IRRESPONSIBLE MEDIA; DIPLOMACY NOT ENOUGH — NIXON In the past several days the news media has understandably been preoccupied with President Reagan's bout — hopefully a successful one — with cancer. Yet it must be noted that another week has passed without any punishment for the known hijackers who commandeered TWA Flight 847. And there isn't likely to be, as speculated in the "Washington Whispers" column of the July 22, 1985, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT:
Despite all the tough talk, forget any counterstrike in retaliation for the TWA hostages. Reagan has reluctantly concluded that there's no way to hit back as long as other Americans are being held hostage in Lebanon. The best that Washington can do: Keep Arab terrorists nervous about U.S. intentions.
With the hostages back home, attention has since focused on the extraordinary role played by the news media during the crisis. Newspaper cartoonists have had a field day depicting the role of television news coverage. One cartoonist showed a terrorist holding a loaded pistol to a passenger's head. "They shoot us" was the caption. The adjoining panel showed Uncle Sam aiming a TV camera, with the caption: "We shoot them." Another cartoon featured two heavily armed guerrillas. One asked the other about the strange-looking object on the tip of his automatic rifle. "What is that? A silencer?" His compatriot replies, "No...an amplifier. " Actually it is a television camera.
A critical review of the media's role (especially television) in the crisis appeared in the "Essay" column in the July 15 TIME. It was written by a frequent "Essay" contributor, Charles Krauthammer:
The problem of evil has long been the province of philosophy. Philosophy is not particularly interested in that question anymore.... Journalism has taken up the slack. Unfortunately, journalism is not terribly well equipped to handle it, principally because journalism is a medium of display and demonstration.
When evil is the subject, the urge to display leads to dark places indeed. Last month, for example, it led...to Beirut, where during 17 days of astonishing symbiosis, television and terrorists co-produced — there is no better word — a hostage drama....
Driven...by these two journalistic imperatives, technology and competition, journalism will go where it can go. When it has the technology, it shoots first and asks questions later. For the correspondent bargaining for access to hostages, the important questions are Can I get the story/show? and Will anyone else? The question What am I doing? comes up after the tape has been relayed from Damascus, if at all....
Broadcast television imposes limits, strict but self-enforced limits, on explicit sex. Why not on explicit terror?... A few years ago, when some publicity seekers started dashing onto baseball fields during televised games, TV producers decided to discourage the practice by averting the camera's eye. So now, the crowd roars at the commotion, and the viewer strains to see what it is all about, but cannot. Yet he accepts this restraint, this self-censorship, if you will, without complaint because it serves to avoid delays at ball games. Yet we won't do the same when the end is reducing the payoff for political murder.
If we did the same, the drama we would miss would no doubt be riveting. Evil is riveting. From watching Hitchcock we know of the perverse, and fully human, enjoyment that comes from looking evil dead in the eye. But when the evil is real and the suffering actual, that enjoyment is tinged with shame, the kind of shame one experiences when exposed to pornography. And like pornography, terrorist television, the graphic unfolding of evil on camera, sells. During the hostage crisis, network news ratings rose markedly. But this fascination has its price. Lot's wife fixed her gaze on evil and turned to salt.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told American lawyers meeting in London on July 15 that means must be employed to "starve the terrorist and hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend." The July 8 edition of NEWSWEEK chipped in with a one-page media summation of its own, titled "The Network Circus":
No one was denying that the Beirut crisis was a serious news story with a particularly harrowing last chapter. But the ever escalating television circus lent an almost comic touch, as if it were "Let's Make a Deal" or "Nabih Knows Best," courtesy of the Amal Broadcasting Company.
The real ABC was all over the story — down to delivering some of the hostages' mail.... Personnel from each network indignantly denied paying for stories — but some added that they couldn't vouch for their competitors. If no money was known to have changed hands, it wasn't for lack of trying on the part of the Amal militiamen.... Several Amal tried to auction off a session with the hostages for $12,500 — and weren't laughed off. "I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of those guys driving around in Caddies a couple of months from now," said one American reporter in Beirut....
On the ground in Beirut, faction-torn Shiites split into yet more factions — each loyal to its favorite American television network. CBS and NBC worried that the competition was growing dangerous.... Even the Shiites wanted a cease-fire. They posted a notice in the Commodore Hotel that all footage of the hostages should be pooled [available to all equally]....
Earlier in the week, NBC's "Today" show tried to fetch Mrs. Allyn Conwell [wife of the unofficial hostage spokesman] by Learjet from the Greek island of Corfu. They were too late: she was gone — to ABC's "Good Morning America."...
After Visnews cameramen taped interviews with several hostages early in the week, Shiites seized the tape and deleted the comments of four hostages whose remarks it didn't endorse.... For most of the week, the same dozen or so hostages were trotted out again and again.... More than anything else, the hostage crisis shows that "news" should be more than just the latest video images — especially if the terrorists are allowed to act as executive producers.
