MR. LAKE, President's National Security Advisor: "The pulse of the planet has accelerated dramatically."

MR. KALB: "Technology is currently exploding."

CNN ANCHOR: "Welcome to our viewers around the world."

ADM. PEASE: "CNN was onboard the aircraft carrier."

MR. LIVINGSTON: "...broadcasting live instantaneously on a global basis."

MR. KALB: "There isn't an escape from information any longer."

ADM. PEASE: "Everything has to be done fast."

PETER ARNETT: "The technology is here. We're not going to roll back the technology."

MR. KALB: "It has obliterated time and space."

ADM. SHANAHAN: I'm Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information. In a past program, we looked at the interface between the press and the Pentagon. Our program today is going to examine the good and not-so-good influences that instantaneous worldwide TV has on our foreign and military policies.

TV ANCHOR: "The speech had been well-leaked in advance had been leaked of Mikhail Gorbachev's..."

NARRATOR: A decade ago in the Soviet Union, it became evident to Mikhail Gorbachev that his society could no longer be shielded from Western ideas and he ushered in the era of glasnost, or "openness." Visions of capitalist prosperity invaded the Eastern Bloc by way of TV, underscoring the economic decay in those countries.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall was demolished, an event unimaginable just a few years earlier. Thanks to satellites and instant global communications, TV images of the celebration circulated around the world. In the wake of the Soviet breakup, popular revolts brought down one communist government after another in Eastern Europe; news pictures of one uprising inspiring the next.

Computers, fax machines, video cassettes and pervasive media coverage provided the means for ordinary citizens to share ideas in ways that totalitarian governments couldn't control. In the end, communism was brought down not by military force, but by the growing power of electronic communication.

MR. LAKE, National Security Advisor (in a speech, September 21, 1993.): "The pulse of the planet has accelerated dramatically and with it, the pace of change in human events. Computers, faxes, fiber optic cables and satellites all speed the flow of information around the globe."

MR. ARNETT: Today, you can take a briefcase-size satellite phone anywhere in the world, from the middle of any action and make a report.

NARRATOR: CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, whose live reports from Baghdad during the American bombing raids in January 1991 helped boost CNN's reputation worldwide, has covered 17 wars in a career spanning four decades.

MR. ARNETT: It means that there's far more opportunity for reporters to get access to action areas and to come up with insightful, accurate reports and commentaries.

NARRATOR: But while Western leaders celebrate the effect of pervasive media coverage in the former Soviet bloc, many bemoan its influence on their own governments. Today, the term "CNN effect" has come to mean the impact of live broadcasting of international events on the way foreign policy is conducted.

MR. LAKE (from same speech): "Ultimately, the world's acceleration creates new and diverse ways for us to exert our influence, if we choose to do so, but increases the likelihood that if we do not, rapid events, instantly reported, may overwhelm us."

NARRATOR: Congress decided the issue was so important, it held a hearing on the impact of TV on foreign policy.

REP. HAMILTON (D-IN) (House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, 26 April '94): "TV can educate the public and focus attention on faroff trouble spots that may otherwise be ignored. It can provide world leaders the means to communicate with each other directly in a crisis. But television also encourages policymakers to react quickly, perhaps too quickly to a crisis."

MR. KALB: The strength of television's impact often has to do with the strength of the government's vision of policy.

NARRATOR: Marvin Kalb, formerly the chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS and NBC, now heads the Shorenstein Barone Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard and is a leading scholar on government media relations.

MR. KALB: If the government has a strong vision, then television is not likely to have a major effect. If the government has an ambivalent position with respect to a problem, then pictures can have a big effect.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: What the "CNN effect" is is a whole bunch of things.

NARRATOR: Professor Steve Livingston teaches political communications at George Washington University. For the past ten years, he has studied the relationship between the news media and politics.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: The "CNN effect" can be, in some instances, an acceleration of policy; in other instances, it can be an impediment to policy. In other instances, it's a dialogue between diplomats taking place instantaneously. At other instances, it's a dialogue between warring parties: The Scud missile crew on the one end, the Patriot missile crew on the other.

NARRATOR: Whereas, in the past a president had days in which to weigh a response to a foreign crisis, today a stirring TV image can create a demand for an instantaneous reply.

ADM. PEASE: Pictures are so powerful.

NARRATOR: Rear Admiral Kendell Pease has directed Navy public affairs efforts around the world during his 27-year career and today is the chief of Navy Information.

ADM. PEASE: Television and CNN and satellites has changed the commander's role. Everything has to be done fast. There are a lot of people who want it fast and sometimes you want it real bad and sometimes it comes out bad because you don't have all the facts.

