TV AND THE GULF WAR : TV Plays Johnny One-Note: Is Nothing Else Going On?

Uh . . . just wondering. But whatever happened to the rest of the world?

These days, a casualty of news . . . is news, as continuous coverage of the Persian Gulf War has swept other events to the outer edges of the media stage, if not into the orchestra pit and out of sight.

As always, TV doesn’t tell us what to think as much as what to think about . In this case, its nightly global agenda--and that of most newspapers--consists almost entirely of the ongoing crisis in the gulf and just about every possible sidebar to the hostilities there.

In our minds, thus, everything else ceases to exist.

Depicting the world narrowly is hardly radical for the networks’ regular half-hour nightly newscasts. Their 22-minute news holes (minus commercials) have always accommodated little more than a smattering of headlines and video bites. Moreover, crippling budget cuts have further hampered the news-gathering capabilities of once-omnipotent network news divisions.

But rarely have they been as relentlessly narrow as now.

TV gave you the impression Monday, for example, that the only truly important international story was the war, even though the networks also granted a little time to the cancellation of next month’s planned Moscow summit.

A survey of the day’s newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC and their Los Angeles affiliates showed the following:

Although KABC was much more war-obsessed than KCBS and KNBC, all three affiliates offered a much broader agenda of local and regional news than their corresponding networks did national and international news.

That was true even though both ABC and CBS have doubled their national newscasts to an hour because of the war.

It was a typical network news day. Except for the summit story, NBC’s half-hour “Nightly News” was a virtual warcast, as was ABC’s hourlong “World News Tonight.” Besides the war, “CBS Evening News” found time in its hour only for the summit story, another story noting the fifth anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle disaster and another about the death of football great Red Grange.

That the Gulf War is today’s 800-pound gorilla of news stories--one that deserves to spread across an entire newscast--is beyond question. However, that in doing so it bumps coverage of other news is also beyond question.

Is the upheaval in the Soviet Union worth no more than 60 or 90 seconds? And whatever happened to Cuba, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Greece, Pakistan, India, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa? Whatever happened to education? The homeless? AIDS?

One item that did make two of Monday’s network newscasts--sort of--was CNN correspondent Peter Arnett’s interview with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Arnett is the standout veteran war reporter being allowed by the Iraqis to remain in Baghdad and report on the war primarily from their perspective. CNN on Monday confirmed that reporter Margaret Lowrie and three of her CNN colleagues have joined Arnett in Baghdad after receiving visas from the Iraqis.

Although CNN said it was not planning to run the Iraqi-videotaped interview with Hussein until today, Arnett gave the essence of it in a phone report on CNN on Monday.

This was Hussein’s first interview with a U.S. journalist since well before the war, and it was news that he granted it to Arnett, who would be giving us at least some insight into the Iraqi leader’s state of mind, however orchestrated. Yet, competitors being competitors, not everyone saw it that way.

Dan Rather gave the interview a prominent headline on CBS. Tom Brokaw reported Hussein’s “interview with CNN”--with no mention of Arnett--as a lead into one of NBC’s own stories. ABC did not mention the interview in “World News Tonight,” although it did in a news update later in the evening.

In a way, the diminishing of Arnett was symbolic of the state of TV news today. Despite the war-induced presence of more TV news than ever, Americans are probably less informed about the world now than at any time in recent years.