Television

Chester Pach

Under the cover of darkness on 9 December 1992, U.S. forces went ashore at Mogadishu, Somalia, and got an unexpected reception. The night suddenly turned bright, as television lights illuminated the landing area and temporarily blinded marines and navy SEALs equipped with night vision goggles. At the water's edge were hundreds of journalists who had been waiting to film the beginning of Operation Restore Hope, a humanitarian mission to distribute food and other vital supplies to starving Somalis. The news media had turned the beach into a kind of outdoor television studio, much to the distress of the troops.

The advance guard of Operation Restore Hope did not know that television journalists would complicate their landing. Yet the reporters were there because Pentagon officials had alerted them. Military officials hoped for favorable publicity from news stories about the beginning of a mission that they thought would win widespread approbation. But while they notified reporters, Pentagon authorities forgot to tell marine and navy commanders to expect a reception of lights and cameras.

This incident illustrates the complex relationship between the news media—and particularly television journalists—and those who plan and implement U.S. foreign policy. Journalists depend on government officials for information and access—to conferences, briefings, crisis areas, and war zones. Yet they often chafe under the restrictions that policymakers or military commanders impose. Those who formulate or carry out foreign policy depend on TV news to provide them with favorable publicity as well as information about international affairs or channels for building public support. Yet these officials also worry about the power of cameras and reporters to transform events as well as to frame issues, expose secrets, or challenge official policies. Cooperation and mutual dependence is the flip side of tension and conflicting interests.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, television has been closely connected to U.S. foreign policy. What makes TV important is that it is a visual medium that commands large audiences. Continuing technological improvements, including live broadcasting of international events as they take place, have made television a powerful instrument for conveying information, molding public attitudes, and influencing government policies. Yet it is easy to exaggerate or misunderstand the power of television to shape foreign policy. Beginning in the late twentieth century, the U.S. government had to deal with twenty-four-hour news cycles, "real-time" reporting of "breaking" news, and extensive coverage of international events with large significance, such as the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001, or with dramatic appeal, such as whether Elián Gonzalez, the six-year-old refugee, should remain with relatives in Miami or return to his father in Cuba. Television has affected the ways that the U.S. government has made foreign policy and built public support for it. Yet presidents and other high officials with clear objectives and sophisticated strategies for dealing with the news media—for example, George H. W. Bush's administration during the Persian Gulf War and the international crisis that preceded it—have maintained control of foreign policy and commanded public backing for their international agenda.

Yet even before it had such immediacy or reach, television played a significant—and sometimes controversial—role in shaping government actions and popular understanding of international affairs. The Vietnam War was a critical event. It began, at least, as an American war, just when television had become the principal source of news for a majority of the U.S. public. It offered lessons—controversial, to be sure—about the role of TV in shaping public attitudes toward international affairs. And it occurred at a time of significant changes in journalism. Despite their devotion to objectivity, balance, and fairness, TV reporters would no longer insist, as Edward R. Murrow had in 1947, on a contract provision that limited his right to express opinion in his stories. Vietnam, in short, marked a major transition in the relationship between television and foreign policy.

TV NEWS AND THE EARLY COLD WAR

Although it was a novelty in the United States at the end of World War II, television became an important part of American life during the first postwar decade. Fewer than one out of ten American homes had television in 1950. Five years later the proportion had grown to two-thirds. New stations quickly took to the air and usually affiliated with one of the networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), or the short-lived DuMont Television Network.

Even when the networks consisted of a handful of stations, government officials showed keen interest in using television to build public support for U.S. foreign and military policies. Public affairs officers in the State Department said they favored television because it did "a better job than any other medium at depicting foreign policy in action." The department worked with both networks and independent producers to create shows about foreign policy and world affairs or make available for telecast films that it produced itself. Among the most popular series was The Marshall Plan in Action, which premiered on ABC in June 1950 and continued under the title Strength for a Free World until February 1953. Other shows were the interview program Diplomatic Pouch (CBS) and, during the Korean War, The Facts We Face (CBS) and Battle Report—Washington (NBC). In these early days of broadcasting, the networks were eager for programming to fill up their time slots. They also took advantage of opportunities to demonstrate support for American Cold War policies, especially during the McCarthy era.

Evening newscasts became regular features during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Each network aired fifteen-minute programs. CBS and NBC expanded their shows to thirty minutes in September 1963; ABC did not do the same until January 1967. John Daly anchored the ABC broadcast during most of the 1950s. Douglas Edwards held the same position at CBS until Walter Cronkite replaced him in April 1962. The most popular news program in the early 1950s was NBC's Camel News Caravan, with host John Cameron Swayze. With a carnation in his lapel and zest in his voice, Swayze invited viewers to "go hopscotching the world for headlines." After this brisk international tour, there might be stops at a beauty pageant or a stadium for the afternoon's scores. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley succeeded Swayze in October 1956. Anchors and journalists rather than hosts, as Swayze had been, they brought greater depth to the NBC newscasts without making them solemn. They also attracted viewers because of the novelty of their pairing, the contrast in their personalities, and the familiarity of their closing—"Good night, Chet;" "Good night, David." They led the ratings until the late 1960s.

International news was important on each of these programs, yet there were difficulties in covering distant stories, especially on film. Fifteen minutes (less time for commercials, lead-in, and closing) allowed coverage of only a few stories and little time for analysis. Cumbersome and complicated cameras and sound equipment made film reports difficult. Before the beginning of satellite communication in the 1960s, it might take a day or two for film from international locations to get on the air. Despite these limitations, the audience for these newscasts grew steadily. By 1961 surveys showed that the public considered television the "most believable" source of news. Two years later, for the first time, more people said that they relied on television rather than newspapers for most of their news.

Many viewers watched in utter astonishment on 22 October 1962, when President John F. Kennedy informed them about Soviet missiles in Cuba and the possibility of nuclear war. Soviet diplomats got a copy of the speech only an hour before Kennedy went before the cameras. The president's decision to make his demand for the removal of the missiles on television made compromise on this fundamental issue all but impossible. Kennedy spoke directly to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, calling on him to step back from the nuclear brink. It was an extremely skillful use of television as a medium of diplomatic communication. The crisis dominated TV news coverage until its end six days later. The reporting surely influenced public attitudes, but it probably had little direct effect on Kennedy's advisers. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara later revealed that he did not watch television even once during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet during the growing difficulties in Vietnam, Kennedy, his advisers, and those who succeeded them in the White House paid close attention to television news.

