The Art and Curse of Television - 9 April 1999

Here is a letter to America that I have just come across. The date is January 1855, and it's in the middle of the Crimean war. It's a letter from Charles Dickens to an American friend.

"The absorption of the English mind in the war is, to me, a melancholy thing. Every other subject of popular solicitude and sympathy goes down before it. But for all this, it is an indisputable fact, I conceive, that Russia MUST be stopped, and that the future of the world renders the war imperative upon us."

Well, this war, that absorbs and appals us all - has been going a little more than two weeks, but it too has blanketed popular discussion of most domestic policies, except the ones that affect the pocket book, like the state of the local crop or the orders coming into the local factory. The politicians who are off on next year's presidential trail - (and there are at least half a dozen of them) - these men (not to mention Elizabeth Dole) find that if they talk with passion about their favourite issues - education, daycare, the budget, turning welfare into workfare, cutting taxes - even Y2K - the audience looks at them as if they'd just arrived from another planet.

What people want to know before anything else is - how do you stand on the war - not, as in the troubled days of Vietnam, whether you're for it or against it. The audience itself at this point, doesn't know where to stand, what to think. It is, like the candidates, scared to be positive one way or another - come out for ground troops and be called a warmonger willing to sacrifice the blood of a rising generation. Or, come out positively against it and be called an iceberg of a human being immune to the heartbreaking human spectacle on the borders of Kosovo.

This frustration is something new and it's due to the most influential institution of the second half of our century - television - which we can't any longer go on thinking of as a reflection simply of reality. It creates reality, where before TV we had to imagine reality or we didn't choose to. For us, for all but the people actually there on the battle grounds, or the statesmen privy to private information, the reality of Kosovo is what we see every evening on the news. This has been so since Vietnam, because that was the first war that abolished front-line censorship.

This novelty struck me like a thunderbolt almost thirty years ago when we saw for the first time a correspondent, a young American cameraman, poke his camera into a small jungle clearing in some unpronounceable corner of Cambodia. Four or five American soldiers were squatting there and the cameraman-reporter asked them how they felt about moving across yet another Asian border. One of them said with a tired smile: "We ought to get back home where we belong - in Vietnam."

After that frank joke, they said what they felt about the war and it was a shocker. Not so much what they said as the new fact that they were allowed to say it out loud for millions of people to hear including the mothers, fathers, sisters - relations of the men being quizzed. What they said was that they violently disagreed with their commander-in-chief - who was, of course, the President of the United States. They had no taste for this war - they thought it was either a fraud or a useless thing to fight, and that the Cambodian adventure was a mess. It struck me then that in any previous war, they would have been arrested and court-martialled.

This astonishing innovation - this break with centuries of war reporting - simply happened. Neither the president nor anybody else, anybody in authority, announced we are going to take an historic step we are going to abolish the censorship of war at the front. I don't recall any comment at the time. We were on the crest of the late sixties in the full tide of the counter-culture, of hippiedom and Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and campus riots and anti-Vietnam marches and we were at the beginning of stretching the 1st amendment (the right of free speech) to cover anything you cared to say, in any sort of language, in any place at any time. It was also the high noon of the popular doctrine that the people have a right (not specified in the Constitution) a right to know everything that's going on between statesmen, especially behind closed doors.

The idea that this should ever happen was first sprung, you may recall, by President Woodrow Wilson way back in Paris at the peace treaty meetings in 1919. Discussions of differences between nations should, he said, be aired for all to hear. One of the phrases that Wilson used as a guide to all future diplomacy took on the weight and resonance of a proverb: "Open covenants openly arrived at." In fact, the phrase was spoken and forgotten. It was not, so far as I can recall, every overly berated in any of the allied countries.

I remember with what heat - and he was not a hot-tempered man - the second secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, with what scorn 30-odd years later he commented on Wilson's prescription. "Open covenants, yes, but they must be secretly arrived at. Publish every twist and turn and argument of a series of negotiations and you'll see the end of diplomacy itself."

Well, we didn't. Came the invention of the press conference embodying the right to know and its extension to almost every public institution and public figure - from presidents to police chiefs to athletes to movie and rock stars to mothers of murdered daughters to the Royals - most relevant to what we're talking about - to every delegate from every member country of the United Nations. So, everything that happened that affected a member nation - from a labour strike to an assassination or a border dispute, required the delegate from that nation to call a press conference and - say something.

This did not mean, as the popular view would have it, that we the people would learn more about the background of the event. What it meant was that diplomats and public men learned a language - the jargon which said nothing very much in many long words and obscure phrases: (It took me about a week during the Korean war, to know what the military meant when they talked about body bags.) This week, I heard a correspondent on the Yugoslav side talk about the relocated transit Albanians.

He was talking about what we call refugees - or driven out refugees or victims of ethnic cleansing. That's our view. But only yesterday, I watched a boisterous parade of very angry Americans carrying flagrant banners with swastikas representing the United States. "Stop the bombing" they said. Several of the protesters were interviewed - they were apparently all Serbian-Americans. There was one woman, an articulate, plainly sincere woman, and she complained in a loud almost sobbing voice, that Americans were getting "only one side of the story."

So what was the other side we should know about? She thought the most shameless part of our coverage was our stress on the pictures of shuffling hordes of ethnic Albanians and our covering commentary that they were being driven from their homes by Mr Milosevic and his soldiers. Outrageous propaganda, she implied. These people it seems were being taken to be rehoused as guests in Serbian homes. They why were so many of them crying? So forlorn and frightened? Because, don't you see, they were being bombed by Nato. Ah, so!

One evening, one network station - I wish more would make a nightly habit of it - played the Belgrade television nightly news, to show that "other side" that we are deprived of. It began very much as our coverage begins - brilliant red explosions against a night sky, close-ups of the flaming skeletons of bombed buildings, with the accompanying reminder that a hospital was next door. Cut now to a hospital ward - a blinded boy - a little girl with a bandaged leg and arm. To sharpen the point, we then saw allied planes simply swooping across a daytime sky and immediately cut to cowed and bent over families of refugees looking up, looking up obviously to the merciless Nato planes. A final shot of about 20 motor cars driving swiftly along a road showed, it said, refugees on their way to their Serbian hosts.

Now there in miniature is the whole art - and curse - of television, which is to say of cinema. In the very early days of the cinema, a Russian director explained to a class of students. He explained using only about six seconds of film what was so wonderful about this new medium and what was so devilishly effective for propaganda purposes. The essence of cinema, the Russian said, is deceit. He showed a close-up of a keyhole. Within a fraction of a second he showed a close-up of a bathtub and the head and shoulders of a young woman in it. That's all. What never crosses your mind, he said, is that the keyhole was on a door in Moscow, and the young lady was photographed in a bathroom in Leningrad.

So put together the new institutions we live by, or, rather, that we perceive reality by. The press conference, which implies our right to know what the big boys are doing and saying backstage. Television, through which somebody presents us with our picture of the world. Thirdly and most important the abolition of front line censorship - and the question then is: can most people in a democracy support a war as steadily as a dictator can make his people support any war - by his priceless ability to choose the pictures, to hold no press conferences, to tell you what's happening at the front.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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