Though in later years he frequently invoked his midwestern roots and called himself a Missourian, Walt Disney was made for Hollywood. He loved dress-up and make-believe, was boisterous, outgoing, self-aggrandizing, and histrionic, and craved attention. Hollywood was his spiritual destination. Even for the general public, roughly forty million of whom, or one-third of the country’s population, attended the movies each week in the early 1920s, Hollywood was more than a provider of entertainment. It was the capital of the imagination, the symbolic center of release and recklessness, the “most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks,” as British observer Alistair Cooke would later put it. Hollywood was where one went to realize one’s dreams, which was why Walt’s grandfathers had both headed to California before being sidetracked and why Walt himself had now gone there. Just as his youthful energy converged with and was intensified by the postwar national spirit, in Hollywood the dynastic Disney dreams of escape — and Walt’s own longing for transport that had been nursed on the farm in Marceline and then expressed in drawing and in animation — converged with a national vicariousness. In Hollywood he was home.
But if Walt Disney was made for Hollywood, he himself questioned whether Hollywood was made for him. He hardly looked like a movie swell. He arrived early in August 1923 in his borrowed suit with nothing but pluck and his peculiar self-confidence. (Despite his penury, as his wife would later tell it, he had traveled first-class because he “always wanted the best way.”) His own clothes made him seem shabby and downscale, as did the months of near-starvation in Kansas City that had melted off the pounds he had gained in France and made him cadaverous. “He looked like the devil,” Roy [Disney, Walt's brother] recalled. “I remember he had a hacking cough, and I used to tell him, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t you get TB!’”
Despite his outward confidence, he was worried about how he would make his way in Hollywood. Though he had brought his reel of “Alice’s Wonderland” [a live action-animated film of Walt's] and his drawing implements with him, he was not hopeful about his prospects in animation. He now felt he had gotten into the business too late, that it was too insular, that he would not really be able to break into the big time of animation, which was, in any case, centered in New York. “I had put my drawing board away,” he told an interviewer years later. “What I wanted to do was get a job in a studio — any studio, doing anything,” though in truth his aspirations were larger and more fanciful. He now hoped to get a job as a live-action director somewhere.
He loved motion picture studios — the very source of fantasy. Early one morning that first week he took a bus out to Universal City in the San Fernando Valley and by flashing his old Universal News press card, which he had kept from the time he worked as a stringer shooting newsreels, he managed to wangle a pass. He wandered the lot, walking through the sets, not leaving until late that night. He called it “one of the big thrills I had.” Soon afterward he toured the Vitagraph studio with his cousin Alice Allen, who was visiting from the Midwest. He also got onto the Paramount lot, where he ran into an old Kansas City acquaintance who was picking up work as an extra and who encouraged Walt to apply for a job on a Western riding a horse; he got the role, but the shoot was rained out, and Walt was replaced when it was rescheduled. He spent time exploring Metro too.
Roy, who had been working as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman before suffering a relapse of his tuberculosis and landing back in the Veterans Hospital in Sawtelle in what would later become the Westwood section of Los Angeles, thought Walt was lazy and typically overconfident (an “infection,” Roy called it) about his employment prospects, only pretending to apply for jobs so that he could linger at the studios. “Tomorrow was always going to be the answer to all his problems,” Roy said. “He was hanging around this town and I kept saying to him, ‘Why don’t you get a job?’ And he could have got a job, I’m sure, but he didn’t want a job.” But contrary to Roy’s impression, Walt was not just wandering dreamily through studios. He spent his first two months on those expeditions trying to convince someone to hire him and even had the temerity to approach producers for advice. At the same time he unsuccessfully trudged around Los Angeles with his print of “Alice’s Wonderland” hoping to find a distributor. Some suggested he take the print to New York, where the distributors might be more receptive. Since Walt did not have the money to go east himself to lobby, he sent the print to a well-connected intermediary named Jack Alicoate, who represented Lloyd’s Film Storage Corp., where the film had been held during the Laugh-O-Gram dust-up with Pictorial, and Alicoate, a generous man, circulated it. Grabbing at anything while it made the rounds and he awaited the distributors’ verdict, Walt revived his comic strip, “Mr. George’s Wife,” and pitched that too, without any more success than he was having with his film. He even had new stationery printed: “Walt Disney Cartoonist.”