THE FIRST TELEVISION WAR

Vietnam did not become a big story on American television until 1965, but it was a controversial one from the time that U.S. military personnel began to play a significant role in combat in the early 1960s. Officials of both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments were extremely concerned about coverage of the war. Their criticism at first centered on reporting in newspapers and magazines and on wire services, as these news media began sending full-time correspondents to Vietnam several years before NBC's Garrick Utley became the first television journalist based in Saigon, beginning in mid-1964. Yet even though their assignments were brief and their numbers few, TV journalists still found that South Vietnamese authorities scrutinized their reporting and sometimes objected to it, as Utley's colleague, Jim Robinson, learned during one of his occasional trips to Saigon while stationed in NBC's Hong Kong bureau. Offended by one of Robinson's stories, President Ngo Dinh Diem expelled the correspondent from the country in November 1962, despite protests from both the U.S. embassy and journalists in Saigon.

The Kennedy administration used less heavy-handed methods to manage the news from Vietnam. Administration officials tried to play down U.S. involvement in what it described as a Vietnamese war, even as the president sharply increased U.S. military personnel from several hundred to more than sixteen thousand. Yet Kennedy and his advisers rejected the military censorship of news reporting that had prevailed in previous twentieth-century wars, lest such restrictions call attention to a story whose significance they wished to diminish. Instead, U.S. officials in Saigon mixed patriotic appeals "to get on the team" with upbeat statements about South Vietnamese military success and misleading information about what were ostensibly U.S. military advisers who in reality participated in combat operations.

The administration's efforts at news management collapsed during the Buddhist crisis of 1963, as horrifying images of the fiery suicides of monks protesting government restrictions on religious expression appeared in American television news reports and on the front pages of newspapers. What the U.S. embassy called the "press problem" worsened, as reporters not only mistrusted official sources because of their manipulation of information, but contributed to a public debate about whether the Diem government's liabilities were so great that it might not be able to prevail in the war against the National Liberation Front. In important televised interviews in September with Cronkite of CBS and Huntley and Brinkley of NBC on the day that each of those newscasts expanded to thirty minutes, Kennedy reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam while publicly delivering the message that diplomatic emissaries privately conveyed: that the Diem government should make changes to reclaim popular support so it could more effectively prosecute the war. Kennedy also quietly tried to dampen public criticism of Diem, even as his advisers debated how to step up the pressure on the South Vietnamese leader and whether to encourage a coup, by suggesting that the New York Times remove correspondent David Halberstam, whose critical reports had questioned the administration's backing of Diem. The publisher of the Times refused to buckle to presidential pressure; Halberstam remained in Saigon to cover the coup that ousted Diem on 1 November.

The administration of Lyndon B. Johnson in many ways followed its predecessor's pattern of news management as it expanded U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. Johnson and his principal advisers believed that domestic support was critical to the U.S. war effort, but worried "that our public posture is fragile." Like its predecessor, the Johnson administration ruled out censorship of the news in favor of a system of voluntary cooperation in withholding certain kinds of military information. "Because we are fools" was the explanation that the president gave one group of journalists for this choice. Yet administration policymakers repeatedly considered censorship and rejected it for fear of damage to official credibility. They also hoped that an ambitious program of public relations would ensure favorable coverage of the U.S. war effort.

Yet the "information problem" continued, even after U.S. policy became "maximum candor and disclosure consistent with the requirements of security." Many reporters distrusted the daily official briefings in Saigon, which they derisively called "The Five O'clock Follies." While some journalists considered these briefings a mixture of spin, exaggeration, and half-truths, others concluded that the information officers told "outright lies." Evidence for this darker interpretation came from Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, who turned an innocuous social occasion in Saigon in July 1965 into a nasty confrontation when he sneered at reporters, "Look, if you think that any American official is going to tell you the truth, you're stupid."

Some White House officials worried about "fragmentary" reports lacking "perspective" on TV newscasts as the networks rapidly increased their news operations in South Vietnam in 1965. Their fears about what TV cameras might reveal became acute when the CBS Evening News showed correspondent Morley Safer's sensational film report about U.S. marines using cigarette lighters to burn civilian huts in a search-and-destroy operation in the village of Cam Ne in August. Pentagon officials charged Safer with staging the incident and tried unsuccessfully to get him removed from his assignment because his Canadian nationality supposedly made it impossible for him to report fairly on what they now called an "American" war.

Safer's story was exceptional. Few reports on TV newscasts in 1965 and 1966 directly questioned U.S. objectives or methods of warfare. Most concentrated on combat that involved what anchors commonly called "our" troops or pilots. Many of these "bang-bang" stories lauded the sophisticated military technology that gave U.S. forces advantages in firepower and mobility or the scale of the U.S. war effort, as troops and supplies poured into South Vietnam. Television news often entertained as it informed by providing many appealing human interest stories about American war heroes or ordinary GIs. Reporters and anchors usually accorded commanders in the field and high policymakers in Washington deferential treatment. Critics of the war—especially those in the more radical organizations—often got skeptical or patronizing coverage, if they got any at all.

Yet TV news also showed the difficulties, dilemmas, and horrors of Vietnam, if only occasionally, from the time that the Johnson administration committed large numbers of U.S. combat troops to the war in 1965. Some reporters quickly recognized fundamental strategic problems, as when ABC's Lou Cioffi asserted in October 1965 that "the United States has brought in a fantastic amount of military power here in Vietnam. But so far we've not been able to figure just exactly how to use it effectively in order to destroy the Vietcong." There were stories about the persistent troubles with pacification programs and the many ways that the war was distorting—and destroying—the lives of Vietnamese civilians. The difficulties and dangers of filming heavy fighting, along with the "queasy quotient" of network production staffs that edited reports for broadcast at the dinner hour, ensured that TV news programs would not show daily, graphic scenes of human suffering. But the newscasts did provide glimpses of severely wounded soldiers, as in Charles Kuralt's report for CBS about an artillery sergeant who clenched a cigar and grimaced as medics dressed the wounds in a leg that surgeons later amputated. A few stories also concerned atrocities, as when CBS's Don Webster described how U.S. troops severed ears from enemy corpses. And some stories could be unsettling, even if they contained no graphic images, as when the CBS Evening News showed a soldier's widow, baby in arms, reading one of her husband's last letters from Vietnam. Such stories were infrequent, yet their power came from what NBC News executive Reuven Frank said television journalism did best, which was the transmission of experience.

