Ted Koppel, the host of ABC-TV’s “Nightline,” surely has been forced to confront many peculiar prospects, but perhaps few as curious as this: Adolf Hitler still alive.
But there Koppel was Tuesday, answering, not asking, questions at a congressional hearing and listening to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) expound on the perils of TV to the conduct of foreign policy.
“I’m not convinced, as a World War II veteran, that Hitler wouldn’t still be alive in his dotage today if we had the cameras covering the landing at Normandy and some of the other places,” said Hyde, a decent and kind man whose admirable passion can at times overcome his powers of hypothesis.
“The emotional buttons that are pushed by seeing people killed and maimed are very powerful, and I think history would have gone in an entirely different direction had we had the coverage that the media today would want of that kind of landing,” Hyde said, suggesting that Americans’ desire for total victory might have been eroded.
Proving that the U.S. Congress could briefly be mistaken for Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Koppel, CNN executive Ed Turner and historian Michael Beschloss had been beckoned to counsel Hyde and colleagues on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on “The Impact of Television on U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Koppel, our video secretary of state, put on an impressive performance, even if the interrogation by your elected representatives-including Rockford Republican Don Manzullo and Iowa’s Jim Leach, President Clinton’s professorial congressional nemesis on Whitewater-was short of daunting.
Committee Chairman Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) set the stage thus: TV can educate and inform wonderfully, providing instant information to leaders during a crisis, but it can encourage hasty actions and allow the media “to set the agenda,” inspiring selective concern. Why our interest in Somalia, not Sudan? Bosnia, not Nagorno-Karabakh? TV can prompt sound bites masquerading as policy.
Koppel’s response included declarations that TV’s critics could exploit.
There was his assessment of the general state of journalism: Because of the 1st Amendment, and lack of real criteria for being, or licensing of, a journalist, “We have a hell of a lot of bad journalists, a few mediocre journalists, a lot of good journalists, and some outstanding journalists. It’s awfully difficult to defend the profession.” (Even if you strain to call it one.)
Then there was the famous anchor-witness on economic imperatives: When Peter Jennings and Dan Rather get dispatched to South Africa, their networks’ simultaneous allocation of resources means that other stories will get short shrift.
And there was Koppel on misuse of the medium: “Focusing a camera on a live event is a miraculous technological achievement, but it’s not journalism. We are all, I think, prisoners of the electronic tail wagging the editorial dog.”
But his basic point verged on the irrefutable and is all the more vivid at a time when U.S. foreign policy seems, at minimum, a work in progress, or, at worst, in chaos.
If an administration has a clear, well-argued policy, and defends it to the voters, the potential influence of media coverage is diluted.
But if that’s not the case, he said, “it doesn’t much matter whether the news arrives by satellite or clipper ship, eventually the policy will fail.”
If there was a final prospect to conjure, it wasn’t a frail, wizened Hitler pushing a walker down Collins Avenue in Miami Beach and privately musing about the good old days in Berlin.
It was, as Koppel suggested to Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), a technological revolution that would make the stunning impact of media in Eastern Europe-where, for example, Romanians watched CNN’s coverage of revolts elsewhere and were encouraged to start their own-look like “peanuts.”
In the future, he said, people won’t need to rely on a network or local station since there’ll be “tens of millions of very small (satellite) dishes which will enable them to receive direct broadcasting from anywhere in the world.”
If one seeks to curb TV’s coverage of foreign affairs in some orderly fashion, it’s too late.
“The technology has outstripped that,” said Koppel.
The view of an expert
Murray Kempton, the wondrous, cerebral and ironic 76-year-old newspaper columnist, dropped by to say hello on a rare visit to a place he covered long ago for the New Republic.
The pomposity of many journalists who cover Washington, said the author of a new collection, “Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events” (Times Books), stems from their faulty premise that actions of great moment surround them and that the presidency is an agent for grand change worthy of intricate dissection.
“But there’s a total resistance to change here,” he said with soft-spoken delicacy.
“So, by definition, nothing happens, except the development of excuses for not doing anything. If you’re (a columnist here) you have to write four a week and fake it.”
Circus of the stars
The annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association is rife with the sort of apple-polishing of the powerful by journalists that is endemic here. The association’s president even included in his welcome to President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton and the 2,700 assembled other guests his effusive praise of the first lady’s Whitewater press conference the day before.
Fortunately, the gathering includes a touch of surrealism, even if it’s too deliberate by half as media organizations strive to outdo one another in nabbing celebrities, not just from the political Establishment, as their guests.
Thus, you could wander to Vanity Fair’s pre-dinner cocktail party and stumble upon actors Tom Selleck and Jack Palance and Northwestern University’s dynamo historian-cum-journalist Garry Wills. Figure it out.
Wandering the ballroom during dinner later, you might stop and find “Northern Exposure’s” Janine Turner to your left, Labor Secretary Robert Reich to your right, Clinton straight ahead, and media mogul Barry Diller picking at his uninspired surf and turf, little noticed.
“Chicago Tribune bureau chief? Wow, really neat. Nice to meet you, man, nice to meet you, man,” said my best friend for 30 seconds, actor Dennis Hopper, another guest of Vanity Fair.
“Now, the She-cah-go Twib-yune, you must call my ministah of ca-mune-ah-cations in NEW York because I am speaking to zee B’Nai B’rith in She-cah-go August 22. Or is it August 21? I’m not sure, Mr. She-cah-go Twib-yune,” counseled Dr. Ruth Westheimer, invitee of the defiantly right-leaning Washington Times newspaper.
The Tribune, noble bastion of Heartland values, opted for anti-charisma, despite my shameless and failed attempt to lure Jerry Seinfeld. Our guests included Dawn Clark Netsch, Illinois’ unlikely Democratic governor candidate, who, I’m happy to report, seems healthily removed from Seinfeld and the rest of our TV-driven culture.
I had to thus inform her who “Saturday Night Live’s” Al Franken, the dinner’s host, was. It was likewise with several references in his very funny speech, like one to Senor Wences, the charmingly mediocre ventriloquist who graced “The Ed Sullivan Show” for years.
It’s all right? It’s all right. Good for Netsch.
