Role of TV News in Shaping Foreign Policy Under Increasing Scrutiny : Media: Influence may be overstated, but technology is requiring nation’s leaders to have new kinds of communication skills and a clearer focus.

As the United States ponders invading the island nation of Haiti to oust its military junta, a troubling question arises: In the age of instant 24-hour news, is U.S. foreign policy being whipsawed by the quick emotionalism of TV?

In Somalia, the George Bush Administration sent in troops after the public was barraged by wrenching TV images of starvation. Then the Clinton Administration a year later began to pull those troops out--the mission not accomplished--after the public was barraged with wrenching images of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets.

Some of the most thoughtful voices in the country on foreign policy, such as author George S. Kennan and Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), have suggested that U.S. foreign policy is too often based on the capricious and emotional pull of television images, which in Haiti have included desperate refugees being fished from the sea and scenes of unconscionable poverty ashore.

A closer look reveals that television news has not played as decisive a role in policy-making as the critics imagine, even in Somalia.

But technology is requiring leaders to have new kinds of communication skills and a clearer focus to resist the hyper-velocity of round-the-clock media. And here the Clinton Administration, even its own officials concede, is suffering.

One reason observers of foreign policy are so worried is that television coverage of foreign affairs in recent years has become less coherent and more oriented to stoking crises.

Ten and 20 years ago, the networks had webs of overseas bureaus and covered trends and events abroad on a regular basis. Today, due to network cutbacks in foreign bureaus and fears of audience boredom, television news has become a kind of information mercenary. It tends to cover only wars and disasters--usually with reporters who parachute in from elsewhere and may know little about the country.

In particular, a detailed study of the records from the Vanderbilt University television archives reveals:

* The three broadcast network news divisions today average only two foreign stories a night, averaging six minutes per show--and these stories almost always involve violence. Regular coverage of foreign politics and trends has all but vanished.

* Ten years ago, the three networks averaged more than double that many stories, and nearly 50% more time, and covered politics, foreign policy and social trends regularly.

* Twenty years ago, the networks did even more foreign stories each night, an average of close to six stories a night, though they were usually shorter than today. The cumulative message on TV today is that the rest of the world is a confusing and dangerous place filled with civil war and ethnic and nationalist hatreds.

Driving the change is a drastic cutback in the number of network overseas bureaus. CBS today has only four foreign bureaus, down from close to 20 in its heyday. NBC now has nine, and ABC 13. In 1993, CBS even stopped having a full-time State Department correspondent. Network executives acknowledge that they no longer attempt to systematically cover trends, events and politics of the major capitals of the world.

But they say they have no choice, given the realities of economics.

Yes, perhaps CBS “did better work” overseas in many places of the world 20 years ago, said Lane Venardos, vice president of hard news and special events for CBS News. “But the issue is nobody can afford to do that in this day and age. So it doesn’t do any good to talk about what might have been. It is a new age.”

What’s more, surveys consistently reveal that the public doesn’t care as much about foreign news. So while the networks have good people abroad, executives limit foreign news on their broadcasts.

“There is a feeling that certainly exists at CBS that the State Department and the process of diplomacy is not a good TV story,” said CBS correspondent David Martin.

This crisis mentality on television, said David Gergen, the Clinton Administration adviser to the State Department, “makes it harder to sustain a foreign policy and explain why you are doing it.”

But there is little evidence that crisis pictures on television routinely pressure policy-makers into action.

In 1993, for instance, the Bosnian civil war was the most reported story on network television, accounting for 1,071 minutes of the three major network’s evening newscasts, nearly twice as much as the second-most covered story, health care, according to the Tyndall Report, a weekly monitor of the networks.

Yet the Clinton Administration, like George Bush’s before it, resisted the pressure, often amid torrid criticism from the press.

During the final months of Bush’s presidency, reporters say, his assistant secretary of state for public affairs, Margaret Tutwiler, even called news organizations to urge them to cover Bosnia, hoping that the pictures would pressure her Administration to intervene.

But the policy didn’t change.

Consider China: Bush resisted the pressure of pictures from China’s Tian An Men Square massacre in 1989, said his press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, because “Bush knew China and knew there was nothing we could do that would be effective.”

