COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : Advancing Human Rights by Camcorder : Recent cases show that offending governments can be shamed by footage of abuses.

If any single event marked the dawning of the video age, it was perhaps the death of Bill Stewart. Reporting for ABC News from Managua in the summer of 1979, Stewart was shot in the head by a Nicaraguan soldier--live, on camera. Film of the killing led that night’s TV news, and the anger it provoked changed the course of U.S. policy.

The memory of incidents like that lies at the heart of a new project called Witness, launched recently in New York by the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights. In too many countries, so the committee reasoned, abuses take place unseen by the unblinking eye of a camera. As a result, they are like trees falling in the forest when no one is around; they do not, in effect, make any noise.

When news producers are accused of neglecting human-rights issues, they respond with the oldest line in TV: no picture, no story. Witness proposes to solve that problem, thanks to the revolution in video technology.

The potential was first apparent in “South Africa Now,” an independently produced series that aired for several seasons on PBS. Part of the show’s success was its “inside-out” concept of news coverage, placing small camcorders in the hands of local reporters. Witness goes further; it is now soliciting requests from human-rights monitors across the globe for computers, fax machines and the new generation of 8-mm camcorders that will give TV the images it requires.

A number of recent cases encourage the belief that offending governments can be shamed by the right footage. In one example, the plight of the Kurds was highlighted by official Iraqi film, captured after the Gulf War, that showed government goons kicking and beating Kurdish prisoners. Last summer, ABC showed videotape that had been secretly filmed by Buddhist priests of Tibetans being clubbed by Chinese police. A few months later, after Indonesian troops massacred peaceful marchers in Dili, East Timor, CBS aired footage that had been shot by a British cameraman hiding nearby.

The cynic might reply that the networks were predisposed to look at Chinese and Iraqi abuses because they were already under close scrutiny in Washington. Perhaps Dili made the nightly news only because two American journalists were among those beaten senseless by the Indonesian soldiers.

But the real question is whether the video documentation produced by Witness will ever reach the American public, given the vertiginous speed of change in TV news programming. Once, the obvious outlet would have been network news. But Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather have now been relegated to the 6:30 p.m. ghetto, where they must fight harder all the time for foreign coverage. Programmers have made the 7 p.m. slot the preserve of “Hard Copy” (CBS), “Now It Can be Told” (NBC) and “A Current Affair” (Fox). Only ABC offers an alternative--in the form of “Jeopardy.” No room for foreign stories here.

The new “news” that most viewers experience is edgy, voyeuristic entertainment, packaged in the idioms of video--jump-cuts of bewildering speed; fractured images washed in unnatural colors; exaggerated verite techniques that offer the illusion of reality; pulsing electronic soundtracks and random, disconnected snatches of dialogue. It would take a neurologist, not a media critic, to judge whether this kind of “news” touches the moral centers of the brain at which Witness is directed.

The Witness tapes will enter a marketplace frenzied by the contest for audience share and advertising dollars; human-rights monitors will have to compete with the work of millions of Americans, armed with camcorders, that now washes through newsrooms like so much untreated sewage.

There are still many intelligent TV producers who will welcome Witness as a way of filling the void left by slashed budgets, decimated staffs and vanishing overseas bureaus. But they work for crass and hostile network executives who have made their preferences clear. It will be a battle for any producer to judge Witness by traditional “news” standards--how important is the story?--rather than by the new criteria of entertainment. How powerful a frisson does the footage provoke? Can we see the torturer apply the electrodes?

Witness is founded on the most optimistic ideal of the video age: that it would democratize information and speak truth--literal, visual truth--to power. But can it hope to occupy a significant place in the video world that the programmers have created for us to inhabit?