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Crisis, TV, and Public PressureAuthor(s): Stephen HessSource: The Brookings Review, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), p. 48Published by: Brookings Institution PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20080454 .
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POLITICS WATCH
Crisis, TV, and Public Pressure BY STEPHEN HESS
\
Stephen Hess is a senior fellow in
the Brookings Governmental Studies
program. His next book will be
about U.S. foreign correspondents.
4 8
Last September, in a speech
outlining the Clinton adminis
tration's foreign policy, Na
tional Security Adviser An
thony Lake cautioned that
"public pressure for our hu
manitarian engagement increas
ingly may be driven by televi sion images."
This proposition has become
the conventional wisdom. And
just because it is commonly as
sumed to be right, it need not
be wrong. Yet surely it deserves
parsing. We don't respond
equally to all stimuli. Is it not
possible to make distinctions
that can help policymakers
gauge how Americans are go
ing to react to crisis images? The classic case of a crisis
response involves the October
23, 1984, NBC Nightly News
report about famine in
Ethiopia?famine that had
gone virtually unrecognized for a decade by American TV.
When a freelancer had offered
film on the famine to CBS,
NBC, and PBS in 1983, all had turned him down. But the
BBC did a story that was seen
by NBC's London bureau
chief, Joseph Angotti, who
urged it on his bosses. They de
clined. He sent it to New York
anyway, where anchorman Tom
Brokaw insisted on using it.
The response was immediate.
A deluge of famine stories fol
lowed as viewers pressured the
Reagan administration to
respond. Federal food aid in
creased from $23 million for fiscal 1984 to $98 million. But
within a year, though famine
persisted in Ethiopia, TV cov
erage had returned to its pre 1984 level. The public had tired
of the issue. And the networks
were happy to drop an expen sive and unattractive story.
Thus ended public pressure on this U.S. policy.
Marvin Kalb, veteran net
work diplomatic correspondent and now a Harvard professor,
says that the media have two
criteria for covering an overseas
event. One: does it have "siz
zle"? Does it deal with a riot, a hijacking, or some other hap
pening that can stir emotions?
Two: are U.S. troops involved?
Famine in Ethiopia had "one," not "two." Apparently "one"
will get a story on the air, but
it takes "two" to keep it there.
Changes in the TV news
business since 1984 also matter.
All three networks changed hands in 1986, but only one
new owner, ABC's CapCities, was in the media business. And
only ABC has remained com
mitted to seriously covering in
ternational news. In the cost
cutting world of today's net
works, a large corps of foreign
correspondents, once the pride of CBS and NBC, has been re
placed by parachute journalists.
By 1992, for example, NBC had only nine correspondents
permanently posted abroad.
Parachute journalism means
that the networks pay a great deal of attention to a story but
only briefly. When, on Decem
ber 8, 1992, the Navy SEALS arrived in Mogadishu and were
greeted on the beach by the American media, the three net
works together devoted 45
minutes of primetime news
broadcasts to Somalia. A week
later, after the anchormen had
gone home, the collective news
count was down to 13 minutes; 8 minutes by December 17.
The other big media devel
opment since Ethiopia is the
rise of CNN, founded in 1979, but first truly capturing world
attention with its Gulf War
coverage in 1991. Yet on non
crisis days, CNN has only small
audiences at home. While 30
million people in the United States watch the evening news
on the three broadcast networks, fewer than a million see CNN's
prime evening program. "Pub
lic pressure" is still most likely to come through the networks.
When the TV anchormen
left Mogadishu a year ago, net
work coverage shifted to Sara
jevo. The teeter-totter relation
ship between Bosnia and
Somalia as a news story (when one is up, the other is down) relates directly to Kalb's second
law: the cameras follow the
troops, or at least go where
they expect the troops to be.
The added TV coverage from
ex-Yugoslavia last winter grew out of the expectation that
President Clinton was gearing
up to involve the United States.
The networks began to pay serious attention. Total Bosnian
coverage for April 1992 was 14 minutes; by February 1993 it had risen to 95.
Bosnia is a searing story about hunger, suffering, and
immense inhumanities. More
over, it is happening in Europe and is being beamed back to a nation of majority European
ancestry. Still, Americans refuse
to be "public pressure." (Nor did the United States get in volved in Somalia because of
television-induced pressure. We
are there because George Bush, for many reasons?humanitarian,
psychological, geopolitical? willed us to be there.)
What, then, might we con
clude from these cases of crisis,
television, and public pressure? TV is a reactive medium.
It is not in the policy-initiating business, despite what govern
ment officials may think. Find
ing crisis in Ethiopia was acci
dental. Overseas camera crews
rarely are allowed to go looking for crisis. It's too expensive.
Other than the episodic "sizzle"
stories, they tend to follow the
flag (Somalia) or go into areas of
probable involvement (Bosnia).
Thus, a president has
great leeway in the policy
formulating period, regardless of TV's capacity to generate
public pressure. This wide
margin for maneuver roughly extends to the point where
American lives are in danger. After that, the TV pictures kick
in, and a president's options shrink rapidly.
THE BROOKINGS REVIEW
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