TV news cameramen flying with Royal Air Force bombers over Regensburg and Schweinfurt...

...That the impact would have been enormous is too obvious to state...

...Conferences on limiting sea power, on disarmament, on trades and tariffs were peevish and incomprehensible...

...Those people were not in that prison for parking violations...

...One thing should be made clear: When the term "media" is used in this pejorative context, what is meant is television...

...As I was leaving my doctor's office recently, he asked me what I thought of the coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal...

...Isolationist Senators like Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party and Democrat Burton K. Wheeler of Montana would appear often on Bill O'Reilly's cable talk show...

...The drafted soldiers and the mobilized National Guardsmen underwent training maneuvers in Louisiana...

...There seems little possibility that today's kind of reporting would have changed any ofthat...

...Benito Mussolini's Black Shirts and Italy's 1935 conquest of Ethiopia...

...I did not think that was the point...

...There would be videotape of the Italian Air Force bombing Ethiopian civilians, but nothing to compare with what happened in Guernica...

...Instead of the dramatic radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, television would have delivered the daily bombings of London—the sights and sounds themselves— as well as videotape recorded by U.S...

...This cry will be with us for decades, but it has nothing to do with embedded reporters, real-time coverage, digital cameras, or the Internet...

...On Television Playing What If with World War II By Reuven Frank If Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had to function in today's media atmosphere, the adverse public opinion being spawned would have prevented them from carrying on to victory in World War II—leaving at least half the world in the hands of Nazis and Fascists...

...No one ran off to Canada, or Scandinavia...

...They range from television pundits to those men in the street so dear to journalists without enough material to flesh out a report...

...But it is hard to believe that after years of dispatches from Britain, and after Pearl Harbor, such footage would have changed any attitudes...

...We were lectured on the Geneva Conventions to the point ofboredom, but we were not involved in interrogation, so I was never witness to that kind of confrontation...

...But these negative stories are hardly the sort of news that could have diminished the ability of Roosevelt and Churchill to pursue the War to victory...

...Hoover's high, starched collar might have cost him votes...

...Still, there were photographs and accounts of mistakes and disasters that the brass would have considered negative TV reporting...

...Despite America's boredom with the outside world, these stories would have made "good television" and led off the evening newscasts...

...For about half of my lackluster career in the Army I was a military policeman in a unit guarding prisoners of war...

...voter would have been less troublesome for FDR, not more so...

...One tires of such questions, so my answer was noncommittal...

...The United States had come out of the first conflict disillusioned and withdrawn...

...Say don't you remember, I'myourpal...

...No one can say exactly what the result of their shattering effect would have been, yet it seems an understatement to suggest that it would have been profound...

...gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River in December 1937, militarists were goading the United States to declare war, but Tokyo's apology was so swift and so contrite that the crisis passed...

...Any impresario will tell you how unwise it is to show people what they do not want to see...

...Journalists and people who studyjournalism are reporting, in both research and anecdote, an unprecedented level of distrust of the Fourth Estate in this country...

...I did not...

...Americans would have found him clownish...

...It might have taken an hour or more before they set up at the naval base, but from then on the attack would have been broadcast across the country, with videotape footage repeated endlessly thereafter...

...It does, however, contain a grain of historical relevance...

...Say don't you remember, they called me Al...

...Old Jews scrubbing Vienna's streets with toothbrushes would elicit sympathy...

...Even more than in our battle coverage, that was the case in our approach to protests and other antiwar activities, climaxing in the riots and police beatings outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago...