The Tyranny of Imagery
A lie gets halfway round the world before truth has time to put its trousers on. So said Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's distinguished secretary of state, but his complaint today is more than a bit behind the times, given the explosion of information on the Internet and 24-7 cable TV. Lies travel faster than truth because truth is more complicated. Today, however, a simple lie is more lethal than ever because the imagery that accompanies it is so quickly absorbed by the mind. What we see on TV seems so real-"But I saw it with my own eyes!"-that false perceptions often become impossible to correct. We used to say power comes from the barrel of a gun. Now it comes from the lens of the video camera.
Remember Somalia, just over a decade ago? Television confronted us with images of millions of people starving because of a clan war; half a million died. Asked why he decided to intervene in Somalia and not Sudan, the first President Bush wrote: "Somalia was where television was." Indeed. When TV next gave us the image of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, after a horrific firefight memorialized in the book Black Hawk Down, it led President Clinton to pull our troops out. TV giveth, and TV taketh away.
Global TV has been a significant factor in international relations since CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. "CNN is the 16th member of the Security Council," said Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the secretary general of the United Nations. Television may not have decided policy, but the "CNN effect" certainly helped set the agenda. Witness Tiananmen Square, where the cruel nature of the regime in Beijing was forever memorialized by the image of a skinny student staring down the barrel of a tank. Witness America's support for Mikhail Gorbachev against the military coup after President George H. W. Bush saw TV cameras record Boris Yeltsin clambering onto the top of a tank. Witness the indelible horror of the September 11 attacks. Some images are unforgettably powerful, signal moments not just in photojournalism but in politics, an instance when the image truly represents a dramatic truth.
Terrorists, perhaps better than anyone, understand how images amplify their message. They know that horror and drama are magnets for media attention, so they manufacture moments of horror and drama. Instead of simply killing their victims in cold blood, they behead them on camera and post the video on a friendly website. A handful of depraved men with video cameras, perhaps better than anyone, can make leaders with the strongest armies in the world back off. Osama bin Laden's terrorists understand this. Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was explicit in his message to the former al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi: In the war against the West, media are half the battle.
HD detail. This has great relevance in the conflicts of our day between states and nonstate actors such as terrorist organizations, when the gap between media and public expectations of decisive victory and the ability of the military to deliver such clear results is so wide. Take casualties: Given our powerful conventional and high-tech military capabilities, the public wants to know why we can't limit our casualties. But these wars are fought among people in countries where the enemy doesn't wear uniforms to separate, and where it hides among the local populace, making casualties inevitable.
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