TV's Talking Headaches

During the war in the Persian Gulf it became common for humorists to mock the battalions of Middle East "experts" who appeared on television night after night to make predictions and supply analysis. For the comment of the general's wife depicted in a New Yorker cartoon ("Oh, he's pretty depressed -- he's the only retired general the networks haven't called") to Andy Rooney's spoof of the "professor of old rocks and stones" on 60 Minutes, the retired generals, policy experts, and "news consultants" became easy targets of such friendly fire.

While humor at the expense of television's ubiquitous experts ran the gamut from satire to derision, the analysts also attracted their share of serious media criticism. Critics and viewers alike found something unsettling in the ease with which the experts shaped the events of the war into sound bites for the evening news.

Many of the articles about television's use of all these experts debunked the experts' predictions. Focusing on how many of the predictions had been off-target, they ignored what should be a more significant question for students of the media: Why did reporters persist in asking the experts for predictions in the first place?

Coverage of the gulf war provides a good opportunity to examine the issues of objectivity and operational bias -- a term I use to describe the emphasis television news organizations place on players, policies, and predictions, on what will happen next as opposed to what lies behind what has already happened.

THE EXPERTS Television's use of experts in its coverage of this war differed from ordinary news analysis in two ways: the producers had the opportunity to plan ahead, and the extended news coverage gave experts more time to speak their minds. Every network news produced I spoke to emphasized the planning that went into his or her organization's coverage of the war. Between Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and the first allied air strikes against Iraq on January 16, 1991, television researchers compiled books listing the regional experts and their specialties. At CBS, for example, researchers began in October to cull newspapers and magazines for the names of Middle East experts. By December they had assembled a bulging briefing book that included the names, addresses, and phone numbers of experts who had already demonstrated their media savvy by appearing in print.

Once the war began the experts had more than the usual eight or nine seconds to make their points. According to CBS producer Diane Wallerstein, the biggest problem was finding enough "talking heads" to fill up the air time. To guarantee the availability of the experts required to help fill that time, each of the networks had three or more under contract. Though actual figures are hard to come by, Newsday's Verne Gay estimates their pay as having been between $ 500 and $ 1,000 per day. Paid consultants were often asked to provide the names of other experts or to evaluate the qualifications of those who had already been tapped. Thus the networks created a self-perpetuating cycle.

A relatively small group of unofficial sources dominated television coverage of the gulf crisis. In the eight months of regularly scheduled network news programming that I examined, 188 individuals appeared on television an average of 4.5 times for a total of 843 appearances. Experts from the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies made up 102 of those appearances, accounting for 12 percent of the total. Most of the others were either retired military personnel or scholars from other think tanks. In many instances they were both. The news organizations used relatively few independent, university-based scholars to explain or interpret the news.

Most of the experts who appeared repeatedly on television were affiliated with institutions located either in New York or Washington. All of the producers I spoke to said that they were willing to book the leading expert regardless of where he or she was located (provided that, as one put it, the expert didn't live in "Podunk"). In spite of these declarations, my data suggest that all of the networks tended to rely on the familiar local faces.

The New York and Washington think tanks have a symbiotic relationship with the networks. Producers find in them a ready supply of media-savvy experts, and television exposure gives the think tanks the publicity they need to procure foundation grants and corporate donations.

If the war created the opportunity for extended news analysis, it also raised a unique set of problems. Of these the most significant was American ignorance of the Middle East -- an ignorance shared by many broadcast journalists. There seems to be a myopia among all Americans about the diversity of peoples and cultures in the Middle East. As Standford University historian Joel Beinin has written, "Would you ask a historian of France to comment on a crisis in Portugal on the ground that they are both European countries?" Though his answer to this rhetorical question was obviously no, during the war Beinin (a historian of Egypt, Palestine, and Israel) was frequently asked to comment on events in Iraq -- a country he had never visited.

This lack of basic knowledge of the region was compounded by the fact that many "Middle East analysts" have political biases. Most of the experts used on television were either former public officials closely associated with the administrations they had served or scholars affiliated with organizations seeking to promote certain policies in the Middle East. Their political biases were, for the most part, apparent.