Johnson was concerned about the impact of dramatic images and the simplification inherent in half-hour newscasts. He also knew that television audiences were increasing; more than half the American people said they got most of their news from TV. The president's thinking was an example of what sociologist W. Phillips Davison has called "the third-person effect," a belief that mass communications have their greatest influence "not on 'me' or 'you,' but on 'them'" and a tendency to exaggerate the impact "on the attitudes and behavior of others." Johnson, who frequently watched the newscasts on banks of monitors tuned simultaneously to all three major networks, worried about the effects of even a single critical story and sometimes expressed his dismay directly to network news executives, anchors, or reporters. He also repeatedly found what he considered evidence of one-sidedness, unfairness, and bias.

As the war became more controversial and public support for his Vietnam policies declined, Johnson made more extreme charges. He told the president of NBC News in February 1967 that "all the networks, with the possible exception of ABC, were slanted against him," that they were "infiltrated," and that he was "ready to move on them if they move on us." The following month, he alleged that CBS and NBC were "controlled by the Vietcong," and later that year he insisted, "I can prove that Ho [Chi Minh] is a son-of-a-bitch, if you let me put it on the screen—but they [the networks] want me to be the son-of-a-bitch."

When many reporters began to describe the war as a stalemate in mid-1967, the Johnson administration launched a new public relations campaign aimed at persuading the American people that the United States was indeed making progress in achieving its goals in Vietnam. Believing that the "main front" of the war was "here in the United States," Johnson urged his advisers "to sell our product," since he insisted that "the Administration's greatest weakness was its inability to get over the complete story" on Vietnam. The Progress Campaign produced increased public support for Johnson's Vietnam policies. The improvement in the polls reflected the hopeful statements of high officials, including General William C. Westmoreland's famous declaration in a speech at the National Press Club in November 1967 that "we have reached the point when the end begins to come into view."

Such assertions of progress contributed to public disbelief and confusion and to further decline in the president's credibility when the Tet Offensive began in January 1968. TV showed startling scenes of South Vietnam under "hard, desperate, Communist attack," in the words of NBC's Brinkley, as fighting occurred in Saigon as well as in more than one hundred other locations. Some of the film was the most spectacular of the war, including footage on NBC and ABC of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese police, executing a captured NLF officer after a street battle. Several disturbing reports showed TV journalists suffering wounds on camera.

Some observers have been highly critical of the news coverage of Tet. "The dominant themes of the words and film from Vietnam," wrote Peter Braestrup, "added up to a portrait of defeat for the allies. Historians, on the contrary, have concluded that the Tet offensive resulted in a severe military-political setback for Hanoi in the South." Yet historians continue to debate the results of the Tet fighting; there is no scholarly consensus, despite Braestrup's assertion. Moreover, TV journalists who assessed the battles did not find allied defeat. The most famous evaluation came from Walter Cronkite, who declared in a special, prime-time program on 27 February that "the Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we." "We are mired in stalemate," he concluded, and the time had come for negotiations to end U.S. involvement in the war.

"If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country," Johnson said gloomily. Cronkite's call for disengagement did influence the president, but only in combination with many other indications of deep divisions within the public, the Congress, the Democratic Party, and even his own administration over the war. Fearing that he could not govern effectively for another term, Johnson made his dramatic announcement to millions of stunned television viewers on the evening of 31 March 1968 that he sought negotiations to end the war and would not run again for president.

President Richard M. Nixon believed that he faced even greater opposition than Johnson from the news media in general and television journalists in particular, especially over his handling of the Vietnam War. Nixon usually read daily news summaries rather than watching the newscasts themselves. His marginal comments frequently indicated his displeasure and instructed assistants to "hit" or "kick" a particular correspondent or network for a story that he considered inaccurate or unfair. Presidential aides also maintained lists of journalists—mainly network anchors, White House correspondents, and syndicated columnists or commentators—ranked according to their friendliness toward the administration and that could be used for inflicting retaliation or providing "a special stroke."

Nixon followed a two-pronged strategy to deal with the alleged hostility of television news and to build public support for his Vietnam policies. One part involved direct, often hard-hitting, attacks on the networks. Beginning with his famous speech in Des Moines on 13 November 1969, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew tried to channel popular frustration with the war toward the networks by charging that the executives who ran them were "a tiny and closed fraternity" who "do not represent the views of America." The second part of the strategy was to use television as a medium of direct communication with the American people in order to bypass as much as possible critical reporters, editors, and commentators. As he withdrew U.S. forces from South Vietnam, Nixon urged his aides to use public relations initiatives—increasingly centered on television—to create an image of him "as a strong leader of boldness, courage, decisiveness, and independence" who would settle for nothing less than "peace with honor."

Television coverage of the war diminished as U.S. troops came home and U.S. casualties declined. Those stories that did air gave more attention to the social, political, and economic dimensions of a war that was again becoming mainly a Vietnamese conflict, one that to many Americans lacked the significance of earlier years, one that had simply gone on too long. In a report on the CBS Evening News about fighting in Quang Tri province in April 1972, the camera showed the crumpled bodies of children, refugees who died when their truck hit a land mine. There would be more fighting, correspondent Bob Simon declared, and more that generals, journalists, and politicians would say about those battles. "But it's difficult to imagine what those words can be," Simon concluded. "There's nothing left to say about this war. There's just nothing left to say."

Some critics blamed the extensive, uncensored television coverage for U.S. failure in Vietnam. Robert Elegant, who reported about Vietnam for the Los Angeles Times, insisted that partisanship prevailed over objectivity as journalists "instinctively" opposed the U.S. government and "reflexively" supported "Saigon's enemies." The television screen rather than the battlefield, according to Elegant, determined the outcome of the war by creating a "Vietnam syndrome" that "paralyzed American will" during Saigon's final crisis and that may have led to further troubles in Angola, Afghanistan, and Iran. Elegant offered little evidence to support these inflammatory charges, and Daniel C. Hallin, who carefully studied news media coverage of Vietnam, found many compelling reasons to conclude that television did not somehow lose the war. Hallin argued in The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (1986) that public opinion had turned against Johnson's handling of the war by early 1967, during a time that TV news coverage was most favorable to administration policies. Moreover, public support for the Korean War diminished even more quickly, yet "television was in its infancy, censorship was tight, and the World War II ethic of the journalist serving the war effort remained strong."