A major news analysis piece on the media appeared in the July 10 WASHINGTON TIMES, titled "The Media are the Message." It focused on the prevailing and presumptuous view that newspeople exist on a plane above and beyond the nation itself:
Critics are accusing the TV newsmen of providing the terrorists with a podium, collaborating with them and frustrating the efforts of legitimate U.S. leaders by pretending to be intermediaries and policy-makers....
"Morally speaking, there are not two sides to this story," said syndicated columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz, on a recent edition of Cable News Network's "The Larry King Show." It was, she said, the story of "a brutal act, a murder and a kidnapping. To attempt to show both sides," she said, "is to imply there is a rationale for a group of murderers who have abducted a planeload of American nationals."...
Critics seemed troubled not by any particular action undertaken by the network newsmen, but a pervasive attitude: that television journalists somehow get an automatic exemption from the burdens and obligations of citizenship; that being a television journalist means you ought to rank your cameras above your country.
"There wouldn't have been any press conference," said Time magazine's William Henry III, commenting on "Nightline" about the chaotic first encounter between hostages and newsmen at the Beirut airport, "if the journalists hadn't attended." Mr. Henry said it "bothered" him "that some Americans in that room were free to go when it was over.
Others had to stay. And why were the ones able to leave able to? Because they were being used to transmit the messages of those terrorists...people who were the sworn enemies of this country."...
Network journalists hammered home the same theme: Television was able to document throughout the crisis — even guarantee — that the hostages were alive and well. The hostages were alive, all right, but were they well?...
What weren't the networks telling us? Almost everything of consequence.... What kind of unspeakable things were happening? [Especially with the handful of passengers kept separate because they had Jewish-sounding names.]... "We lived in filth," said hostage Arthur Toga, after he arrived back in the United States. "The place was a hovel. We had cockroaches, rats and a nonÂworking toilet for 19 men with diarrhea."...
CBS Broadcast Group Vice President Van Gordon Sauter saw the role of the media as "an honest broker of information, whether it's a Reagan press conference or the hostages delivering messages-to the president." "We were the conduits for what was happening;" said CNN's Bernard Shaw.
"I can hardly agree with a position that implies such neutrality," said Dorothy Rabinowitz. Is it really the same, she asked, to say that because "the president of the United States the media... we can be uses by the terrorists as well?...
ABC scored a ratings' coup when correspondent Charles Glass led a crew onto the Beirut airport tarmac to interview TWA Captain John Testrake from the window of his cockpit.... Everything, the captain said, was OK — almost everything. Captain Testrake was concerned about a possible U.S. mission either to rescue the hostages or retaliate against their captors. "I think we would all be dead men if they did," Captain Testrake said....
"I think that was a very legitimate question (ABC's Charles Glass querying Captain Testrake about the "military option"), to ask that man what he thought about the prospect of retaliation. After all," added Mr. Shaw, "his life was involved."...
It didn't seem to occur to the network journalists, noted the critics, that Capt. Testrake might not be in an ideal situation to decide what is best for America. There you have the spectacle of a man with a gun to his head, he's solicited for his opinion on whether we should take military action," said Dorothy Rabinowitz. "Here his answer is taken and reported."...
Eking out every competitive edge, the television newsmen indiscriminately focus on everything, trivializing the event by their unwillingness to weigh the value of one thing against another. The picture of the Delta Force boarding planes bound for Cyprus is worth exactly the same as a Pentagon spokesman's plea not to tip America' s hand.... Hostage spokesman Allyn Conwell's statements are worth exactly the same as the pronouncements of the president of the United States. Television's unblinking eye coolly scanned everything.... The only detail that television, blinded by its tunnel-vision neutrality, didn't notice was America's national interest.
Terrorism: America Loses, Soviets Gain
President Reagan charged on July 8 that Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua "are now engaged in acts of war" against the United States. In a speech to the American Bar Association, Reagan said the "real goal of the terrorists is to expel America from the world." UPI reported on the President's address as follows:
Reagan named Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba and Nicaragua, saying the countries were "continents away, tens of thousands of miles apart," but all shared "the same goals and objectives.... Most of the terrorists who are kidnapping and murdering American citizens and attacking American installations are being trained, financed and directly or indirectly controlled by a core group of radical and totalitarian governments, a new, international version of Murder Inc. — all of these states are united by one simple, criminal phenomenon — their fanatical hatred of the United States, our people, our way of life, our international Stature," he said.
"At the current rate," Reagan said, "as many as 1,000 acts of terrorism will occur in 1985 — that is what we face unless civilized nations act together to end this assault on humanity." Reagan also said the Soviet Union's "close relationship with almost all of the terrorist states" must be recognized. He said the strategic purpose "behind the terrorism sponsored by outlaw states is clear: to disorient the United States, to disrupt or alter our foreign policy, to sow discord between ourselves and our allies, to frighten Third World nations working with us for peaceful settlements of regional conflicts. In short, to cause us to retreat, retrench, to become 'fortress America,'" he said. "Yes, their real goal is to expel America from the world."
