War. . . and Peace

by Danny Schechter

The Nation magazine, March 16 1998

If there was one undisputed victor in Gulf War I, it CNN. With Peter Arnett the only American TV reporter permitted in Baghdad and a stable of 00 military analysts on call, Ted Turner was able o deploy his own news army. Thanks in part to its round-the-clock war coverage, a network that only had a few million subscribers when I was a producer there in 1980 now claims to broadcast to I X4 million homes worldwide. For CNN, the Gulf War was a windfall of profits and prestige.

So it was not surprising that CNN would be first out of the pack to position itself for the sequel. That things haven't come out quite as expected was no fault of the network, which prepared Americans for war with punditry-pumping patriotism complete with "Showdown With Iraq" graphics and the breathy sound of endless promos. CNN's rally-round-the-flag approach was particularly unbecoming to an organization unofficially called "the sixteenth member of the U.N. Security Council" because of its global impact on policies.

For the media-savvy among us, the behavior of CNN is instructive in illustrating the function of TV news in orchestrating public opinion in national security crises. It also raises the issue of how the threat of weapons of mass destruction was used to enhance the power of what Larry Gelbart, who gave us that Korean War sitcom M*A *S*H, calls our "weapons of mass distraction."

The last time out, CNN was heavily criticized by the right for Arnett's dispatches from Baghdad. In his book How CNN Fought the War, one of the network's own advisers, retired Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, says that at first he considered Arnett unpatriotic until he realized he was just "a feeler...somebody who empathizes with the people around him." This time, however, CNN had lots of competition, which may have pushed the network more toward the conventional so as not to be outscooped. "We're sending out everything we've got," said Anthony Massey of the BBC, CNN's major global news competitor. "I only wish we had our own ship." Having perfected the techniques of soap-opera-style storytelling during Gulf War I and used them ever since to pump up the endless seamy tales of O.J., Marv, Diana and Monica, news organizations saw another blockbuster in the making. As one Arab columnist quipped, "As Iraqis stockpile food, Americans are buying beer and popcorn to watch the fireworks."

On the night of February 17, CNN aired a heavily promoted prime-time special beginning with the case for bombing Iraq, which, for thirty-five minutes, was straight-ahead advocacy journalism. Former President Bush was brought back to boost the war effort against Saddam, the man he had first demonized as a Hitler. Only about fifteen minutes, late in the show, were devoted to doubts about the policy's effectiveness. (CNN founder Turner, who has promised to donate $1 billion to the United Nations, clearly didn't share his old network's attitude. The Washington Post for February 20 reported that after greeting Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala at a Washington restaurant, Turner rose and loudly announced, "Tell the President not to bomb them. It's wrong." But Ted's sensibility, | shared by millions worldwide, did not seem to have much resonance in the CNN control room.)

The day after its Iraq special, CNN was not just I covering the news but making it as the volunteer I packager of the made-for-TV "town meeting" at | Ohio State University, which was designed to produce a pulpit for the Administration to "explain" I (read "sell") its bombs-away strategy to the heartland. The format was prefabricated, with a run' down allowing for commercial breaks. However, a few well-worded questions and belted-out chants punctured the propaganda hot-air balloon. What a lesson on how activists can interrupt a media message and alter its frame. The protesters may have been rude, but they sent a strong challenge to an Administration and media that had excluded and ignored their views.

If CNN and other broadcasters are in a mood to learn anything from this debacle-and indeed from the whole Iraq episode- they might begin by considering how they could build audiences by covering peace, rather than war. Last summer in England, forty well-known journalists and media academics debated how the media could play a more constructive role and endorsed the "peace journalism option," an approach that identifies all parties to conflicts, including civilians, as worthy of coverage, and all peace initiatives as legitimate subjects of serious scrutiny. This was not about tie-dye-dressed reporters waving flowers but rather about impartial journalism that seeks truth on all sides, debunks cover-ups and avoids becoming a transmission belt for any powers that be. The group urged more historical context and sympathy for the victims of war as well as preventive journalism that accents conflict resolution before the guns go off. Peace journalism rejects treating war as a zero-sum game of winners and losers; it also opposes demonizing the enemy and patronizing its victims. It stresses the importance of critiquing official sources and exposing non-sourced speculative reports that deliberately exaggerate the power of the other side to mobilize fear on the home front.

If such ideas find a hearing, it seems unlikely that CNN will be in the vanguard. I was at the U.N.'s World Television Conference in 1996 when Kofi Annan proposed that the media try to help head off genocidal wars, only to be challenged by CNN's Christiane Amanpour, who reiterated her commitment to journalism as a "just the facts, ma'am" business. Still, most journalists who cover war learn to hate it and sooner or later to see through its lies. As European scholar Johan Galtung puts it, "The first casualty of war is not truth. That is the second. The first casualty of war is peace."

In light of the Secretary General's success in brokering a negotiated outcome that most of the coverage did not forecast or take seriously, perhaps next time even CNN may see it in its interest to field its own peace correspondent. ~

Danny Schechter is the executive producer of Globalvision and a former producer at CNN and ABC News. He is the author of The More You Watch, the Less You Know (Seven Stories).

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