Hallin had the stronger argument, but Elegant's point of view had a greater effect on U.S. policy. Military officials resented the portrayal, as time went on, of the Vietnam War as part of what Hallin called the "sphere of legitimate controversy." Their belief that TV coverage undermined popular support for the war led to new restrictions on reporting when U.S. troops invaded Grenada in October 1983. Military commanders refused to transport reporters to the combat zone and barred them from the island for several days. Most journalists simply did not believe the official explanation that their exclusion was mainly to ensure their safety. ABC correspondent Steve Shepard was one of several reporters who chartered a boat, only to be turned away by the U.S. Navy as he approached Grenada. The Pentagon provided TV news programs with the only available video of the military operations in Grenada, but it did not include any scenes of combat. Walter Cronkite, who had retired in March 1981 as CBS anchor, deplored the abridgment of the public's right to know. Yet these protests did little to detract from the main story, which closely followed the Reagan administration's position—that U.S. forces had conducted a successful military operation against a potential Cuban-Soviet satellite. The restrictions on the reporting of the Grenada operation were an indication that in government-media relations, there would be no more Vietnams.

THE IRANIAN HOSTAGE CRISIS

No international story other than war dominated television news for as long as the Iranian hostage crisis. The seizure of the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 marked the beginning of fourteen months of concentrated, dramatic, and controversial news coverage that affected both public understanding of the hostage crisis and government efforts to resolve it.

TV's treatment of the Iranian hostage crisis invites comparison with its reporting about a similar event—the seizure of the USS Pueblo on 23 January 1968 and the imprisonment of its crew of eighty-two (another crew member died of wounds incurred during the ship's capture). The North Korean capture of this intelligence ship got extensive coverage for several days on all three networks. Yet even when it led the news, the Pueblo seizure seemed to be related to the biggest continuing story at the time—the Vietnam War. Some reporters, such as ABC's diplomatic correspondent John Scali, told viewers that senior U.S. officials believed that the North Koreans had coordinated their action with the North Vietnamese, who were massing troops around the U.S. marine base at Khe Sanh. The beginning of the Tet Offensive a week later eclipsed the Pueblo story, although newscasts occasionally reported about the negotiations to free the crew. No one, at least on TV, counted the days (335) that the sailors remained in captivity. No Western journalist could go to Pyongyang to interview government officials or gauge popular attitudes toward the United States. Without such film reports, the Pueblo story simply could not hold a prominent, continuing position on TV newscasts. Film of some crew members did occasionally appear on the evening news programs. But the North Korean government approved its release; it contained confessions of wrongdoing and apologies, and the network journalists who narrated it made clear that the film was highly suspect. A few interviews with family members dwelled less on their distress or outrage than on whether the face or voice in the film was really their relative's and whether he appeared any different since being imprisoned. The Pueblo was an important story, but in 1968—a year of "horrors and failures," according to CBS's Harry Reasoner—it was not nearly as sensational or shocking or troubling as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the violence at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the war in Vietnam.

The Iranian hostage crisis, by contrast, became a dominant story quickly and remained so throughout its duration, even during the 1980 presidential election campaign. Some journalists did not imagine that it would become a news event of such magnitude. Ted Koppel, who covered the State Department for ABC, thought that this incident, like the detention of U.S. diplomats during an earlier invasion of the embassy in Tehran on 14 February 1979, would be over in hours. Yet the Sunday evening edition of ABC's World News Tonight on the first day of the crisis showed some of the images that did much to stoke public outrage: glimpses of hostages in handcuffs and blindfolds, the burning of an American flag, and a photograph of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who reportedly approved the takeover of the embassy.

Network competition had a notable effect on ABC's coverage of the crisis. In 1977 ABC News, traditionally third in ratings and reputation, got a new president, Roone Arledge, who also headed the network's highly successful sports division. Arledge considered expanding World News Tonight to a full hour as a way of giving it more prominence, but local affiliates were unwilling to cede to the network an additional—and highly profitable—half hour. Arledge then experimented with late night news programming by airing half-hour specials with increasing frequency at 11:30 p.m. (EST). The hostage crisis gave Arledge the opportunity to secure permanent hold of that time slot. ABC, however, did not show its first late-night special until 8 November 1979 nor make it a nightly offering until six days later. The title of the show was both revealing and influential: America Held Hostage.

On 24 March 1980 the program got a new, permanent host, Koppel, and a new name, Night-line. It continued to provide daily coverage, even if the hostage crisis sometimes was not the lead story. Koppel hoped to use the growing capabilities of satellite technology and his skills as an interviewer to create "intercontinental salons" on live TV. Yet the discussion on the debut program was hardly genteel, as Dorothea Morefield, wife of a hostage, asked Ali Agah, the Iranian chargé in Washington, how his government could "continue to hold these innocent people." Some critics found such verbal confrontations contrived and mawkish, with news taking a back seat to show business. Yet television newscasts have long been a mixture of entertainment and information; Nightline expanded the limits of an established genre. And like ABC, the other networks covered the hostage crisis as a human drama as well as an international event, devoting considerable time both to interviews with family members and to the diplomatic efforts to secure the hostages' release. While ABC may have provided the hostage crisis with a melodramatic title, CBS's Walter Cronkite, television's most respected journalist, popularized what became the standard for measuring its duration. He added to his famous sign-off—"and that's the way it is"—a count of the days, eventually 444, that the fifty-two hostages endured captivity.

The Carter administration at first welcomed the heavy news coverage. Administration officials had many chances to explain to viewers that they were taking strong, but measured action—diplomatic initiatives, economic sanctions—to try to resolve the crisis without resorting to military force. Jimmy Carter could concentrate on his role as president, rather than as candidate facing a vigorous challenge for his party's presidential nomination from Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Indeed, Carter conspicuously refrained from campaign travel in favor of a Rose Garden strategy that played up his responsibilities as national leader. Carter's approval rating surged from 30 to 61 percent during the first month of the hostage crisis. Never before had the Gallup Poll recorded such a sharp improvement.

