The Instant-Replay War : Immediacy of TV’s Gulf Coverage Takes Psychological Toll on Daily Life

Since the moment the nation’s television networks broke into their regularly scheduled late-afternoon programming with dramatic accounts of night skies ablaze over Baghdad, the war in the Persian Gulf has landed in American living rooms like a psychological Scud missile.

Viewers have watched transfixed by wall-to-wall, round-the-clock coverage, sending the ratings of Cable News Network to record heights and increasing the viewership of the evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC by 20% since the war began.

Audiences have seen dazzling, video-game-style footage of high-tech weapons in action. They have watched instantaneous reports of missile attack warnings in Israel and Saudi Arabia being relayed by reporters who at the same time were reaching for their gas masks. And they have watched on-scene reporters describe destruction and injury as cameras captured bloodied bodies being carried on stretchers to waiting ambulances.

TV coverage of the Persian Gulf War is so much a part of the ongoing global story that it is hard to stand back and measure exactly the impact the coverage is having on viewers.

But several psychologists, political scientists and communications analysts who study the ways that viewers experience TV news say we are witnessing a new level of viewer involvement because of the Gulf War coverage. That intense involvement, they say, has been affecting viewers psychologically--and could lead to unexpected results in public attitudes toward television and the war itself.

“We’ve never had a ‘live’ war like this, with people at home able to watch Patriot missiles go up and shoot down Scud missiles,” said William C. Adams, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, who studies media coverage and public opinion. “The constant barrage of live coverage is a new experience for the American public.”

“People talk about Vietnam as the first ‘living-room war,’ but it often took weeks for TV stories to come from Vietnam,” said Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan research group that monitors TV coverage. “The Gulf War is the first ‘instant-replay’ war. The war itself, of course, is a momentous event. But the extent of the coverage intensifies the emotional response to the news.”

One of the characteristics of live television coverage in a crisis is the ability of TV to create a kind of town meeting, bringing people together for what is perceived as a shared emotional experience. What’s different about this war is that the instantaneous TV viewing has spilled over into other aspects of people’s lives. “Usually, TV news is one strand of our experience,” Lichter said. “With the Gulf War, you can’t get away from it--it’s what your friends, family and co-workers are talking about.”

A recent survey by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press indicates that viewers are reacting strongly to the Gulf coverage. Eighty-one percent of respondents said they are keeping TV or radio tuned to the news, while 51% said they were reading newspapers more closely. Although newspaper coverage of the Gulf War generally was given high marks, 50% said they felt compelled to watch war news, and many of those reported feelings of sadness, fear and some confusion at the news.

In Savannah, Ga., James Turner, a psychologist at Memorial Medical Center, has been putting some families on a CNN “diet,” suggesting that they limit their intake of live Gulf coverage. He says that even mentally healthy people have been exhibiting signs of addictive behavior, and he has dubbed their behavior “the CNN complex.”

“We’ve found that some people have become anxious when they’re away from the coverage,” Turner said. “They’re worn out physically and mentally from riding the roller coaster of every rumor, and they say they feel like they’re missing something if they don’t see things happen live. For many people, the coverage seems to be having a voyeuristic impact--they get an adrenaline high, without the risk. Others seem to feel that they’re participants in the war effort by watching everything live.

“It’s not good for people to isolate themselves with television for long periods, getting their emotional punches from the tube. The fact is, we cannot continue this kind of intensity and carry on our normal lives.”

Broadcast-TV news executives say that they are making some changes in their coverage now that the war is under way--changes that could help alleviate viewers’ fears. But an executive at CNN said that the network does not plan to change its news-gathering and disseminating policies in light of viewers’ intense reactions to the news.

“If you get into those kinds of considerations, pretty soon you’re censoring coverage of a drive-by murder in Los Angeles,” said Ed Turner, CNN’s vice president in charge of news-gathering. “This story is alarming and sensational, and it has captured people’s attention. All we can do is try and keep a level-headed approach to it.

“I hope that viewers are not distressed by our coverage, but our job is to report the news. If they are distressed by the coverage, maybe they ought to watch entertainment programming for a while.”

Health-care professionals who have observed a flurry of phone calls to local hot lines from stressed-out viewers--and runs on gas masks in cities from New York to Los Angeles--have expressed surprise at the intensity of response from people who have no direct connection to the war. In Boston, where she hosts a local radio-talk show, psychologist Aleta Koman said, “The calls about the Gulf coverage have ranged from Vietnam veterans who said they’d had flashbacks to Vietnam, to people who worried that the whole thing seemed surreal and they were getting numb.”

The depth of a person’s response to the coverage, Koman said, bears some relationship to what is going on in one’s own life. “The events in the Gulf bring up feelings of helplessness,” she said. “One patient of mine, for example, said that she realized that she had reacted so strongly to the war coverage because she’s getting a divorce, and watching coverage connected with her own feelings of lack of control.”

One of the reasons that visual images have such power is that people tend to believe what they’ve seen with their own eyes. Yet TV also isolates a single event or image for viewers, which can lead to a skewed picture of the real scene.