Even consider Somalia: Yes, Bush acted in Somalia after seeing the TV pictures. But the pictures, officials explain now, were not the reason.

“It came at a time when he was trying to leave office and didn’t want to face the charges of being a lame duck and dropping the ball for an incoming President,” said one high-ranking Bush official involved in the discussions.

Perhaps more important, the Bush Administration thought it saw a way, however mistakenly, for the U.S. military to act without risk--by providing humanitarian aid.

The consideration of whether a particular action might work is more likely to drive policy than television, policy-makers say.

Nevertheless, communications technology has compressed time throughout the process of diplomacy, formally one of the world’s most deliberative environments, thereby putting a premium on decisiveness.

In the Gulf War, the Bush Administration faced a special pressure when the Iraqis released pictures of a bunker where 400 women and children were killed.

“The visual was horrendous,” recalled Tutwiler. “A response couldn’t wait three days. How much stuff do we declassify instantly” in order to justify the bombing to the public, she asked rhetorically.

Then there was the morning Saddam Hussein suddenly sent a communique saying he was willing to withdraw from Kuwait and the Bush Administration felt it had to respond quickly.

After a quick translation of the message, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Bush decided the overture was laden with conditions and insincere. “Only 30 minutes had elapsed when President Bush told me to go on TV, to use CNN, essentially, to deliver a message to 26 governments simultaneously that we were rejecting the message,” Fitzwater said.

All this may make the chances of mistakes greater, said Fitzwater. But most who have been involved in these crises believe that even these moments need not dictate the decision-making.

Hodding Carter III, assistant secretary of state during Jimmy Carter’s Administration, goes even further. “I think it requires an official absence of policy and a loss of nerve for the pictures to drive policy.”

Rather than driving Administrations to act quickly, most research shows that the overwhelming pull on public opinion is to keep the country out of foreign adventures.

“People are looking for an exit,” said Clinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. “They turned the channel when the Berlin Wall came down, and after all the years of sacrifice from the Cold War, they are largely turning the channel on Bosnia.”

Indeed, Greenberg says a close look at the numbers suggests the public does not even care much if a politician hesitates all that much over foreign policy.

“What is interesting is how little foreign policy events seem to be linked to Clinton’s overall job performance approval rating. After Somalia, Clinton’s foreign policy rating dropped 20 points, but his job performance rating only budged a couple points.”

In Haiti, as in Bosnia, public sentiment generally has been against intervention. A moment in Haiti that hurt the Clinton Administration came last year when about 100 supporters of the military junta showed up at the Port-au-Prince docks carrying sticks, prompting a U.S. Navy ship to abort a landing of U.S. and Canadian military trainers paving the way for a return to democracy there.

But what hurt more, State Department officials concede now, was the impression of American weakness, which could have been avoided if the ship had waited a day or two rather than seeming to be scared away by the sight of men with sticks.

The problem in the Clinton Administration, even some of its own officials concede privately, is that many of its top people lack some of the more modern skills that television demands.

Vice President Al Gore’s debate with businessman Ross Perot over the North American Free Trade Agreement vote “was very creative, probably the single most creative use of television to advance foreign policy,” said State Department spokesman Michael D. McCurry. But other than that, “we haven’t had much.”

Others are even more blunt. On television, Secretary of State Warren Christopher “looks like he just walked out of a bad opera,” said one former high-ranking State Department official.

National Security Adviser Anthony Lake also suffers on the airwaves. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott is reluctant to become too visible and trump his boss. That leaves only Clinton and Gore, who want to emphasize domestic policy.

Inside the Bush State Department, Baker and his aides planned three months ahead what they wanted to accomplish and what news coverage they hoped to initiate. “Sometimes we were successful and could do the whole list, but rarely,” said one Bush official.

The Clinton team has had trouble doing that, officials acknowledge privately.

A more difficult question may come if the U.S. decides to invade Haiti: How do officials handle live coverage from the battlefront?

For Haiti, journalists have agreed to be in a Defense Department press pool, which travels with an early wave of troops. This group would submit to escorts and censorship.

But the pool is supposed to dissolve after a day or two. Beyond that neither the military nor the press has done much planning.

“When things hit,” said Barry Dunsmore, a 30-year veteran of ABC News, “we send out the ground station and think about who is the prettiest person to send with it.”