(Originally appeared in Crosslines, published by the International Center for Humanitarian Reporting)

In conflict zones, the TV news organisations arrive with their satellite dishes, Marisat telephones and lap-top computers. In Haiti they arrived and were installed well before American troops landed. In Chechnya western TV cameras were broadcasting from Grozny before the Russian invasion began. The images were show-stoppers but they had virtually no effect on policy making.

In such crises the reaction of government officials from both west and east is predictably similar. They curse what they consider the emotive, skewed power of the resulting real-time TV images live from a battlefield like Sarajevo, or the carnage like Rwanda and the resulting catastrophe in Goma. They complain that vivid, shocking, emotive TV images force them to respond and act in a way they would prefer not to.

But do they respond as they claim TV is forcing them to?

A Self-Perpetuating Myth

Conventional wisdom has it that such real-time TV coverage of Bosnia or Somalia or Rwanda creates the demand that something must be done ; that it drives the making of foreign policy. However, that wisdom is an ill-informed, self-perpetuating myth.

TV s ability to provide rapid, raw, real-time images as a video ticker-tape service should not be mistaken for a power to sway policy makers. Frequently the relationship is not as profound as conventional wisdom assumes or believes. Indeed, as the horrors of Chechnya pointed up most sharply of all last December, ministers and officials resist with an iron will the emotive pressures created by TV images.

After an intensive period of study and interviewing more than one hundred key players in policy making on conflict, I conclude that neither TV journalists nor humanitarian organisations should delude themselves about the impact of their images on the making of foreign policy.

On a few occasions the impact can be great, especially when it comes to responding with the palliative of humanitarian aid. Routinely, however, there is little or no policy impact when the TV pictures seem to cry out for a pro-active foreign policy response to end a conflict. 

Apparent Policy Action

In 1991 and 1992 horrifying TV images of Vukovar, Dubrovnik and the massacres in central Bosnia never forced a determined western response to bring war in the former Yugoslavia. They merely created pressure for apparent policy action. The result was declarations of condemnation of horror at the EU or UN, or the dispatch of negotiating missions to meet Balkan politicians who had their own war agenda, every intention of deceiving and no intention of responding to western diplomacy.

Despite the daily horrors on TV, I believe western policy found refuge in actions which were high profile and suggested commitment, but which in reality were minimalist, low-risk, low-cost and known to have little chance of ending the conflict. For example one leading British official involved in the 1992 London conference on the former Yugoslavia described it to me much later as a stalling machinery created for public relations purposes where the UK and US agreed to smother Bosnia Herzegovina with cotton wool in order to subdue the fighting .

More than ever the scale of response is determined not by TV images but by each nation s national interest and political will. Increasingly this is negligible among main UN donor countries. A high profile response that makes good TV must not be confused for an underlying change in policy designed to end fighting and bring any conflict to a close.

For example, I would argue that dispatching water trucks from California or logisticians from Frankfurt in response to TV pictures of bodies being tipped into the cholera pits of Goma was not a fundamental foreign policy switch designed to end a crisis. It was a knee-jerk, high-profile response which carried little political risk or cost. It made good television. It also gave the impression of engagement and deep concern at a time when -- in President Clinton s case -- domestic policies like health care reform and gun control had hit the rocks. 

Cynical yes. But all my sources candidly made clear that this is the political reality, especially when public opinion is increasingly soft and shallow towards the never ending proliferation of regional conflicts.

Actions like the response to Goma are of limited use and must therefore be considered as alibis. In Rwanda they masked the fundamental diplomatic impotence of the big western powers who for three months monitored the mass slaughter seen on TV, backed UN resolutions, but then failed to provide the political will or heavy airlift capability to ship in to the war zone the pledged 5,500 UN troops. 

As in Chechnya six months later, intermittent but horrifying TV coverage of Rwanda did nothing to prevent and solve the root causes of a catastrophe which the big powers defined as outside their tightly defined sphere of national interest. Worse still, NGOs describe the alibi responses prompted by vivid TV images in several different conflicts as often misguided and inappropriate. 

