TV AND THE GULF WAR : TV Networks Shying From Vivid Violence

The “spin doctors”--professional manipulators of television--have taken over political conventions and presidential debates, so it is no surprise that they have now taken over the Gulf War.

In this case, the spin doctors are government information brokers who have learned well the smooth Madison Avenue-style control over television, from prime-time entertainment to White House news conferences.

They have absorbed the network lesson that viewers are kept most contented with entertainment shows that don’t upset them--the theory of “least objectionable programming.” Thus, with little first-hand information, we now have the least-objectionable war.

It is true that lives and national security may be at stake as reports shoot instantaneously around the new, wired world--and those are legitimate concerns.

But most significantly, the government’s public relations experts seem to understand that TV networks, although often chastised for violent programs, are not comfortable with violence in all its ugly realities.

Nothing would stop violent TV entertainment faster than, say, vivid shots of body parts being blown away in a gun battle.

The truth is, TV never has been violent enough to cause true revulsion against violence. Death is usually nice and neat--a bullet causing little visual damage and little, if any, blood.

In the same way, if the ugly deaths of the Gulf War, which we have not seen and probably will see very little of, were presented on TV, they would likely increase public revulsion.

That is why our TV picture of the conflict thus far is reminiscent of the World War II movie newsreels that presented a clean, heroic view of our participation--simplistic, noble and, in truth, not unreasonable at the time.

But during the Vietnam War, TV’s news ratings declined when the real ugliness of death and destruction became everyday sights at home.

Network affiliate stations, generally conservative, rebelled against the Big Three networks, which they felt represented a New York-based, Eastern Establishment, anti-war attitude. Happy-talk news began to blossom on local TV as an antidote to the depressing reports being presented.

Thus, while network news departments surely want less public relations and more access to the Gulf War, the government’s doling out of comforting reports may well be secretly satisfying to money-minded network bookkeepers looking for any excuse not to interrupt regular programs and lose advertising revenue.

Except for moments of high drama in the war, the networks, all struggling for their existence in the new world of TV alternatives, have reverted almost entirely to regular programming.

It is now the February sweeps period--when ratings help determine the advertising prices of local stations. This absurd exercise in profit-making is of no importance during a war, but it is there nonetheless.

There is, in short, a kind of unintentional collaboration in which the war-by-press-release is playing into the hands of the networks’ desire to have their cake and eat it, too--covering what has to be covered, and cutting away to entertainment when they have no access to what is happening in the Middle East.

Just this week, an NBC research executive said the network’s ratings, which have been poor during the February sweeps, were affected by war coverage.

No one at any network, of course, would have the nerve or bad taste to suggest that the Big Three do less than respond fully to the ground action that is expected soon in the war.

But for anything of less than gigantic import, one gets the feeling that network management, already trying to dump political conventions and turn them over to CNN, would likewise like to do the same with the running reporting of the Gulf War. That’s exactly what has happened thus far.