NARRATOR: Should the president fail to respond to an unfolding foreign crisis, in the vacuum TV images can quickly come to frame the issue and influence policy.

MR. KOPPEL, ABC News (before House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, 26 April '94): "The point, Mr. Chairman, and it is equally applicable to Haiti, and Bosnia, and Korea, is that when an administration fails to set forth a clear agenda of its own, it will become the prisoner of somebody else's."

NARRATOR: However, some recent studies have suggested that television's impact on foreign policy is commonly exaggerated. these studies acknowledge that stark TV reports of human suffering can occasionally prompt a decision to send humanitarian aid. But, they argue, TV pictures rarely convince governments to take decisive military action to end the conflict, such as the war in Bosnia, no matter how heart-rending the images.

October 1962: Unbeknownst to the American public, Soviet nuclear missiles are shipped to Cuba. For the next six days, President Kennedy and his advisors, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, deliberated secretly about how to respond. During the two weeks of the Cuban missile crisis, Secretary McNamara did not turn on the television once.

MR. KALB (in a speech): "Time was always a natural ally of the journalist and of the politicians or the president, because time meant there was a moment to reflect. Now because of this, quote, 'CNN Factor,' it appears before us in a matter of instant seconds. It is there. The world is now wired. And as a wired world, everything is connected. And there then is an obligation on the part of people to respond."

NARRATOR: What would have happened if the Cuban missile crisis had occurred today?

PROF. LIVINGSTON: It's often suggested that today because of the nature of instantaneous global media, with satellite imagery being made available to the networks, that we would be a in situation of where the president would be forced to respond within a 24-hour news cycle or less to allegations that he isn't exercising his discretion correctly in meeting this challenge from the Soviet Union. And that, it has been suggested, would have led to nuclear war.

NARRATOR: On the other hand, the glare of today's media spotlight might have focussed attention on the problem before it reached crisis proportions, leading to an earlier diplomatic solution.

In June 1989, television crews happened to be in China covering Gorbachev's historic visit to that country. When the pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square, CNN satellites beamed the dramatic footage around the world live.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: The Tiananmen Square episode is pointed to by most scholars as the starting point, if you will, of the true global media revolution.

NARRATOR: The US quickly condemned the massacre and briefly imposed trade sanctions. By contrast, a previous violent crack-down on Chinese dissenters in 1986 drew no response from Western leaders, largely because there were no cameras there.

ADM. PEASE: I think any smart commander understands that the media are going to be there and accommodate the media.

NARRATOR: The CNN effect has profound implications for the military. Army Field Manual 100-5, entitled "Fighting Future Wars," states: "Dramatic visual presentations can rapidly influence public -- and therefore, political -- opinion, so that the political underpinnings of war and operations other than war may suddenly change with no prior indication to the commander in the field. ...Strategic direction and, therefore, the range of operations and their duration may be dramatically affected."

NARRATOR: With the end of the Cold War, the American public's sense of an external enemy has diminished and national attention has turned inward. More than ever, the decision to use military force must be made in conjunction with clearly stated policy goals in order to withstand the impact of TV pictures of both American and civilian casualties.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: I think that military operations will be conducted with an eye towards how they look back home, simply as evidenced by recent history. I mean, the -- the tremendous effort that goes into shaping and managing and framing how an operation is perceived.

ADM. PEASE: I'm not sure real-time television has an impact on the operation. I think whether there'd be real-time television there or not, we'd still do the military operation to the best of our ability, realizing what our mission is, and carrying out the mission.

The introduction of TV on the battlefield doesn't change your option. You always want to have the least number of casualties that you possibly can.

NARRATOR: But Peter Arnett believes that the presence of television cameras can make a difference.

MR. ARNETT: The coverage that CNN and others did from Baghdad tended to draw attention to civilian casualties, tended to temper the military tactics in that, tended to limit the number of air strikes against the cities, and then ultimately the involvement possibly of hurting civilians.

In terms of the soldiers, more access to a battlefield gives greater understanding to the public and politician about what's going on and it's more likely to temper tactics. And I think that this is a positive fact in terms of controlling excesses on the battlefield.

NARRATOR: Because of the impact such images can have on public opinion, military planners feel they must fight short and relatively bloodless wars. This belief was a driving force behind the Bush administration strategy in the 1991 war with Iraq.

MR. KALB: The Pentagon leadership during the Gulf War stated its goals with remarkable candor, I thought. I thought that Defense Secretary Cheney time and time again said that this has to be a short war, the American people are not going to tolerate a long, drawn out war with extended casualty lists and, therefore, everything had to be done in a compact period of time. In order to succeed, the American people had to be onboard.