“People who were on the scene in Tel Aviv (during the first missile attacks) would probably have had their attention spread in many ways, worrying about food, or telephoning their families (when they were told to put on their gas masks),” said George Gerbner, who studies viewers’ responses to news at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications. “On TV, a reporter in a gas mask is taken out of the context of where he is, and the whole country (here) focuses on that image.”

When Iraq launched Scud missiles against Israel on the second day of the war, several TV correspondents relayed reports that chemical weapons had been used. The fear that Saddam Hussein could launch chemical warheads had lead the Israeli government to distribute gas masks to its citizens. In their haste and confusion, some reporters relayed reports that Israel apparently intended to immediately retaliate.

“There were some errors made that night,” said Jeff Gralnick, vice president and executive producer for special broadcasts for ABC News. “The Israeli Defense Ministry told people to go into their sealed rooms; (ABC’s correspondent Dean Reynolds) left the impression that his sources were telling us that non-conventional weapons had been used, but his sources later told him we were in error, and we corrected the report in 15 minutes.”

“We reported what the Israeli government said,” CNN’s Ed Turner said. “They said, ‘Put on your gas masks; it might be chemical.’ ”

Another paradox of the Gulf coverage is that, having decided to provide round-the-clock coverage of the crisis, the networks have found themselves with very few pictures of the conflict. Like print journalists, broadcast journalists are operating under Pentagon-mandated restrictions on their news-gathering in the war. Broadcast journalists have complained about the lack of video of allied air attacks. But without seeing the visual effects of bombing, viewers may feel disengaged from the reality of war.

“All the shots of technology at work give the misleading impression that it’s all pushing buttons,” Gerbner said. “(The restrictions) will make the occasional human tragedy even more shocking when it appears.”

Although the ratings for expanded evening newscasts and other Gulf-related TV news programming remain high, staying glued to the tube in the beginning of the conflict could lead to viewer “burnout” in the coming weeks. At WBZ-TV, an NBC affiliate in Boston, program director Barry Schulman said, “News viewing is still very high, but we’re starting to see less demand for wall-to-wall coverage. Some people have called the station to complain about seeing news where they don’t normally see it, preempting entertainment programming.”

“I think that we can expect to see a decline in public attentiveness to detail (to the story) as a means of psychological ‘distancing,’ ” Adams said. “ ‘Distancing’ provides a protective barrier so that one does not have to experience every hour, every day, the intensity that close attentiveness would bring.”

It is difficult to separate the public’s view of the Gulf War from their reactions to how the war is being depicted in the media. But several analysts predict that the extensive TV coverge of the war will lead to increased volatility in American public opinion.

“The intense coverage has mobilized interest and so engaged emotions that it is likely to accelerate swings in public opinion,” Lichter said. “I don’t know whether it’s going to make people more hawkish or more dovish--but I do believe it will accelerate trends in opinion about the war. With the public panting breathlessly for every new event, it’s going to make military decisions more political--and political decisions more psychological.”

“With the lack of visual images so far on TV, the incidents we have seen have had greater emotional impact,” said Doris Graber, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois who has written about the relationship between the media and U.S. politics. “I think we’re likely to see more volatility in public opinion because people started out with euphoria about how the war was going and now seem to be reacting to the slightest setback.”

Although journalists generally are uncomfortable with considering the impact of coverage on their audiences, TV news executives say that they have learned from the first days of their round-the-clock, live marathons and are seeking ways to “normalize” coverage for viewers while giving them the information they need.

“There was no model for how this story would be covered on commercial television, but I think we’ve established a news judgment-driven pattern of programming,” ABC’s Gralnick said. “We’re not putting everything on the air now.”

“One of the things we’ve learned is that we can’t go on the air and then wait for something to happen,” said Steve Friedman, executive producer of NBC’s evening newscasts. “Before we go on the air with an air-attack alert, we make sure it’s not a false alarm.” In addition, Friedman said, “We’re trying to put everything more in context--telling people, for example, that Scud missiles are not a militarily effective weapon.”

Such changes, Friedman maintained, were part of an evolution in the coverage. “It was natural in the beginning of the war to report what was going on. Now it’s fallen into a rhythm where we know more about what’s real and what isn’t.”

Maintaining the balance between scaring people with every bad-news bulletin--and irresponsibly entertaining the public in a time of crisis--is a problem that the networks may have to deal with in coming days.

CNN does not have to deal with the same conflict between news and entertainment. Yet, although CNN has been praised by critics for its dramatic coverage from the scene, some reviewers recently have questioned the network’s practice of going live all the time with reports from the Gulf.

“We don’t want to alarm people unduly,” Turner said. “But this is what we do--we cover the news.”

With satellites continuing to beam both fascinating and fearful news of war into American homes, the Gulf conflict may fulfill the prophecy of media guru Marshall McLuhan. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception,” McLuhan wrote in 1964. Electronic media, McLuhan predicted, would be extensions of the human central nervous system, with viewers “locked in a global embrace.”