Public, Pundits Split Over Kosovo Story

At first glance, the grainy image of three POWs on a recent Newsweek cover seemed to echo America’s worst fears about Kosovo becoming another Vietnam: “Horror and Hostages,” it read. “How America Stumbled Into a No-Win War.”

For days, the U.S. media were filled with grim stories about the captured soldiers, their families and hometowns. The conventional wisdom was that millions would be shocked and quickly lose their stomach for any further engagement.

But as powerful as the POW footage was, it was soon supplanted by heartbreaking pictures of refugees streaming out of Kosovo. Americans were riveted--and now tell pollsters they would support the use of ground troops to end the conflict, with margins ranging from 55% in a New York Times/CBS survey to 61% in a Washington Post/ABC poll. Those numbers climbed higher Thursday, with 62% supporting ground troops in a Harris poll. This came even as Americans saw disturbing new television pictures of dead and wounded refugees, whose convoy may have been accidentally bombed by a NATO warplane.

Once again, pundits wondered whether the latest tragedy might shatter public support for the bombing, despite officials’ comments that such accidents are inevitable in war.

“You had so many folks in the media maundering on about the prisoners and the downed pilot, as if the republic was about to collapse, as if we had Iranian hostages here,” said television critic and author Michael Arlen. “But the public was way ahead of them. They felt badly for the families, yet they understand this is war, and that we now have a professional army.”

It’s long been said of politicians and generals that they are forever fighting the last war--slow to recognize new contingencies--and the same may apply to journalists. Chastened by the experience of Vietnam, Iran, Somalia and other U.S. foreign policy disasters, a great many columnists, television pundits and other commentators were quick to apply past lessons and assumptions to the current situation, thinking that Americans have no appetite for casualties and military action.

During recent talk shows, for example, ABC-TV’s Sam Donaldson warned ominously that Americans won’t support another Vietnam-like quagmire; the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt, National Public Radio’s Nina Totenburg and PBS commentator Mark Shields voiced fears that President Clinton has not educated Americans about the dangers of a land campaign in Yugoslavia, and that public opinion would quickly turn if the conflict went badly.

That may yet prove to be the case, but after three weeks, the split between the U.S. public and some influential segments of the media over Kosovo is telling. To some, it suggests that the press is once again out of step with most Americans, as they seemed to be during the impeachment controversy.

“Most of the people whose opinions are influential in the media today are those for whom the principal reference is the Vietnam War,” said Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley. “But there are now two generations of people who have come of age with no memory of that conflict, and it’s not surprising that many pundits routinely pass over them.”

Indeed, a large number of U.S. media voices are from a generation with little or no military experience, and this also may color their attitudes, according to John Keegan, a British military historian and the defense editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph.

“I think the media in your country is still very much in a post-Vietnam mode, and they haven’t learned that public opinion has moved on,” he said. “In the early going, at least they were forever one step ahead of what they believed to be an ever-softening public opinion. Now they’re backpedaling.”

To be sure, broadcast and print organizations have committed large resources to covering the multinational conflict, and individual reporters have shown great personal courage in getting the story. In addition, some experts defend the media’s overall performance, saying it’s too early to judge public opinion.

“The press isn’t out of step on this, because we haven’t really kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” said historian Stanley Karnow. “We want bloodless wars, and although we feel for the Kosavars, we don’t want to lose anybody. It’s a testament to our Vietnam experience.”

Like Kosovo, the Vietnam conflict was framed by TV and photo images that dramatically shaped public opinion: A naked girl burned by napalm; a suspected Viet Cong soldier having his brains blown out at point-blank range; U.S. helicopters fleeing Saigon.

It took days, however, to transmit those pictures from the field into American living rooms. Back then, most people watched television news usually at night and almost never during the day. Now, images of war and disaster are broadcast instantaneously, and some observers say the saturation of 24-hour cable TV news coverage has robbed many images of the power to shock.

While the POW story initially held center stage, the sheer repetition of the footage with no new details may have dulled the story’s emotional edge, according to Susan Moeller, a Brandeis University journalism professor and the author of “Compassion Fatigue,” a study of media and disasters.

“Pictures lose their ability to shock you if they keep getting repeated over a daily news cycle,” she noted. “If the picture of a teary-eyed child works once, the next time you have to show a wounded child, then a dying child, then a child dying on camera. You’ve got to keep pushing the envelope.”

It’s especially important in a war where there has been only limited hard information to report and few understand what is really happening in the field. Citing security needs, the Pentagon initially clamped a blackout on details about bombing raids, and in the absence of hard data, both sides have been waging a video propaganda video war--the Serbs triumphantly showing pictures of civilians killed in the refugee convoy, and the allies taking the unprecedented step of playing an audio tape by a NATO pilot who mistakenly attacked the civilians, trying to explain what went wrong.

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans are not much interested in foreign news, but once again Kosovo has broken the mold. “Viewers seem to be thinking bigger on this story, and I’m surprised,” said Cissy Baker, Washington bureau chief for Tribune Broadcasting Co., which feeds 16 local news broadcasts around the country, including KTLA in Los Angeles.

“The Kosovo story has been consistently at the top of the news or in the first block of stories in local TV news all around the country,” she noted. “We’re seeing pictures of ethnic cleansing that we haven’t really seen before, and people across the board are paying very close attention.”

Few dispute the power of images to affect mass opinion, but the media can go overboard, said UCLA history professor Joyce Appleby. “The press has an almost knee-jerk need to humanize every story,” she said. “It’s easy to do, and so we get the human drama in everything, whether it’s Olympic athletes, people on trial or captured soldiers in the U.S. Army.”

This can enrich coverage in the long run, she added, but in the short term it crowds out thoughtful analysis and a strategic view of the conflict. “There are times when you have to risk lives. Yes, we have prisoners, but many more people are also in peril.”

As the conflict deepens, editors and reporters may be re-learning an important lesson, said former CNN Vice President Ed Turner. “Americans are prepared to be educated and informed,” he said. “They saw images of suffering and they had an open mind. No one should ever take their opinions for granted.”