Certainly, news pictures can shock policy-makers just as they do the rest of us. Senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic described to me how regularly they and their top ministers had been moved and troubled by the horrors on television. They "saw images of people who could have been themselves. Yugoslavia kept officials awake at night," said one British source. "People were genuinely upset by the substance of what television showed. (At times) John Major was upset," said a former senior Downing Street official. But television's new power should not be misread. It can highlight problems and help to put them on the policy agenda, but when governments are determined to keep to minimalist, low-risk, low-cost strategies, television reporting does not force them to become engaged. "Governments have to be prepared to cope and have bloody sticky moments," said one official. "They must be willing to sustain the policy line during (television coverage) then after TV has gone away." According to another senior British of ficial involved in the Bosnia issue: "Politicians were prepared to withstand images. The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary will always take a long view. We were driven by TV pressure, but it was never overwhelming."
One paradox is that these pressures are being brought to bear on people who rarely watch television. In Britain, most ministers have a television in their of fice, but few have the time or inclination to watch it. They and officials described how their wives, children, families, office drivers, colleagues or friends see the appalling images, then express their horror. "Did you see that...? You've got to do something," or, "Where is Douglas? He must see this!" In America, television sets proliferate in government offices. President Clinton (who even has CNN in his bathroom) zaps between channels, but "does not really watch anything", according to his staff.
George Bush's National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, watched television "religiously, but only to validate the intelligence he was receiving", according to one former aide. His successor, Anthony Lake, rarely watches it. Mr. Lake says that gruesome television pictures of a dead US soldier in Mogadishu last autumn forced the Clinton administration to realize that "the military situation had deteriorated in a way that we had not frankly recognised", but he has admitted that he himself never saw the images For diplomats used to working "methodically, slowly, systematically and reflectively", as one described it, television pictures from war zones can have a profound impact on the way they work. There is no time for leisurely reflection.
But when television pictures cried out for a determined, active response to end the Bosnian conflict, ministers made sure there was an appearance of action when in reality there was little or no policy impact. They have learned to resist the pressure.
"Television is a big influence on a daily basis, but the key is keeping a balanced, even keel over the long term," said one British official. On Bosnia, another conceded: "TV almost derailed policy on several occasions, but the spine held. It had to. The secret was to respond to limit the damage, and be seen to react without undermining the specific (policy) focus." Or as Britain's UN Ambassador, Sir David Hannay, concluded: "We are a pretty stubborn lot. When it comes to an earth-shattering event we will not be swept offour feet."
Television pictures did not save Vukovar and Dubrovnik. Neither did they save Gorazde from Bosnian Serb bombardment, or tens of thousands in Rwanda from slaughter. In general, television has merely highlighted the West's impotence and its failure to find a diplomatic consensus to prevent or pre-empt war. It has been a catalyst for humanitarian help and financial aid, but has not forced crisis prevention beyond carefully defined diplomatic limits. Kofi Annan, the UN Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, puts it simply: "When governments have a clear policy, they have anticipated a situation and they know what they want to do and where they want to go, then television has little impact. In fact they ride it." But television can identify priorities in crisis management. Philip Zelikow, who spent five years in the US State Department and two years on the US National Security Council, said: "Television is influential on problem recognition, but no television does it (crisis coverage) well enough to have an influence on policy." Occasionally, governments can be overwhelmed. When this happens, ministers and of ficials have confirmed how they found themselves fighting the tide of what one called a "fantastically powerful medium which is often crude and where the words that go with it are often trite". These are the r are moments of panic in the face of real-time news. "When there is a problem, and policy has not been thought through, there is a knee jerk reaction. They have to do something or face a public relations disaster," said Kofi Annan. The effect of television images is therefore profound and fickle. "There are many times when there are horrific images and there is no policy impact", says Rick Inderfurth, Alternate US Representative to the UN. "It is very difficult to work out and anticipate how the CNN factor will come into play. It is like waking up with a big bruise, and you don't know where it came from and what hit you."
