Operation Desert Tube : CNN’s War Illuminates the Dark Room of Humanity With a Familiar Bluish Glow

BEFORE DESERT Shield turned to Desert Storm (will the postwar phase be Operation Painted Desert?), one phrase kept ominously poking through the wall of noise. Launching a war, noted a group of somber-faced sages, is like walking into a dark room.

Somehow, the phrase sounded scarier than it should have. We all, at least those of us who turn off any lights in our houses to save the four milliwatts of electricity that will turn the tide, walk into dark rooms every night. Yet that figure of speech carried the intended meaning of a step into a box whose dimensions were unknowable.

But we know now that there was a light in that room. It was the reassuring, slightly bluish glow of a television screen.

If Vietnam was the living room war, bringing the carnage in the jungle to our hearthsides, the Persian Gulf crisis has been the CNN war. The dark room in Baghdad where those three reporters huddled together on the war’s first night had space in it for millions of us, and CBS might as well have had Pee-wee Herman anchoring its coverage. Aside from ABC, it’s been hard for me to watch any coverage but CNN’s. The networks have assumed that you could make television news increasingly silly without penalty, but those chickens have come home to roost: Brokaw or Rather covering this war have had all the authority of Michael Dukakis driving a tank.

Vietnam didn’t visit our living rooms all that regularly. Fred Friendly walked away from CBS News after the network refused to air Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on that war, opting instead for daytime “I Love Lucy” reruns. This war’s monopoly of the tube is less a technological imperative--we have the uplinks and the downlinks and the smoky links, so let’s plug in--than a result of that five-month-long buildup. With a teaser campaign like that, even “Days of Thunder” might have made money.

But the CNN-ness of this war is not only based on that network’s relentless omnipresence and stable demeanor (nobody asks David French or Ralph Wenge “What’s the frequency?”). It is eerily fascinating that this particular form of television has paved a two-way path down the middle of that dark room. There were people in Jerusalem, even reporters from other networks, clearly watching CNN while filing their own reports. The Iraqis knew exactly what those Three Men and a Mike were doing in their Baghdad hotel room because Iraqi officials were watching the reports being telephoned out of their own city being beamed back around the world to their satellite dish. Never has a phone call traveled so far to get across town.

It’s instructive, at this point in the lifetime of television, to look back at the claims that were made for the medium in its infancy. Much rich humor, for example, can be derived from the pronouncements of RCA’s General Sarnoff that TV was too valuable a communications tool to be turned over to the crass importunings of mere commerce. That whirring sound you may have been hearing lately is the general revolving in his resting place as the 15-second spots elbow past each other for a shot at our consciousness.

But that’s a cheap, clean thrill of ironic enjoyment compared to what we must feel confronting the grander claims made for worldwide communication. An early NBC show, “Wide Wide World,” epitomized the dream: Three decades before CNN, live linkups from around the globe were presented with the explicit assumption that they would advance understanding, that man’s horizons, thus widened, would usher in the end of dark rooms.

Score a big one for human nature. The Iraqis can watch all the Larry King they want, but that hasn’t reduced human conflict to the level of “Crossfire.” What started out in the minds of dreamers as an instrument that might banish war has instead become merely the best way to savor the battle’s every nuance. Near the end of the technological century, about the only real change our toys have wrought on us is carpal tunnel syndrome.

Ultimately, the fax machine did not defeat Li Peng. President Marcos got snookered into saying on “This Week With David Brinkley” that he’d hold an election, but it was his own stupidity, not the medium, that greased his fall. It may be a CNN war, but it’s far from a CNN world. That’s the one part of the story, the dark room of the human mind, that Dan Rather can convey more accurately.