Therefore, it was absolutely essential that television, the great instrument of communication, be on the side of the government and present the government's point of view about the war without any distractions allowed. And that was the purpose of the control that the Pentagon exercised over the television networks.

NARRATOR: In the Gulf War, the Pentagon realized that television news images, selectively controlled and released, could be used to promote the military's agenda instead of working against it. By restricting the network's access to the front lines and providing its own video news releases, the military featured the precision of high-tech weapons and downplayed the human consequences of war.

MR. KALB: The field of vision was narrowed to that part of the war that the Pentagon chose to accent; namely, a successful high-tech operation. There were no distractions. Nothing occupied the eye other than what the Pentagon provided.

NARRATOR: After the war, it came to light that only seven percent of the bombs dropped on Iraq were so-called "smart bombs." The remainder were conventional ordnance that often produces widespread civilian destruction.

Video shot by the networks can also serve to galvanize public support. In the Gulf War, images of Patriot missiles knocking Iraqi Scuds out of the nighttime sky over Tel Aviv created a public perception of the wonders of American military technology and persuaded the Israelis to refrain from attacking Iraq, which would have shattered the allied coalition.

The coverage also had another effect.

MS. DANIELS, NBC Broadcast, January 1991: "Arthur, it's curious with all the restrictions that have been imposed, why have they allowed the live satellites to stay up? Could it be that the military actually wants Saddam to see the Patriots taking out the Scuds?"

MR. KENT, NBC Reporter: "You might almost think so."

NARRATOR: Again, after the war it came out that the Patriot's accuracy had been far less than had been reported during the war, destroying targets less than half the time.

REPORTER: "I saw one Patriot leave the launch pad. It sent up to climb, then suddenly it turned back on itself, finally striking the ground behind some offices and apartments just half-a-mile away."

NARRATOR: One study indicated that malfunctioning Patriots and fragmented Scuds actually caused more damage in Israel than they prevented.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: The misinformation was pretty rampant there in terms of the overall effectiveness, as we've come to learn through subsequent studies. But one could argue that they were effective in another regard. They were effective at allaying the fears of the Israeli population.

NARRATOR: Another way the Pentagon found it could use the power of real-time television to its advantage was by permitting live broadcasts of military news briefings from the Gulf War.

REPORTER: [Press Briefing, 27 February '91] "What are your impressions of Saddam Hussein as a military strategist?"

GEN SCHWARTZKOPF: "Hah!" (Laughter.) "He is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he

as a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that." (Laughter.)

NARRATOR: The live broadcasts provided the military with direct access to the American public, effectively eliminating the press's traditional role of analyzing and commenting upon the military briefings.

PENTAGON BRIEFER: "For security reasons, we can't divulge what that is, I'm afraid."

NARRATOR: But future military operations are unlikely to recreate the conditions of the Gulf War. Today, the armed forces find themselves increasingly involved in operations other than war, meaning peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief. In these cases, there is no definable front and the news media are often in location before the troops arrive, making them more difficult for the military to manage.

MR. ARNETT: It's not as though we are natural antagonists against any military action at all. But they have to realize that we are there and if you get less cooperation from the military, it's just going to be irksome for us, but it's not going to change our coverage. And I think this is the message I would give to the Pentagon.

There's going to be reporters present at all these future conflicts and they should learn to deal with us and to understand what our role is rather than attempt to restrict us and control us. Those days are gone.

NARRATOR: Today, the military is making a large investment in the development of "smart weapons" that are intended to minimize civilian casualties and unintentional damage.

The development of non-lethal weapons, designed to incapacitate without killing, also takes a step toward limiting wartime images of bloodied casualties.

ADM. PEASE: We, the military, brought out the sticky foam. That's technology advancing, more so than public opinion saying we shouldn't have casualties. That's technology that gives that commander the ability to make decisions above saying the rifle is the only answer.

NARRATOR: But a study entitled "The Military Technical Revolution," conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies under contract to the Department of Defense, contains a section entitled, "Tend to the US Image," which states:

"When the US interests at stake in a crisis or war are less than obvious to the public, the promise of a less destructive operation will allow US leaders to wield their military instrument more effectively."

NARRATOR: When it was founded in 1980, CNN was a small, maverick operation. Today, CNN has an annual budget of $400 million, 2500 employees, and 150 correspondents based in 29 bureaus around the world, all of whom can report live via satellite to 145 countries. Peter Arnett believes that CNN's presence can serve as a complement to the diplomatic process.