Policy-makers curse instant, real-time coverage of armed conflicts for its unpredictability, randomness and emotive character. "The television camera puts an issue on the agenda when it might otherwise not have been there, " a senior Foreign Office official confirmed. Edward Bickham, until last year the special advisor to Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, says television plays too much to the heart and too little to the head. "It presents powerful, emotive images which conjure strong reactions. Anecdotes about individual suffering make compelling television, but they rarely form a good basis of policy. Foreign policy should be made by democratic governments, accountable to Parliament, not in reaction to which trouble spots the news-gathering organisations can afford to cover from time to time."
Television can present only a modest percentage of the ghastliness taking place in a war. Mr Hurd has spoken of the "searchlight" of television, roving over war zones and providing "patchy" coverage. The absence of a satellite dish means significantly less coverage of a crisis; often no dish means no coverage. On the other hand, the presence of a dish can create news coverage because a TV manager can feel an obligation to justify the expense of its deployment. With its instantaneous appetite for words and pictures, the dish also places new pressures on reporters. In the words of Ted Koppel, the leading ABC news anchorman who reported from Vietnam: "The capacity to go live creates its own terrible dynamic... putting someone on the air while an event is unfolding is clearly a technological toMr de force, but it is an impediment, not an aid, to good journalism "You write differently when you know that your piece won't make air for another day or two. You function differently. You have time to think. You have some time to report." Senior US of ficials were blunter. "Television is often wrong. We have to make sure we are right," said one. Another added: "Television does not focus for long enough and it is often too sensational." A third said: "Television is a joke, and it is scary that this is the way many Americans get their news."
In a conflict such as Bosnia, policy-makers do not trust television reporting, which by its very nature is random, piece-meal and therefore flawed. Diplomacy has been humbled in Bosnia, but so too has television, by its inability to represent even a modest percentage of the ghastliness taking place. Aid workers and UN troops witnessed much more that rv cameras never saw.
In Bosnia, world attention bocame possessed by the Serb siege of Sarajevo, where there was instant war within sight and sound of the satellite dish and the press hotel. UN officials say that in many respects the Croat siege of Mostar was more evil than the siege of Sarajevo But Mostar received scant coverage both because of the great dangers of reaching it and reporting its plight, and the reluctance of television organisations to risk deploying a satellite dish. As a result, it was never on the diplomatic radar screen. On the ground, television often creates resentment. I heard complaints from UN military officers peacekeeping in Bosnia that governments often received their first information on a new development in the form of emotive television news packages rather than more considered military reports.
Real-time reporting can have a direct, short-term effect on events. Here are some examples:
- UN peace negotiators described how, during talks in Geneva, the warring parties would see television reports of fighting. Without checking the details they used the information to justify toughening their position or threatening a walk-out, thereby undemmining the talks process.
- On several occasions the appearance of a camera crew halted, or at least postponed, atrocities. Worldwide transmission of incidents like the Croat ambush of the Convoy of Joy at Novi Travnik in the summer of 1993, and the forced expulsions of hundreds of Muslim men from Mostar earlier that year had the welcome effect of forcing the aggressors to relent.
- Television coverage of misery could have both positive and negative impact on humanitarian operations. Sometimes by highlighting a particular instance of misery - such as the mental hospital in Tarcin - television could force a diversion of aid missions already planned and aimed at other targets. Aid of ficials often resented such diversions. Other coverage - like Jeremy Bowen's BBCAssignment on Mostar - had such an emotional effect on UN staff that they decided they had to take great risks to alleviate suffering.
- The controversial British airlift following the BBC report about Irma Hadzimuratovic on a light weekend news day last August showed both the power of television and the resentment it can create. Irma's story struck an emotional chord with viewers in a way less personalised xoverage could not have done. The media clamour for action saved Irma and resulted ~ offers of 1,800 hospital beds worldwide which the aid agencies could not otherwise se zure. But the process created a bitter, destabilising inter-agency confrontation over the priorities in evacuation procedures for the injured. Some found it hard to comprehend the actions of both the news organisations and the British government. "I felt like a numble foot soldier in an army whose high command had taken leave of its collective senses - and I told them so," said Martin Bell.
Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda will not be the end of the horror. In Africa alone, the Red Cross has identified 2,000 possible future ethnic conflicts. In the former Soviet Union and its fringes, ethnographers have pointed to 260 possible "battle lines of the future". Bosnia and Somalia were probably diplomatic watersheds. They defined starkly the limits to any moral imperative for foreign intervention in future conflicts. Rwanda has produced the most horrific pictures of all, yet the public pressure on policy-makers has been negligible. Television cameras will cover some of the carnage. They will create deep emotions. But they are unlikely to make the kind of difference to the fundamental calculations in foreign policy-making that many expect. From now on they will merely highlight conflicts which Westem govemments have no ability to prevent or the decisive political will to solve - that is until the participants themselves are ready to stop fighting. As the number of territorial disputes, ammed ethnic conflicts and civil wars increases, the chances that horrific images will stir govemments into decisive action are diminishing fast and are probably already negligible.
Case 1: Sarajevo - a Question of Balance
Questions have to be raised about the reporting of some elements of the prolonged Sarajevo crisis. At critical moments the accuracy of real-time television coverage - and therefore its impact - was skewed by the absence of crucial facts in the reporting. Bitter UN of ficials describe some journalists and their reporting as "glamour without responsibility". The fact that Bosnian Serb forces surrounded Sarajevo, deploying heavy artillery in the hills and snipers within the city, is not disputed. Neither is their intention to inflict terror on the mainly Muslim population. Repeatedly, however, diplomats and UN military sources interviewed for my study questioned the picture painted by the media, and by television in particular.
When, in July 1993, Bosnian Serb forces tightened their noose around Sarajevo, there followed a sudden influx of reporters and camera crews expecting allied air strikes and sens ing what o ne co rrespond ent cal led " more than a whiff of Baghd ad Mark II". UN officials noted what one described as a "blood-lust" among journalists. One leading correspondent asked a colleague over breakfast: "What is it going to take us to get the US and their allies to intervene here?"
UN sources say that during this critical period of tension Sarajevo was not totally cut off, as most reporting suggested. "Sarajevo was not strangled. That's an emotive phrase," one senior British official complained long after the crisis. However, an emotive wave of television reporting and alarmist newspaper headlines followed. Pressure for a determined Western military response to the Bosnian Serhs was intense and before long NATO authorised the preparation of air strikes. "Air strikes have been wound up by television," said one official. Lord Owen the EU peace negotiator, also questions the balance of coverage. "The Serbs on Mount Igman was onc of the worst examples of bad reporting," he said. "Negotiations were held up by the issue of the Serbs on Igman when it was not an issue. But the press was saying that this was a big strategic change. Izetbegovic (the Bosnian president) sat in his hotel and would not come to the negotiations." My research appears to support complaints by an anonymous UN official who wrote in Foreign Policy magazine: "The press corps there (in Bosnia) developed its own momentum and esprit. Much of it set out to invoke international military intervention against the Serb aggressors - a principal strategy of thc Bosnian government. That induced in some a personal commitment - that lay uneasily with the maintenance of true professional standards."
UN officials complain that reporting often omitted crucial facts that would supply context and balance. One example was the barely reported refusal of the Bosnian government - not the Serbs - to reconnect Sarajevo's gas and electricity supplies in the summer of 1993. Another was their obstruction of international efforts to restore water. Many of my fellow journalists reject such criticisms and are affronted by the suggestion. Yet some concede privately that there are grounds for complaints of distortion, whether inadvertent or premeditated. In a rare acknowledgement of the problem, a Daily Telegraph editorial in April questioned "the credulity of some sections of the media". It concluded: "The media do no service to thc international community by over-simplifying the issues. If journalists are to be the catalyst for foreign policy initiatives they must retain a measure of detachment." In the US in particular, some correspondents blame their editors for exaggerating , for example the beleaguered image of the Bosnian Muslims . As many sou rces confirmod, America - can only cope with "one black hat" - one cowboy bad guy - in any given crisis. Stories vere critical of the Bosnians were often spiked or diluted. "Editors did not want to believe it," one American reporter told me. "Anyone who defies the conventional view will find themselves in deep trouble," said another.