The biases of the second group of experts -- those affiliated with policy-oriented think tanks -- were more difficult for viewers to assess. The names of many of the think tanks are similar enough to be virtually indistinguishable to the public, and their political agendas are murky at best. Even those think tanks that are not overtly ideological may have political agendas. For example, scholars from the Center for Strategic and International Studies appeared in my sample of experts a total of forty-four times. The CSIS was presented as just another prestigious think tank, although as Howard Kurtz reported in The Washington Post Magazine, it is a "markedly conservative organization that forms a sort of interlocking directorate with the Washington establishment." According to Kurtz, 10 percent of CSIS's funding comes from the Pentagon and other federal agencies, with significant financial support coming from defense contractors such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Rockwell, Honeywell, and Westinghouse. Such es to the military industrial complex undermine CSIS's claim to independent status.

The networks' reliance on experts from CSIS illustrates what I have called the operational bias of television news, a bias that shapes news coverage yet does not conform to the conventional framework of left versus right. what the think-tankers, former public officials, and retired military personnel who appeared on television over and over again had in common was a technical expertise and a desire to shape policy. Meanwhile, rather than using these experts to provide background, context, or analysis, television journalists asked them to generate a never-ending supply of predictions. In just one of dozens of similar examples, on February 5, 1991, ABC anchor Peter Jennings asked "news consultant" Anthony Cordesman the following series of questions -- all of which were concerned with either strategy or tactics or what was going to happen next:

What is the best the U.S. can hope for from the B-52 campaign against the Republican Guard? . . . Can the Iraqis confuse the U.S. on the ground? . . . What did the Pentagon mean by saying it could put companies out of action if 30 to 50 percent of them are destroyed? . . . Can you move out and around during a B-52 attack? Or do you have to stay dug in all the time? . . . Can the Iraqis get themselves back together again a couple of weeks after taking this kind of attack?

Obviously, the American people want and deserve answers to questions like the ones Jennings posed. The safety of American troops, the reliability of U.S. equipment, the determination and morale of the enemy are all issues of vital concern in wartime. The problem is that these were the only kinds of questions that the news organizations asked -- or, indeed, were prepared to ask. The operational bias meant that an divisions of every news organization were concentrated on strategy, tactics, and what was going to happen next. The pool reports, news footage, Pentagon briefings, and expert analysis were all focused on illustrating, expanding, and explaining what CBS News producer Wallerstein referred to as "the picture of the moment."

During the war, journalists also pressed the experts to provide answers to an endless series of unanswerable questions like, "Is Saddam insane?" Lack of credible information in no way deterred the experts from commenting. For example, on January 15, 1991, the CBS Evening News included a report from Mark Phillips on "speculation on what's going on in the mind of Saddam Hussein:"

Mark Phillips -- The analysts see him not as a madman, but as something worse.

Jerrold Post (George Washington University "political psychologist") -- This is a judicious political calculator who is by no means irrational, but dangerous to the extreme. From early on this man has been obsessed with dreams of glory, with the goal of becoming the preeminent strong man in the Arab world.

Phebe Marr (National Defense University) -- The word "dignity" is a word that Saddam uses very frequently. In my view he's got a Rodney Dangerfield complex -- he wants the world's respect.

Geoffrey Kemp (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) -- The mind set, as some people have said, is straight out of The Godfather. This is a Mafia don who understands his own power arrangements and his own principles and his own values very well, but has an awful difficulty relating to what goes on in the rest of the world.

In short, the most important service the experts provided was assistance in creating an atmosphere of gravity and authority on television news programs. By making predictions and attempting to answer the unanswerable, they did little more than supply television viewers with what Steven Waldman in a Washington Monthly piece has called "the illusion of depth."

EXPERTISE

In academia, a scholar claiming to be an expert on the Middle East would -- at the minimum -- have an ability to speak Arabic, have spent time in the region, have completed a significant body of primary research on the area, and be well read in the secondary literature of the field. Surprisingly, none of these considerations are important to television producers. In answer to the question of what makes a good expert, NBC's Mary Alice O'Rourke explained that the best experts have "a lot of contacts," can work the phones, and can "tell you what's going on." This is important, because "things happen fast."

