As the War Turns: A New Soap Opera
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By FRANK RICH
Columnist
The New York Times
April 25, 2004
ON Feb. 27, 1968, America's most trusted anchor, CBS's Walter Cronkite, concluded a special report from Vietnam by saying that the "only rational way out" was a negotiated end to the war. To L. B. J., this pronouncement was a political death sentence. "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost Mr. Average Citizen," he confided to his press secretary. A month later he decided not to seek re-election.
If Iraq were Vietnam, then Bob Woodward's appearance on "60 Minutes" last Sunday night might have been when George W. Bush lost "Joe Public" (the current Texan president's preferred term for Mr. Average Citizen). Mr. Woodward, the most famous of American reporters, has not been previously known for being tough on Mr. Bush. If he had been, the president would never have granted him hours of on-the-record interviews. But last Sunday, Mr. Bush appeared to have lost him. Mr. Woodward went so far as to editorialize that "some people" may find the administration's covert financing of the run-up to the war in conflict with the Constitution.
But for all the sobering similarities, Iraq is not Vietnam — not as a war, and even less so as a continuing television event. It has its own media dynamic that may yet drive Mr. Bush from office, but not by the same scenario that Vietnam did Lyndon Johnson. In our fractionalized TV universe, there are no avuncular Cronkites anymore, no single establishment anchor or reporter or journalistic institution that holds such sway over a mass public. There is a new news culture gunning for the current wartime president instead, one that didn't exist in the Vietnam era and that may be more deadly.
Some of that new culture, of course, is technological. Next to the bloodshed of Vietnam, Iraq's is on electronic steroids. Though Vietnam is always identified as the first televised war, we saw much less of it than legend now has it, and on far fewer channels and on far smaller and lower-definition screens. But in an America thronging to "Kill Bill," even the graphic "Mogadishu moment" in Fallujah may have a short-lived impact. The shift in the news culture that most seriously threatens the president is not sensory but emotional: the rise of news as a 24/7 soap opera in which the stars are ordinary people. He is in the crosshairs of The Families.
Mr. Bush knows how to defend himself against journalists — by shutting them out and demonizing them as elites out of touch with Joe Public. He tries to limit troubling pictures, by either forbidding them (soldiers' coffins) or superseding them with triumphalist tableaus of his own (that aircraft carrier). But faced with a revolt of The Families, he buckles. The Families are Joe Public, and you can see his fear of them from the timing of the sudden prime-time news conference that materialized on April 13. For days, TV had been overrun by the families, and on April 12 the phenomenon was at full tilt. All three morning network news shows, the programs that reach a vast audience of American women of voting age, had reports on the families or interviews with them or their immediate neighbors: either the families of 9/11 victims, the families of American troops (whether those killed in Iraq or those forced to extend their stay there) or the families of Americans taken hostage in Iraq. (Or, in the case of CBS's "Early Show," a smorgasbord of all three.)
These families, with their tales of dead or absent fathers and children, tear up the audience, and the White House, which made the strategic error of keeping the president away from mourning families at the war's outset, is now desperate to get with the program. In his reluctant press conference, Mr. Bush didn't seem in command of much once he was forced to improvise, but he knew to hit his rehearsed talking points about the families — a half-dozen times. "I feel incredibly grieved when I meet with family members," he said at one point, adding, "and I do quite frequently." (Message: I care — more than my father ever seemed to.) "I've met with a lot of family members," he reiterated later, "and I do the best I do to console them about the loss of their loved one." (Message: I care as much as Bill Clinton did after Oklahoma City.)
Yet the news conference hasn't stopped the steady flow of families onto television, and Iraq mints new cast members by the day. The phenomenon has sufficiently alarmed the White House that earlier in the month its media allies tried to discredit the 9/11 families, particularly the so-called "Jersey Girls," the four telegenic suburban widows who have forced the administration to reverse its stonewalling of the 9/11 commission at nearly every juncture. Rush Limbaugh labeled Kristen Breitweiser a Democratic operative (in fact, she was a Republican who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000). Bill O'Reilly sounded the alarm that "some 9/11 families have aligned themselves with the far left." But this stab at damage control went nowhere. Knocking widowed "Jersey girls" looks as un-American as badmouthing Bruce Springsteen.