Yet administration officials soon deplored the extensive television coverage. Hodding Carter, the State Department spokesperson, complained that news reports were complicating negotiations. White House officials found considerable evidence that Iranian demonstrators were playing to the cameras. Yet their efforts to shift public attention away from the hostage crisis simply would not work because of what presidential counsel Lloyd Cutler called "the constant drumbeat of TV news." Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher believed that television intensified public anger and frustration as it reported about the failed rescue effort in April 1980, described diplomatic initiatives that seemed ineffective, and relentlessly counted the days. Press secretary Jody Powell expressed his frustration at the end of one long day when there had been demonstrations across from the White House by two antagonistic groups that had shouted and scuffled. He crossed Pennsylvania Avenue late at night, walked into Lafayette Park, and unexpectedly encountered CBS reporter Jed Duvall. The reason for these prolonged difficulties, Powell blurted out, was "the networks with their nose up the Ayatollah's ass."

CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE LEGACIES OF VIETNAM

"No more Vietnams" was a popular slogan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but there were strong disagreements about the meaning of that simple phrase. Some people wanted to avoid another long, costly, and—most important—unsuccessful war. Like Ronald Reagan's first secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, they believed that the United States should use its military forces only to achieve clear objectives that commanded public support and that would lead to victory. Others wanted to refrain from intervention in Third World revolutions or civil wars where no outside power could hope to impose a lasting settlement. Some counseled against a major effort, even to stop the spread of communism, in a peripheral area. Still others were wary of situations in which limited measures—military aid, the dispatch of advisers, covert action—might create pressures for progressively deeper involvement culminating in the commitment of combat troops.

Television viewers often learned about these perspectives as their advocates addressed a major, recurring question: Would Central America become "another Vietnam"? On the evening newscasts, the range of views on this issue—and, more generally, on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua or El Salvador—was much greater than in the early 1960s when television covered the expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Changes in broadcast journalism did not account for this difference. Reporters still relied heavily on official sources of information. Quantitative studies of television newscasts show that officials of the Carter or Reagan administrations and members of Congress most frequently appeared in stories about Central America. What was different was that the sphere of legitimate controversy was broader, in large measure because of the legacy of Vietnam.

Television reporting did occasionally have a notable effect on public attitudes or U.S. policy concerning Central America. One shocking example involved ABC correspondent Bill Stewart, who was reporting about the civil war in Nicaragua. Carrying a white flag and media credentials, Stewart approached a National Guard roadblock in Managua on 20 June 1979. A guard officer ordered him to lie on the ground and then shot him and his interpreter. Stewart's crew filmed the killings from its van; the tape ran not just on ABC but on CBS and NBC as well. The footage was uniquely horrifying; the only comparable incidents that TV had shown were Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and General Loan's execution of the NLF prisoner during the Tet Offensive. Speaking the next day to the Organization of American States, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance deplored "the mounting human tragedy" in Nicaragua. "This terror was brought home vividly to the American people yesterday with the cold-blooded murder … of an American newsman." Vance then issued the Carter administration's first public call for the resignation of Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza and his replacement with a "government of national reconciliation."

Eight years later in very different circumstances, television focused on another individual who affected public views about U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. Colonel Oliver North, fired from his position with the National Security Council, testified for several days in July 1987 during televised congressional hearings into the Iran-contra scandal. Dressed in marine uniform, North was poised and passionate. He admitted that he had misled Congress, but was unrepentant. He presented himself as a patriot who had served his country and his president by maintaining the contras, "body and soul." Polls revealed a significant shift in public attitudes toward continued U.S. military aid to the contras, with opponents outnumbering supporters by a margin of more than two to one before North's testimony but opinion almost equally divided after his appearance. Television, however, helped focus attention more on North's personality than on public issues. Polls showed that many Americans agreed with Ronald Reagan, who called North "a national hero." "Olliemania," as some journalists called the phenomenon of his sudden celebrity, helped launch North on a new career as radio talk show host after appeals overturned three felony convictions.

THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR ON THE WORLD STAGE

President Ronald Reagan became known as the Great Communicator, a distinction that earned him both plaudits and derogation. Reagan's speeches moved, inspired, and reassured millions of people. Critics, however, insisted that Reagan was an acting president, a performer who brought to the White House the theatrical skills that he had learned in Hollywood and who followed scripts that he had done little, if anything, to create. Reagan, like most contemporary presidents, usually read texts that speechwriters had prepared. Yet sometimes the words and often the ideas were his own. Opponents deplored the troubling oversimplifications in his folksy anecdotes and uplifting stories. Yet many viewers found an authenticity that came from the president's sincerity and conviction. Reagan was extraordinarily successful at using the White House and, indeed, the world, as a stage—or perhaps, more accurately, a studio—as he exploited the medium of television to build public support for his presidency.

White House aides planned Reagan's public appearances with meticulous care as television events. They chose the best camera angles, chalked in toe marks so the president would know exactly where to stand, and positioned reporters to minimize opportunities for unwanted questions. The preparations reflected what the president's assistants called the "line of the day," the story that they wanted to lead the news in order to advance their legislative or international agenda. What viewers saw, Reagan's communications experts thought, was more important than what they heard. When the CBS Evening News ran a critical story in October 1984 about Reagan's use of soothing images to obscure unpopular policies, reporter Lesley Stahl was astounded when White House aide Richard Darman telephoned to congratulate her. "You guys in Televisionland haven't figured it out, have you?" Darman said. "When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. Lesley, I mean it, nobody heard you."

Televised images mattered so much to the Reagan White House partly because of changes in TV news. By the early 1980s about two-thirds of the American public said that television was their primary source of news. Viewers could watch a growing number of news programs, including morning and midday shows as well as the traditional evening broadcasts. During prime time there were popular magazine programs, such as 60 Minutes (CBS) and 20/20 (ABC), as well as brief updates called "newsbreaks." And at the end of the day, there was Nightline. Cable TV, which reached 20 percent of television households in 1981 and more than twice that proportion in 1985, offered more choices. On 1 June 1980 the Cable News Network became the first 24-hour news channel. Greater competition and corporate pressures made network news executives more concerned with ratings and willing to try to increase them by altering the balance between information and entertainment. At CBS, for example, when ratings plunged after Cronkite's retirement, the news director urged the new anchor, Dan Rather, to dress in a sweater to appear friendly and informal and insisted on more "feel-good" features. CBS producers dropped a report about State Department reaction to Israeli bombing in Lebanon to open a slot on the evening news of 30 November 1982 for a story about singing sheep. On all the networks, lighter features, striking visuals, and ten-second sound bites increasingly became ways to attract and hold viewers who had more choices, remote controls, and seemingly shorter attention spans. The communications experts in the White House exploited these trends, packaging presidential appearances to fit the changes in TV news.