MR. ARNETT: In the past year, North Korea, Haiti and Bosnia, three occasions when Jimmy Carter visited to attempt crisis resolution, was successful in all three. And one of the main reasons he succeeded, he had CNN along. There was instant coverage, meaning he could get instant reaction to his comments. There was world attention on what he was doing. This heightened the diplomatic effort and helped resolve these issues very quickly. Left to diplomacy, these had simmered for years, these issues, so we speeded up the process.

NARRATOR: But many policymakers are apprehensive of this accelerated decisionmaking cycle, longing for a way to minimize the news media's impact.

MR. ARNETT: Well, to them I would say that the technology is here, we're not going to roll back the technology. They have to learn to live with the technology.

NARRATOR: The majority of Americans depend on television as their primary source of information about the world. The public has gained access to distant events in a way it never could before.

MR. SHAW, CNN Anchor: "This is the place for complete coverage of live, breaking news wherever it occurs."

NARRATOR: Yet there are limitations in the way television explains the world. TV news tends to feature subjects that are immediate, dramatic and involve human interest, rather than addressing more complicated background causes.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: When television journalism is parachute journalism, when you fly in to the most recent crisis, it is impossible for you to have the kinds of sources there that are going to give you the nuanced view.

NARRATOR: When Somalia was devastated by famine in 1992, images of human misery filled our news reports. The power of these images led President Bush to dispatch US forces to deliver humanitarian aid. As depicted on TV, the problem seemed straightforward enough: send tons of food and the logistical support to distribute it.

What television didn't explain was the historical causes of the problem and the complex political conditions that would make it so hard to resolve. As a result, what started as a quick humanitarian relief mission evolved into a failed attempt at warlord hunting and culminated with a raid that left 18 US troops dead and 78 wounded.

Finally, when this footage of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu hit the news, President Clinton quickly called for an end to the US military mission.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: It wasn't the presence so much of the pictures in Somalia of the dead Americans, it was the absence of a clear rationale as to what we were doing pursuing Aideed. What was the end point? What was the final objective in Somalia? That was the key.

MR. LAKE (21 Sept. '93 speech): "Public pressure for our humanitarian engagement increasingly may be driven by televised images, which can depend, in turn, on such considerations as where CNN decides to send its camera crews."

NARRATOR: Have you heard much about the wars taking place in the Sudan, Angola, Tajikistan, or East Timor? More people have died in these conflicts than in the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia, but the expense and danger of sending crews to these other war zones keeps them off the screen and, consequently, low on the foreign policy agenda.

The power of the video image lies in the "truth value" viewers attach to it. Unlike words, we feel that "the camera never lies." But it doesn't tell the whole truth. TV pictures are framed, edited and organized into a "news package" that can't fully reflect the real situation. A handful of TV news images comes to stand for the complicated conditions behind them. Our leaders often react to pictures rather than relying on sound argument. And TV's choppy, fast-paced nature forces them to speak in sound bites.

ADM. PEASE: I think TV news gives you an accurate picture of what they portray. I don't think it gives you a complete picture, they can't. Sound bite -- 15 seconds? 11 seconds? It doesn't give you the opportunity to really get into the middle.

NARRATOR: Often the foreign policy process itself comes to mimic the cursory and arbitrary sweep of the TV eye.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: Before the airplanes ever leave for the mission, we should have a clear sense of why we are there. And in some instances in the post-Cold War era, we're not entirely sure what we are doing and why we are doing it. We're still in search of a foreign policy.

NARRATOR: Yet there's no denying that the TV spotlight has often served to force policymakers to deal with a crisis that in the past, unseen, they might have chosen to ignore.

MR. ARNETT: Considering what happened to the world this century before instant communications, before CNN -- World War I, World War II, the enormous conflicts that shadowed this past century so terribly -- that I think the role of the media in helping to speed up diplomacy or putting new emphasis on reality is not a negative thing. I think it could be a positive thing for the future of the world and for resolving crises.

NARRATOR: From Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1455 to the development of semaphore, to the first circuit board, the acceleration of information flow has been occurring for as long as there has been communication. Today, it's picking up speed at a rate that challenges our ability to adapt to the changes it brings.

PROF. LIVINGSTON: If we can grasp that complexity of what we mean by the "CNN effect," we as the public can better understand what our government is trying to do, what we are trying to do as a nation. We can better understand those instances where we as a people need to be involved in the policymaking process, and it's just simply bunk that we somehow should be separated from the elite policymakers.

ADM. SHANAHAN: Due in part to the "CNN effect," the military is planning short, neat, high-tech wars with minimum casualties in order to gain the continued support of the American people. The real danger here is that war suddenly becomes more attractive. So, we need to keep in mind that war is war, dead is dead, be it a short or long war. Direct military intervention should not be the weapon of choice in resolving international disputes, the "CNN effect" or no "CNN effect."

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.