David Binder of the New York Times described a "tyranny of victimology" on a which was promptod by a "herd instinct" among reportcrs. "In Bosnia, "balanced journalism has gone out of the window", said Binder. "One of the reasons is that it is not entertaining. For the masses to be entertained we have to take sides. It is considered politically correct in New York and Washington to bash the Serbs on any and all occasions to the point where it becomes almost racist. Serbs are evil-ised virtually to the exclusion of any reporting that might halance that."
Senior UN officials became concerned that the skewed press reporting of Sarajevo distorted impressions within the UN organisation itself and among members of the Security Council, which in turn distorted UN policy-making.
Case 2: The Market Massacre
Conventional wisdom has it that the determined international responsc to the carnage in Sarajevo market on 5 February 1994 was a direct result of the horrific television images. The reality was different. Television was a catalyst, but equally important diplomatic and military factors had been quietly at work for several weeks.
"It did not take just the television coverage of the Sarajevo massacre to push things forward. Things were moving," said Mark Gearan, the White House communications director. That view is shared by Sir Robin Renwick, the British Ambassador in Washington. The mortar attack, he said, "would not have triggered action if people were not already thinking about action".
In Washington, first reports of the market massacre were said to have "incensed" and "outragod" President Clinton. He and some of his advisers quickly assembled in the White House. Thc President's political choice was between exercising caution and, as one official put it, a realisation that "we've got to do sorlething''. The real pressure came, not from television images of the shredded bodies and carnage, but on the phone from the French government. For weeks the French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppi, had been mobilising EU countries and had already taken a tough line with the United States. By 5 February "the US was already beginning to stiffen their position", according to one source. Then came thc market massacre. "It helped the (French) argument," said Mark Gearan.
Graham Allison, then assistant US Defense Secretary, confirmed that "France was pressing for action. The Sarajevo market massacre crystallised for the Clinton administration that it had to do something." While in people's minds the pictures of the market massacre seemed to mark a turning point and watershed for Sarajevo's plight, it was the incident itself more than the television coverage which began to give a momentum towards a fragile peace for the city.
The UN's new, robust commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Rose, had just arrived with a determination to "tell the Bosnian Serbs that if they continued to behave in a savage way they would themselves suffer savagely" and to mean it. Also, after three years of war, all the institutional instruments in the diplomatic orchestra were playing the same tune: the UN, the EU, NATO and the US. This enabled a unique diplomatic window of opportunity to be seized.
Yet who fired the mortar? Was it indeed a Serb emplacement, or was it a mobile Bosnian mortar? The question is unanswered. Following expert investigations, UN officials no longer say categorically that it was a Serb mortar that killed the 68 people. They say their verdict is "neutral". The UN, in other words, is no longer convinced that the mortar was fired from a Serb position.
This ambiguity poses a vital and awkward question in relation to the power of real-time TV coverage. The immediate assumption on 5 February was that the mortar attack was planned, authorised and fired by the Serbs. The "neutral" verdict now questions that. What if world leaders such as Clinton, Major and Balladur had felt themselves forced by public anger over the television images to launch immediate air strikes against the Serbs, when later investigations questioned the Serb culpability for the market massacre? This is the ultimate fear of ministers, diplomats and the military.
Case 3: Prisoners of War
Few will forget the television pictures of emaciated men in the Bosnian Serb prisoner camps. "Haunting images of emaciated prisoners tore at our consciences," said a top American foreign policy official. ITN's award-winning coverage of the camps, which followed the award-winning newspaper reporting by NewsDay's Roy Gutman, seemed to illustrate the power of television to catapult an issue from nowhere into the realm of public concern and on to the diplomatic agenda. Governments gave the impression of great shock. President Bush and British ministers moved swiftly to condemn the Serbs for abuses which were "intolerable and must be stopped". But a British spokesman said that "reports of death camps are exaggerated".
Two years on, it is clear that for at least two months before ITN's reports the Bush administration, the United Nations and, to a lesser extent, the Red Cross possessed significant but incomplete documentation about deaths and inhuman treatment in the camps. Charitably, it can be said that the television pictures identified a policy vacuum; more likely, they revealed a determined policy of official suppression and unwillingness to take action, especially in the United States.