Reagan's international trips produced many dramatic and memorable television scenes. The advance planners created public occasions, often in striking surroundings, where the president would be in the spotlight. For example, on the rocky coast of Normandy, Reagan gave a magnificent speech in which he commemorated the fortieth anniversary of D-Day on 6 June 1984 by saluting "the boys of Pointe du Hoc … the champions who helped free a continent … the heroes who helped end a war." White House aide Michael Deaver made sure that the French scheduled Reagan's address so it would air live during the network morning news programs. In another stirring scene, Reagan expressed his fervent anti-communism and his commitment to freedom when he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on 12 June 1987 and cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Other trips produced less exalted, but nonetheless effective events. During a trip to South Korea in November 1983, Reagan attended an outdoor service at a chapel within sight of the North Korean border. One military police officer explained that a nearby armored personnel carrier was there for "backdrop." In one notorious case, advance planning failed. Presidential assistants did not learn that SS troops were buried at Bitburg cemetery in West Germany before the White House announced Reagan's visit. The president refused to change his plans, but he also went to Bergen-Belsen, the site of a Nazi concentration camp, where he gave one of his most moving addresses.

Reagan's summits with Mikhail Gorbachev were international media events with considerable symbolic significance. At their first meeting in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan said that he recognized from Gorbachev's smile that he was dealing with a different kind of Soviet leader. Televised images of their close and friendly relations symbolized the international changes that were occurring as the Cold War began to wane. At their summit in Washington, D.C., in December 1987, the most important substantive achievement was the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. But what mattered as well was what the news media called "Gorby fever," which the Soviet leader stoked by stopping his limousine and plunging into welcoming crowds in downtown Washington. When Reagan reciprocated by traveling to Moscow in May 1988, he followed a schedule that was the result of elaborate planning, including the use of polling and focus groups to test the themes of his speeches. Cameras followed Reagan and Gorbachev as they strolled through Red Square answering questions that appeared to be spontaneous, but some of which had been planted. When a reporter asked about the "evil empire," as Reagan had described the Soviet Union in a famous speech in March 1983, the president replied, that was "another time, another era." The televised scenes beginning in late 1989 of revolutions in Eastern Europe and the opening of the Berlin Wall confirmed Reagan's pronouncement.

THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

On 16–17 January 1991, viewers around the world watched the beginning of a war for the first time ever on live television. As allied bombs and cruise missiles hit targets in Iraq, CNN reporters described what they saw from their hotel in Baghdad during the first hours of the Persian Gulf War. The explosions had severed communications with other U.S. network reporters in the Iraqi capital. Using the telephone, CNN correspondents Peter Arnett, John Holliman, and Bernard Shaw acted much like radio reporters, since they were unable to transmit pictures of what they saw. "Now there's a huge fire that we've just seen," Holliman exclaimed. "And we just heard—whoa. Holy cow. That was a large air burst that we saw. It was filling the sky." "Go for it, guys," a CNN producer told the reporters. "The whole world's watching." One of those viewers was President George H. W. Bush, who said with relief that the war had begun, "just the way it was scheduled."

The reporting on that first night from Baghdad was exceptional, in part because government restrictions did not impede it. But Iraqi authorities established censorship within twenty-four hours after the start of the bombing and U.S. military officials imposed a system of restraints on the news media that had been years in the making.

Its outlines emerged in 1984, when the Pentagon responded to complaints about the exclusion of reporters from Grenada by creating a committee chaired by General Winant Sidle, who had served as a military information officer during the Vietnam War. The Sidle panel recognized that technological innovations—portable satellite antennas that made possible live broadcasting from the battlefield—might jeopardize the security of U.S. military operations or the safety of U.S. troops. It called on journalists to refrain from reporting sensitive information as a condition of their accreditation. If commanders decided that military considerations required limited access to combat areas, the Sidle panel recommended that small groups of journalists be allowed into battle zones and then share their reporting with their colleagues.

This pool system got its first test when U.S. troops invaded Panama in December 1989. Military transports carried reporters to base areas, but kept them sequestered during the first days of Operation Just Cause. Complaints about a system that seemed to keep reporters away from military action rather than to facilitate their access to it led to extended discussions between news organizations and military authorities during the buildup of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia during late 1990. On the eve of Operation Desert Storm, the Pentagon announced new guidelines, which required journalists to participate in pools, exclude restricted information from their articles and broadcasts, and submit their reports to military officials for security review.

The legacies of Vietnam exerted a powerful influence on the Bush administration as it prepared for war. General Colin Powell, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed that Vietnam had shown that the American public simply would not tolerate a prolonged, televised war with heavy casualties. Bush thought that Vietnam had also proven other lessons. He insisted that the United States and its coalition partners must use overwhelming military force that would produce decisive results. The president did a masterly job of building public support for his demand that Iraqi troops withdraw from Kuwait and his determination to use force, if necessary, to achieve that goal. He portrayed Saddam Hussein as a kind of Middle Eastern Hitler—a dictator who brutalized Iraqis, an outlaw who defied fundamental principles of international order, and an aggressor who wanted weapons of mass destruction to threaten other nations. TV news provided other view-points, other voices, including Hussein's, as the Iraqi president granted interviews to several Western journalists, including news anchors Peter Jennings of ABC and Rather of CBS. The newscasts also covered the debate over the use of force, which Congress authorized on 12 January 1991. Polls showed that substantial majorities favored military action and endorsed Bush's handling of the crisis. Once the war began, the president enjoyed overwhelming public support for his policies.

TV's war coverage in some ways resembled a miniseries. The networks had distinctive titles—"War in the Gulf," " Showdown in the Gulf"—and accompanying music. A good deal of the coverage emphasized the drama of war—the danger of a sudden attack of Iraqi Scud missiles, the risks of flying into hostile fire, the heroism of U.S. troops and the sacrifices of their relatives at home.