Former President Richard M. Nixon has been authoring a series of articles on foreign policy for the WASHINGTON TIMES. In the July 8 issue, Mr. Nixon's piece was titled "Meeting the Threat: Diplomacy Without Clout Doesn't Work." Much of what he wrote appeared to be an update on this premise of his book, THE REAL WAR (excerpted in this column on June 7):
Some naive people contend that diplomacy is the answer to armed conflicts in the Third World. Diplomacy cannot succeed without military power to back it up. For example, when President Carter ruled out the use of force at the outset of the Iranian hostage crisis, he weakened the effectiveness of diplomacy to resolve it. The pathetic failures of the League of Nations and the United Nations to play a significant role in keeping peace or ending wars is striking proof of the impotence of diplomacy without power.
There is too much of a tendency to see all Third World conflicts as part of the larger conflict between East and West. While the Soviet Union profits from most of them, it is not responsible for all the conflicts in the world. As one observer has pointed out, their policy is to trouble the waters and then fish in them....
It is an illusion, however, that if the Soviet Union does not play a role in a Third World conflict our interests are not threatened. The Soviets do not have to fight to win. Whether they fight or not, wherever we lose, they win. Mr. Khomeini's revolution in Iran had nothing to do with communism or the Soviet Union, but that does not mean that the Soviets did not benefit from it. When the shah of Iran was driven from power, the United States lost its strongest ally in the Mideast. Had he remained in power the war between Iran and Iraq and even the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union might never have taken place....
Instability is the Soviet Union's most powerful ally in the Third World War. The Soviet leaders scan the globe for potential trouble spots, places where people are groping for a better way or suffering through episodes of unrest, and then find ways to make those bad situations worse. While the Soviet Union is not behind all violent revolutions, when they are, it is first in line to pick up the pieces....
A...mistake many Americans made in the last years of the Vietnam War was failing to see that in Third World conflicts our choice is usually not between our allies and someone better, but between our allies and something far worse. Liberals today frequently call for the United States to break its ties with right-wing dictators. Otherwise, they wrongly claim, we will be guilty of supporting the world's most flagrant violators of human rights.
By any measure, the most repressive governments are those of the Communists. The record is clear. Cubans are worse off under Castro than they were under Mr. Batista. The Vietnamese are worse off under the Communist Le Duan than under Mr. Thieu. Cambodians were worse off under Pol Pot than they were under Lon Nol. When the non-Communist regimes were in power, the United States could at least exert some pressure to increase adherence to human rights in those countries. Now it can do nothing. We must never take course of action that results in a government that permits some freedom falling to one that permits none. If there is one profound lesson to be learned from the aftermath of the Vietnam war, that is it.
The latest troublespot that could boil over into a real crisis is Sudan, a strategically located African state bordering on eight other nations. Sudan was quite pro-West until a coup ousted President Jafar Nimeiri on Apr il 6. Radical Libya is now courting Sudan seductively, according to this dispatch in the July 22 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT:
Fear of new anti-American trouble-making in Africa is rising sharply with word of the signing of a military pact between Sudan — a longtime friend of the United States — and radical Libyan strong man Muammar Qadhafi. Outlines of the agreement, announced in Khartoum on July 8, cover only Libyan training and equipment for Sudan's armed forces. But its mere existence rings alarm bells in the U.S. and other Western nations because of Qadhafi's support of revolutionary violence across Africa and the Mideast.
In Washington, Reagan administration officials [sent]...an unusually blunt warning to the new Sudanese government of Gen. Abdul Rahman Sewar El Dahab.... Sudan was one of the few Moslem nations to back the 1978 Camp David Accords that resulted in a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. It cooperated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a secret air lift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel earlier this year. Partly in return for this support, the U.S. has been sending Sudan more than 400 million dollars a year in economic aid. The only African country to receive more is Egypt....
Sudan [is] the largest nation in Africa and one of its most strategically located. Sudan borders on eight other countries, including some that are considered ripe for subversion, and the Red Sea.... Sudan's warmer relations with Libya emerged against a backdrop of the Dahab regime's efforts to come to grips with a long list of woes besetting this nation of nearly 22 million people. Two of the most serious problems are closely linked — a bankrupt economy and a two-year civil war in the south that further drains Sudan's slim resources....
On top of all the other burdens is the famine that afflicts the entire region. Relief officials list at least 4.5 million Sudanese as famine victims. Nearly 1.4 million refugees, most of them Ethiopians, have flocked into Sudan in hopes of finding food. In Khartoum, there are few illusions that any of these problems will be solved anytime soon. Instead, there is new concern that Sudan may become cockpit of African turmoil.
A radicalized Sudan would, in turn, place enormous pressure on the key country in the Arab world, Egypt. President Mubarak is under increasing pressure from Muslim clerics to apply stricter Islamic codes.
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