Karl Rove and Karen Hughes know better than to take on those families who sent loved ones to Iraq and are now getting increasingly impatient with the war or turning against it. In any event, the tragic familial soap opera is just too entrenched in the culture for networks to forsake it, no matter what the White House has to say about it. Starting in 1996, when Fox News and MSNBC ended CNN's monopoly in the 24/7 cable news business, the suffering of those who have lost their children or parents, either to apocalyptic calamities or everyday crimes, has become the surefire ratings winner of TV news, cable and network alike. Prior to 9/11, American TV viewers knew more about Chandra Levy's shattered parents and the parents of Columbine victims than about Osama bin Laden. (For the fifth anniversary this week, the Columbine families have returned to TV for an encore.) Even after 9/11, Americans have learned more about the bereft families of Elizabeth Smart and Laci Peterson than Ayatollah al-Sistani. Such families were bigger news "gets" than Paul Wolfowitz and L. Paul Bremer ever were — much as the families and neighbors of Specialist Michelle Witmer, Thomas Hamill and Pfc. Keith Maupin are now.
This is not the same culture that facilitated homefront revulsion with Vietnam. In that war, American troops were vilified (as they are not in this war, even by its most strident critics), and their families at home were not so persistently the middle-class suburbanites of the "Good Morning America"/evening news demographic. The principal protesters were rarely camera-friendly families either, but often surly, long-haired college students. For years, it was easy for TV news (and the public) to dismiss or marginalize those who protested the war.
The real prototype for TV's current treatment of Iraq (as well as for some of the war itself) is the 1979-80 hostage crisis in Iran. In "Roone," his posthumously published memoir, Roone Arledge of ABC News is giddy as he recounts the excitement (and Nielsen rewards) of turning the capturing of 52 Americans in Tehran into a nightly soap opera that was initially titled "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage" before begetting "Nightline." Here, he realized, was a way to turn the complex issues of radical Islam and the Middle East into a must-see cliffhanger featuring ordinary Americans. When the show started to draw as much as 30 percent of the audience, ABC realized it had finally found a way to compete with the invincible Johnny Carson.
In looking back at "America Held Hostage" in her 2001 study, "Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East," Melani McAlister explains that what most riveted the public was not the Ayatollah Khomeini or the largely out-of-view hostages themselves but ABC's focus on the hostage families back home, who collectively proved "a new kind of figure in American political life." These relatives "gave interviews, held their own press conferences and attended commemorative events in local communities." They gained "a powerful status as moral agents in the realm of politics," Ms. McAlister writes, because they were allied with emotions and domesticity "rather than diplomacy, officialdom or politics." The very fact that the families were untainted by politics made it possible for a powerful political narrative to develop around them.
In his memoir, Arledge recalls that Jimmy Carter's White House welcomed this nightly narrative at the start, thinking that ABC's dramatization of the hostage story would make the crisis-focused chief executive look more presidential than his primary challenger, Teddy Kennedy. Instead, ABC's relentless focus on the frustration of the hostage families contributed to the growing impression that Mr. Carter was ineffectual. By the time Election Day rolled around a year after the hostages had been taken, Arledge's show had helped grease the skids for the incumbent's electoral doom.
But "America Held Hostage" was a tiny enterprise compared to the multi-network, multi-program coverage given to today's wartime families. Now it's all families, all the time, and the damage seems to be taking hold faster. Last Sunday, as "60 Minutes" prepared to broadcast its Woodward interview, the historian Niall Ferguson wrote in The New York Times that it was "chilling" to look at polls showing that the number of Americans who think the situation in Iraq was going well had fallen from 85 percent to 35 percent in only a year, with half of Americans already wanting some troop withdrawal. American approval of the Vietnam war, he noted, fell below 40 percent only in 1968, when the American body count was topping 20,000, not the 700 in Iraq to date.
There are many political reasons for this acceleration in national disenchantment in the months of postwar war, most of them visible on the ground in Iraq. But the cultural component cannot be underestimated. Those who apply Vietnam yardsticks to Iraq are still fighting the last quagmire. Vietnam was famously christened the "Living-Room War" by The New Yorker television critic Michael J. Arlen. But in our new living room war, the media battlefield has extended to the actual living rooms where The Families sit for interviews when the networks come calling. Those families are the underestimated guerrillas in the battle for public opinion, and they may yet prove harder for the administration to pacify than the insurgents in Fallujah.
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