Yet in all this reporting about war, TV provided an extremely limited view of the fighting. The Defense Department supplied most of the video of the air war. Recorded with night vision equipment, it seemed fantastic and futuristic, something that reminded many viewers of a video game. The pool system ensured that reporters would have few unregulated opportunities to cover combat. A handful of correspondents, like CBS's Bob Simon, went out into the Saudi desert without escorts. Simon's first such excursion produced a report from Khafji, near the border with Kuwait, where U.S. marines were under attack. On his next unescorted trip, Iraqi troops captured him; Simon and his crew remained prisoners until the end of the war. Although network newscasts ran several reports about what they bluntly called censorship, there was little public dissatisfaction with the Pentagon's restrictions. Viewers were far more interested in seeing the briefings of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding and apparently authoritative performances that made the general the greatest hero of the Gulf War.

The television journalist who got the most attention—much of it unwelcome—was CNN's Peter Arnett. When most reporters decided to put personal safety ahead of the story, Arnett decided to stay in Baghdad. When Iraqi authorities decided to expel the remaining Western TV correspondents during the first week of fighting, they excepted CNN, mainly because producer Robert Wiener had spent months building cooperative relations with government officials in Baghdad. Arnett had no competition, but he did have "minders," information officials who limited his movements and censored his reporting. Repeatedly Arnett pushed against those limits, for example, by arguing that his reports would have greater credibility if he could respond more freely to questions from CNN anchors during live broadcasts. His stories about civilian casualties during allied bombing raids—at a baby milk formula factory and an air raid shelter—stirred enormous controversy in the United States. The most extreme of many attacks on the alleged impropriety of reporting from behind enemy lines came from Republican representative Lawrence Coughlin of Pennsylvania, who denounced Arnett as "the Joseph Goebbels of Saddam Hussein's Hitler-like regime." Arnett disliked becoming part of the story, yet he stayed in Baghdad until the end of the ground war.

Arnett's reporting notwithstanding, Bush administration officials were pleased with television coverage of the Gulf War. Pete Williams, the Pentagon's chief public affairs officer, concluded that the news media had provided "the best war coverage we've ever had." Secretary of State James A. Baker spoke more candidly when he described "that poor demoralized rabble—outwitted, outflanked, outmaneuvered by the U.S. military. But I think, given time, the press will bounce back."

THE CNN EFFECT

By the early 1990s many people had concluded that television news possessed formidable powers to influence the U.S. government's foreign policy. The "CNN effect," as it is usually called, actually has several dimensions. The first is providing a new channel of diplomatic communication, one that allows governments to transmit proposals or engage in dialogue, sometimes with extraordinary speed. Officials in the Bush administration, for example, sometimes used TV to send messages to Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait, hoping that a public channel might increase the pressure on the Iraqi leader to accede to U.S. demands. Government leaders, however, have long used the news media as channels of diplomacy. Radio, for example, carried Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Point Address of 8 January 1918 to an international audience.

The second dimension of the "CNN effect" is setting the foreign policy agenda—giving certain issues urgency or importance through news reports that capture the interest of millions of viewers and elicit a strong response. The ability to provide live reports from almost anywhere in the world, to transmit dramatic, emotional images, and to show them repeatedly seems to provide television with powers that exceed the other news media to alter the priorities that the government gives to international issues. The third dimension is accelerating official action. Even before the advent of CNN and other twenty-four-hour news channels, Lloyd Cutler, a counsel to President Carter, found that TV news had led to "foreign policy on deadline," as White House officials hurried to take action—to make a statement, to announce a new initiative—before the next newscast.

The final—and most controversial—dimension of the "CNN effect" is forcing government action. George F. Kennan, the foreign service officer who was an architect of containment during the early Cold War, summarized this perspective in a diary entry about U.S. intervention in Somalia in December 1992. Kennan maintained that television pictures of starving Somali children had produced "an emotional reaction, not a thoughtful or deliberate one," but one strong enough to take control of foreign policy decisions from "the responsible deliberative organs of our government."

A closer look at U.S. involvement in Somalia, however, suggests different conclusions than Kennan's about the effects of televised images on government policy decisions. Quantitative studies show that extensive coverage of the famine and fighting in Somalia followed the policy initiatives of the Bush administration in 1992 rather than preceded them. Television coverage surely affected the views of administration officials and gave them confidence that what they thought would be a limited, low-risk humanitarian intervention would have considerable public support. But television pictures of suffering Somalis did not determine the president's decision to dispatch troops. Television had a more decisive effect on President William Jefferson Clinton's decision to terminate Operation Restore Hope when newscasts showed shocking tape in early October 1993 of a crowd in Mogadishu desecrating the corpse of a U.S. soldier who had been killed in a firefight. The U.S. casualties took the president by surprise, and he was not prepared to appeal to angry members of Congress for the continuation of a mission that had suddenly grown dangerous. Instead, Clinton announced that U.S. forces would come home by 31 March 1994.

Television showed the horrors of ethnic cleansing and civil war in Bosnia, and those reports were influential but not decisive in shaping U.S. government action. Scenes of Serb camps with emaciated Muslim and Croat prisoners in August 1992 produced condemnations from the Bush administration. Yet the president and his principal advisers were unwilling to take military action, as they believed that there was no clear exit strategy. Clinton, too, reacted intensely to graphic TV reports of atrocities, such as the casualties that occurred when a mortar shell exploded in a Sarajevo marketplace on 5 February 1994. But he followed no consistent policy. Not until mid-1995 did the Clinton administration approve strong measures, including continuing NATO air strikes, to bring the Bosnian war to an end. Available evidence suggests that the president acted to eliminate a major problem that burdened U.S. foreign policy and that threatened his political prospects. Almost four years later, in March 1999, the United States and its NATO allies again used military force in an air war against Yugoslavia to persuade President Slobodan Milosevic to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. News reports, including many on TV, of brutality against Kosovars contributed to public support for this war. But concern about popular reaction to potential U.S. casualties led Clinton to rule out the use of ground troops, except for peacekeeping.

The "CNN effect" influenced U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. TV reports helped set the agenda; at times, officials of the Bush and Clinton administrations had to react—sometimes quickly—to events that dominated the newscasts. But the "CNN effect" was variable, and it was only one of many factors in the process of formulating foreign policy.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

The new millennium began with televised celebrations on every continent, hopeful events that suggested that modern communications were bringing closer the creation of Marshall McLuhan's global village. Yet the twenty-first century also brought almost unimaginable scenes of horror and suffering when terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Enormous audiences in the United States and around the world relied on television for news about these disasters. Even government officials watched television because it provided more information more quickly than other available sources. Round-the-clock coverage on the broadcast as well as the cable news channels quickly spread the disbelief, outrage, grief, and uncertainty about the future that were immediate products of these startling events.