By September, already despairing of getting a job as a director and having no prospects on “Alice,” he reverted to an old plan. One of the first things he had done when he reached Los Angeles was to buy a Pathi camera at Peterson’s Camera Exchange — “Cameras affected him the way alcohol affects dipsomaniacs,” his daughter Diane would write — and rig it up with a secondhand motor. Now he visited the theater impresario Alexander Pantages, a prominent vaudeville promoter who also owned several of the larger motion picture houses in Los Angeles. Walt did not get to see Pantages himself. He met instead with a factotum outside Pantages’s office, to whom he suggested a “special little joke reel” just like the Newman Laugh-O-grams, only with “the name of Pantages splashed all over it, to add prestige and keep the name Pantages before his theatre patrons.” The man dismissed Walt, saying that they were not interested, but Pantages happened to have overheard the conversation, emerged from his inner sanctum, and said he would like to see a reel. Walt headed back to Uncle Robert’s house, where he was staying, and began to animate a sample.
And there was another glimmer of hope. Even before leaving Kansas City, Walt had been sending dozens of letters soliciting distributors for “Alice” with his promise of having “just discovered something new and clever in animated cartoons!” and receiving polite rejections when he received anything at all. But among those to whom he had written while he was still in Kansas City trying to stave off bankruptcy was an unusual distributor named Margaret Winkler — unusual because she was the first and only female film distributor in the country. An immigrant from Budapest, Hungary, Winkler was a petite, round-faced, plain, and pleasant-looking young woman — she was twenty-eight — but her appearance belied what her son would call a feral energy, a quick mind, and a short temper. She had been the secretary to Harry Warner of the Warner Bros. film company, who was stationed in New York, though she was ambitious enough to use her position to travel to film conventions on the West Coast and make connections. By one account, Pat Sullivan, the creator of Felix the Cat, had approached Harry Warner in 1921 to distribute his Felix cartoon series, which had recently been dropped by Paramount. Warner demurred, but he encouraged his secretary to explore the offer. She and Sullivan signed a contract in December. “I think the industry is full of wonderful possibilities for an ambitious woman,” she told Exhibitor’s Herald, shortly after the signing, “and there is no reason why she shouldn’t be able to conduct business as well as the men.”
Margaret Winkler did. By the time Walt contacted her in May 1923, she was also representing the Out of the Inkwell series devised by Max and Dave Fleischer, in which Koko the Clown escapes his inkwell into a real, which is to say photographic, world; between Felix and Inkwell she had become one of the leading animation distributors in America. But at the time Walt Disney wrote her, trouble was brewing for Winkler. The Fleischers were threatening to leave, and she and Pat Sullivan, who was so difficult and addled by alcohol that he once allegedly urinated on the desk of Paramount Pictures head Adolph Zukor to force a concession, were locked in a bitter dispute over the renewal of the Felix option. Walt’s timing, then, could not have been better, which is no doubt why Winkler wrote back to this unknown novice almost immediately upon receiving his first letter, saying that she would be “very pleased” to have him send a print and that “if it is what you say, I shall be interested in contracting for a series of them.” But however encouraged Walt may have been, he did not have the print to send while he was in Kansas City because Fred Schmeltz, the Laugh-O-Gram creditor, had it. He continued to correspond with Winkler, apologizing over the delays while refusing to admit that he did not own the print or that he would have to remonstrate with Schmeltz to show it; by the time he reached Los Angeles, Winkler was getting impatient over his foot-dragging. Corresponding, she wrote him drily early in September, was “about all it [their communication] has amounted to.” But in a sign of her own desperation over the Felix and Inkwell threats and not realizing that Walt had no more than one Alice, she asked him “[i]f you can spare a couple of them long enough to send to me so that I can screen them and see just what they are, please do so at once.”