In Goma the creation of a crude, emergency water supply system inadvertently laid the foundation for the infrastructure of permanent refugee camps and a resulting gang culture. In the former Yugoslavia some argue that humanitarian operations prompted by the moral pressures of TV coverage not only saved lives, but also distorted the natural dynamics of war and probably prolonged the conflict. 

The full arguments have been more expertly described by NGO representatives in Crosslines columns and elsewhere. But there still remains a complex trail of cause and effect to unravel which goes something like this.

TV pictures have an emotive impact. Government officials know they cannot do nothing. Yet the iron political will to do nothing and the underlying strategic imperatives NOT to become engaged mean they can never authorise action as pro-active as the pictures seem to demand. So they resort to high profile responses of limited duration that produce rapid, visual evidence of action but which have little hope of helping to solve the underlying crisis. 

Translated to Goma this meant easing the conditions for those who survived disease, which in turn provided the emotional comfort of permanence and foreign protection . There was virtually nothing, however, to encourage the refugees to return home. By the time TV might have been in a position to pressure big donor governments to act in that direction the news cycle had moved on to another crisis -- Bosnia again. Goma was forgotten. So too the increasingly permanent camps in Tanzania.

Sharply Defined Limits

Thus inherent in any cause and effect relationship between TV images and foreign policy are sharply defined limits -- just like the ultimate ability of ministers and diplomats to end a war. Real-time TV coverage of the proliferation of regional conflicts creates emotions and short term moral pressures. But ultimately -- as the Clinton Administration s President Decision Directive PDD 25 published in May 1994 makes clear -- TV coverage makes no difference to the fundamental calculations in foreign policy making. 

There is no hard and fast paradigm, however. 

On occasions like the creation of the Srebrenica Safe Area in Bosnia, the relationship can be profound. On Srebrenica, Tony Birtley s video-8 images of the suffering of the Muslim population single-handedly forced the non-aligned nations on the UN Security Council to override the objections of the Permanent Five that Safe Areas were a bad principle to adopt and bad precedent to set. 

But a year later the Security Council Chairman who forced through the Safe Area resolution -- Ambassador Diego Arria from Venezuela -- conceded to me the error of succumbing to television s pressures. Looking back he told me : I did not know that what we were creating was a trap .

For any conflict or crisis neither journalists, diplomats nor NGO s will be able to predict a cause and effect pattern with any certainty. In general the relationship is complex, uncomfortable, often contradictory and still evolving in uncertain fashion that defies any automatic assumptions. 

Rick Inderfurth, Alternate US Representative to the United Nations, expressed most vividly the fickle dichotomy. There are many times when there are horrific images and there is no policy impact. It is very difficult to work out and anticipate how the CNN factor will come into play. It is like waking up with a big bruise, and you don t know where it came from and what hit you .

However, in my view, understanding the nature of the big bruise and the dynamics which create it by way of television coverage, must be a central part of all future study of conflict resolution. 

As a conflict develops, the perception generated (or not) by television coverage can have a pivotal role in influencing whether governments and diplomats have any political will to seize the narrow window of opportunity to prevent or pre-empt a conflict.

Politicians, diplomats and the military instinctively distrust TV news coverage as trite, crude, incomplete and therefore unreliable. Suspicion still prevails. That is why they curse television s something must be done pressures. 

But there is a sharp new learning curve. Judging by the stream of invitations I have received from foreign and defence ministries, as well as various UN departments and NGO s, there is a growing realisation that understanding the uncertain dynamics between real-time TV coverage and government decision-making are now a central element in the vexed challenges of conflict prevention, pre-emption and resolution -- as well as the scale of humanitarian response.

*Nik Gowing is Diplomatic Editor of ITN's Channel Four News, London

Crosslines Volume 3(2) April, 1995, Copyright © 1996 ICHR. All rights reserved. For comments and enquiries, e-mail to: info.ichr@itu.ch or crosslines@aol.com

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