Technological changes—especially greater Internet access and the increasing convergence of the computer and the television—may alter viewing habits and change sources of news and information. But for the immediate future, at least, during conflicts, crises, and other important international developments, both public officials and citizens will turn to television news.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arlen, Michael J. Living-Room War. New York, 1982.

Arnett, Peter. Live from the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World's War Zones. New York, 1994. A superb memoir by a reporter who covered the Vietnam War for the Associated Press and the Persian Gulf War for CNN.

Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Culture. 2d rev. ed. New York, 1990.

Baughman, James L. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since 1941. 2d ed. Baltimore, 1997.

Bernhard, Nancy E. U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947–1960. New York, 1999.

Braestrup, Peter. Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington. 2 vols. Boulder, Colo., 1977.

Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York, 2000.

Cutler, Lloyd N. "Foreign Policy on Deadline." Foreign Policy no. 56 (fall 1984): 113–128.

Davison, W. Phillips. "The Third-Person Effect in Communication." Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (spring 1983): 1–15.

Dennis, Everette E., et al. The Media at War: The Press and the Persian Gulf Conflict. New York, 1991.

Elegant, Robert. "How to Lose a War." Encounter 57 (August 1981): 73–90. A harsh and often polemical critique of reporting of the Vietnam War.

Halberstam, David. War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. New York, 2001.

Hallin, Daniel C. The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam. New York, 1986. The best analysis of news media reporting of Vietnam.

——. We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere. New York, 1994. A collection of excellent essays.

Hammond, William M. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1962–1968. Washington, D.C., 1988.

——. Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968–1973. Washington, D.C., 1996.

Isaacs, Arnold R. "The Five O'Clock Follies Revisited: Vietnam's 'Instant Historians' and the Legacy of Controversy." The Long Term View 5 (summer 2000): 92–101. Explains how Vietnam created lasting distrust of the news media among military officers.

Kimball, Jeffrey P. Nixon's Vietnam War. Lawrence, Kans., 1998.

Koppel, Ted, and Kyle Gibson. Nightline: History in the Making and the Making of Television. New York, 1996. Contains an insider account of the birth of the ABC news show Nightline during the Iranian hostage crisis.

MacArthur, John R. Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. New York, 1992. A scathing critique of the pool system and the news media's cooperation with it.

Maltese, John Anthony. Spin Control: The White House Office of Communications and the Management of Presidential News. 2d ed. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994.

Mermin, Jonathan. "Television News and American Intervention in Somalia: The Myth of a Media-Driven Foreign Policy." Political Science Quarterly 112 (autumn 1997): 385–403.

Neuman, Johanna. Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? New York, 1996.

O'Neill, Michael J. The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World. New York, 1993.

Pach, Chester J., Jr. "And That's the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News." In David Farber, ed. The Sixties: From Memory to History. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994.

——. "Tet on TV: U.S. Nightly News Reporting and Presidential Policymaking." In Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds. 1968: The World Transformed. New York, 1998.

——. "The War on Television: TV News, the Johnson Administration, and Vietnam." In Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds. Blackwell Companion to the Vietnam War. Malden, Mass., 2002.

Small, Melvin. Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. New Brunswick, N. J., 1994.

Stahl, Lesley. Reporting Live. New York, 1999.

Strobel, Warren P. Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations. Washington, D.C., 1997. Includes excellent analysis of TV coverage of military interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia.

Tallman, Gary C., and Joseph P. McKerns. "'Press Mess:' David Halberstam, the Buddhist Crisis, and U.S. Policy in Vietnam, 1963." Journalism and Communication Monographs 2 (fall 2000): 109–153.

Utley, Garrick. You Should Have Been There Yesterday: A Life in Television News. New York, 2000. A highly informative memoir by one of television's most important international affairs correspondents.

Woodward, Bob. The Commanders. New York, 1991.

Wyatt, Clarence. Paper Soldiers: The American Press and the Vietnam War. New York, 1993.

See also Dissent in Wars; The National Interest; The Press; Public Opinion.

FRIENDLY PERSUASION: LBJ, TV NEWS, AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

On 28 April 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered U.S. marines to the Dominican Republic to protect U.S. citizens during political violence and to prevent communists from seizing power. Johnson was extremely concerned about news coverage of the intervention. He tried unsuccessfully to get CBS to remove television correspondent Bert Quint, whose reports from Santo Domingo cast doubt on whether there was a significant communist threat. But Johnson found other ways to affect television reporting. In an oral history interview, NBC correspondent John Chancellor revealed the following about events of 2 May 1965: "We had a program, a television program on a Sunday afternoon…. I had gone down … to stand in front of the White House and speak a little essay into the camera on what the President's reaction was…. As I stood out there waiting for the program to begin, what I didn't know was that the President was upstairs…. He was alone and looking at me out the window, and he got very curious about what I was doing…. And the guard in the West Wing came out and got me, and I went inside. He said, 'There's a telephone call for you,' and it was the President."

According to the tape of the telephone conversation, Johnson said:

John, … I don't want to be quarrelsome, but I want you to know the facts…. If we don't watch out, the bellyachers are going to run the country and we'll lose our democracy…. Our mission down there [in the Dominican Republic], evacuation, is not half-way through.…. [U.S. Ambassador John Bartlow Martin] says that the Latin American … ambassadors, generally, are very favorable to us because we've saved their hide…. While they can't come out and say we're against mother or we support marines in Latin America, … they're very happy…. And … he's [Martin] going to point out [at a press conference] some of … them that have been imported and are known Castro leaders…. Fifty are identified as of last night…. I have to be very careful because I don't want to say a guy [who] disagrees with me is a Communist, or I'm a McCarthy…. The point, though, that I want to get over with you is those on the ground … are very happy that their lives have been spared and we're there…. Number two—the mission is not com pleted or about to be completed.

Chancellor replied, "All right, I have that clearly in mind," and Johnson said, "Okay, partner."

Chancellor recollected: "And I went out and stood out there—it didn't sound right, what he had told me, but nonetheless … I put it into the piece I'd written…. Then I went back and the following day I was able to determine pretty accurately that what he'd told me was an absolute fabrication, a big lie! I've rarely been as angry. I really was just furious! Presidents use all kinds of tools on reporters to do their work….. I've never really told this to anybody before except a few close friends because you don't go around calling the president a liar. In this case, he was."