Although some of the network news producers with whom I spoke found it difficult to explain their selection of expert sources, producers for Nightline and The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour could clearly articulate the qualities they believe make one an expert. For Michael Mosettig of MacNeil/Lehrer the most important qualities are "sufficient authority" and the experience of having "operated out in the real world." Mosettig expressed a preference for getting "the players" first. In his words, MacNeil/Lehrer consciously "avoids university seminars on the air."

Nightline's Richard Harris agreed that firsthand experience is important in defining expertise, and pointed out that, since its inception, Nightline has "gone after people who make policy." Harris, whose title is guest booker, emphasized that the contacts an expert maintains make up an important aspect of his or her expertise. Unlike what Harris termed "book experts," Nightline often prefers individuals like Judith Kipper, the "world's greatest networker." Harris's defense of Kipper is revealing in that it articulates a set of criteria for expertise that is dramatically different from its academic counterpart. Though Kipper has spent time in the Middle East, she does not speak Arabic and has written nothing of consequence on the region. Yet Kipper is, by television standards, an expert because, while lacking "good book knowledge," she has had the important "on-ground experiences."

Interestingly, Harris's description of Kipper makes her sound like a kind of super-journalist. Not only does her contractual relationship with ABC News allow the network to use her as a highly paid, part-time correspodent, but the arrangement also permits the organization to contract for her services in lieu of taking on the financial burden of a full-time employee -- an important consideration in an era of severe budget cuts.

Meanwhile, experts who do have real expertise -- be it military, regional, or political -- were not used effectively in television's coverage of the Persian Gulf war. The operational bias meant that experts were almost never asked to put events in a broad historical context. While the first responsibility of television journalists is obviously to provide viewers with news of the latest events, news devoid of context is also biased. A person who watched nothing bug the nightly news would have a view of the gulf war in which Saddam Hussein was a madman who without any provocation or explanation seized the helpless country of Kuwait. With one or two exceptions, there were no stories that presented the background of the crisis in a meaningful way. The issues were framed as a struggle between the forces of good and evil in the world, which were also the terms established by the Bush administration.

Experts, if used thoughtfully, can add real depth to news coverage. But in order for them to do so, the networks must refine their understanding of "expertise" and use experts in a responsible manner -- to provide real background, context, and analysis.

At the very least, they should properly identify expert sources, including an acknowledgement of any particular biases or conflicts of interest. During the gulf war, television news organizations were inconsistent in the way they identified the experts. For example, retired Pentagon and National Security Council aide Anthony Cordesman (who may have been the most ubiquitous expert of them all, with fifty-six appearances in my sample) was presented variously as "Georgetown University professor," military analyst," "defense analyst," "national security analyst," and "ABC News consultant." Cordesman is in reality an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, meaning that he teaches there part-time. It is thus misleading to call him a "Georgetown University professor," which implies a life devoted to teaching, research, and scholarship, rather than to the shaping of public policy.

Like the experts, think tanks were not properly identified. As has already been noted, many policy experts affiliated with think tanks are former public officials. It is misleading to present such individuals as neutral experts rather than as partisans for their former employers. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, who appeared eight times in my sample, is a case in point. As a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, he has a clear point of view -- one that was not properly identified. There is nothing wrong with using opinionated experts who will take a strong position on the issues. The problem arises when an opinionated expert is presented as a neutral one; this is unfair to both the expert and the public.

The networks need not only to be more candid about the experts they use but to use a greater variety of them, as well. As Jay Rosen has observed in Tikkun, technical expertise was the only kind of expertise used in covering the gulf war. By allowing experts in ethics, history, language, and theology to add their voices to the discussion, television would expand the discourse from a simple left-right dichotomy of policy experts to an examination of the issues in all of their complexity. Thus, at a time when producers were complaining of the problem of filling air time, it would not have been difficult to examine the relationship between Iraq and Kuwait from the perspective of the last seventy years rather than the last seventy days.

By decontextualizing the news, broadcast journalists strip events of their meaning. In this informational vacuum, is it any wonder that Americans resort to anti-Arab stereotypes and explain world events as a simplistic confrontation between good and evil?

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