The impact of ITN's images was mixed and relatively short-lived, however. Thierry Germond of the International Red Cross said governments were "compelled through those pictures to put the issue of prisoners at the top of the agenda - at least for several weeks". But thc international response waned as the news "searchlight", as Douglas Hurd calls it, moved elsewhere. It also assisted the main guilty party - the Bosnian Serbs. Their leader, Radovan Karadzic, exploited the resulting international demand for the closure of the camps to secure, as a quid pro quo, the "humanitarian" removal of refugees from Bosnian soil by the Red Cross. In other words, the television images indirectly stoked further ethnic cleansing.
Case 4: Gorazde
"The last thing we want is pictures from Gorazde - we can only just cope with Sarajevo. " This exasperated outburst, uttered by a senior British official in spring 1992, highlights both the impact and resentment that real-time television reporting can generate. The official had just been told that a BBC TV team had entered Gorazde three months into the siege by Bosnian Serb forces. Their report would show harrowing pictures of starvation, desperation and death. Instantly, the BBC coverage would widen the perception of the Bosnian conflict beyond Sarajevo into an area of terror not yet secn by television or newspaper reporters.
The pictures had an immediate impact. Western governments could no longor claim ignorance about ethnic horrors being perpetrated in vast areas of Bosnia not patrolled by the UN and EC monitoring teams. As a result the UN was obliged to draw up policies for increased humanitarian aid which, many argue, became palliatives for more active diplomatic and military measures to end the war. As Sylvana Foa, the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, later confirmed: "Television is our lifeline to the politicians who want nothing to do with us or hope that the problem will go away from public consciousness. Without you, we have no weapon at all."
Case 5: The Siege
One central complaint voiced by officials, soldiers and diplomats concerned the media reporting of the Serb shelling of Sarajevo. The horror and tragedy of a civilian population targeted by artillery in surrounding hills cannot be overstated. But UN officials who monitored armed exchanges between Bosnians and Serbs say the impression given by headlines such as "Serbs shell Sarajevo, killing XX" was misleading. As one military of ficer based in Sarajevo expressed it: "I would be surprised by what I heard on the news compared to what I saw " He said that the Serb shelling of the Bosnian army "would be reported as Sarajevo under heavy shelling. Reports would say the Serbs fired 500 shells in Sarajevo, without saying that 480 were aimed at the Bosnian army, and maybe 20 at the city."
Given the horrors and emotions, the distinetion here is a fine one. But in Sarajevo the Serb forces were usually portrayed as the guilty party when sometimes (although not always) they had been provoked by a Bosnian military offensive. "A significant proportion of Serb shelling is brought on by Muslim attacks," said one high-ranking British officer. "Television portrays only Muslim weakness and Serb strength, but not Muslim strength," complained another senior officer at the heart of the UN operation. The same officer went on to explain how the Bosnian army often made a point of testing Serb lines in a location which they knew meant that Serb artillery would have to fire shells over the main hotel used by the international press. "Muslims around Zuc would shell Serb villages with a number of mortars. The Serbs responded from artillery in their barracks at Lukavica (on the other side of the city). Shells were fired over the 'Holiday Inn', and over the press's head. This was very loud." The fact that the Serbs had only artillery and mortars and relatively little infantry around Sarajevo, while the Bosnian forces were predominantly infantry with a few mobile mortars, went a long way to furthering the international image of the Bosnian side as the disadvantaged one.
But as UN officials kept repeating, and as a confidential report by LieutenantGeneral Francis Briquemont, the outgoing UNPROFOR commander, confirmed in January 1994, the Bosnians attacked the Serb positions with infantry and the Serbs could only respond with their artillery. Lt-Gen Briquemont wrote: "In Sarajevo the BiH army (Bosnian government) provokes the BSA (Bosnian Serb Army) on a daily basis. This is very easy for us to notice as the BiH mortars are generally located near UNPROFOR units and headquarters".
High-level UN officials ordered their staff in Saraievo to correct the media's impression. They tried but failed. "The media had a blank spot. The media turned a blind eye," said one UN official in Sarajevo. He added: "It just did not fit their preconceptions of what was happening - of the encirelement. "