Most likely the first week of October via Alicoate, Winkler finally screened “Alice’s Wonderland” in New York and pounced. “BELIEVE SERIES CAN BE PUT OVER,” she wired Walt on October 15, while emphasizing that the photography of Alice had to be more finely focused and the camera held steadier. She also cautioned, by way of limiting Walt’s financial expectations, “THIS BEING NEW PRODUCT MUST SPEND LARGE AMOUNT ON EXPLOITATION AND ADVERTISING THEREFORE NEED YOUR COOPERATION.” She offered $1,500 for each negative of the first six films and $1,800 for each of the second six. To show her “good faith,” she said she would pay the full $1,500 immediately upon delivery of each of the first six rather than wait until she had gotten bookings or money for them. Walt, clearly with no room to negotiate and ecstatic at having any offer, promptly wrote back accepting. At the same time he abandoned the Pantages project.
The very next day Winkler sent the contracts, incorporating her financial terms and calling for the delivery of the first Alice no later than January 2, 1924. She also included an option for two series of twelve more films each in 1925 and 1926 and a clause that awarded her full rights to all of the films Walt produced during the contract term. That same day, obviously wanting to move quickly, she asked Walt for any photographs of the actress playing Alice and of Walt, and for biographies of each. Most likely in an attempt to impress him, she telegraphed Walt again the same day suggesting that he write Harry Warner, who would attest to her competence. Walt did contact Warner, who wrote back that Winkler “has done very well” and that “she is responsible for anything she may undertake,” but by that time Walt, as anxious to proceed as Winkler, had signed the contract, with Uncle Robert serving as his witness. Returning the documents, he wrote Winkler that the first film, “Alice’s Day at the Sea,” was already in production and would be delivered as early as December 15. She responded a week later, a bit extravagantly: “I see no reason why these should not be the biggest thing brought out for years.”
But despite the months he had waited for just this news and despite his promise to deliver a new film quickly, Walt was ill prepared to launch another animation studio. The day he received Winkler’s initial telegram on October 15, he headed to the Veterans Hospital, where Roy was convalescing from his tuberculosis. As he later told it, again dramatizing for effect, he arrived late, around midnight, crept onto the screened porch where the patients slept, and shook Roy awake to show him the offer and celebrate. But his enthusiasm quickly elided to panic. “What do I do now?” he asked Roy, and pleaded with him to leave the hospital and help him get started. Roy agreed to meet Walt the next morning at Uncle Robert’s house for a strategy session. Roy left the hospital the following day — he claimed that an examination had shown that he was healed — and never returned.
Meanwhile Walt had a pressing issue to resolve. Winkler’s contract had been predicated on having Virginia Davis play Alice, but Virginia was back in Kansas City. The day he received the contract from Winkler, the day he was meeting with Roy at Uncle Robert’s, he wrote Virginia’s mother urgently telling her that he had finally gotten a distributor, that he had been screening “Alice’s Wonderland” in Hollywood, that “every one seemed to think that Virginia was real cute and thought she had wonderful possibilities,” and that if Virginia came out to star in the series, “it would be a big opportunity for her and would introduce her to the profession in a manner that few children could receive.” He pressed Mrs. Davis to make a decision as soon as possible since he was hoping to start production in fifteen to twenty days, and he ended rather grandiosely, not unlike Winkler in her letter to him, saying that “it will be but a short time till the series will be covering the world.”
In point of fact, Mrs. Davis had brought Virginia out earlier that summer for a movie tryout but found that so many other mothers were attempting the same thing that the studios refused to see them. She had returned to Kansas City and was planning another assault on Hollywood in November when she received Walt’s message. Four days after his first letter Walt wrote again, this time offering terms: $100 a month for the first two months, rising in $25 increments every two months to $200 for months nine through twelve, with an option of $250 a month for the next series. He justified what he admitted was a “low salary at start” by pointing to, as Winkler had pointed out to him, the initial advertising and publicity costs.
Though Walt could not have known it, the Davises did not need much encouragement. Virginia’s father was a traveling furniture salesman who was on the road most of the time. Her mother was a stagestruck housewife who had enrolled Virginia in dancing school when the girl was two and a half years old, and she seemed determined to get her daughter into the movies. In addition, Virginia suffered from double pneumonia, and doctors told the Davises that the dry California climate would be beneficial for her health. Mrs. Davis convinced her husband that he could sell furniture from California as easily as from the Midwest and that Virginia would have a career, but even Roy was struck by a man giving up thirty years in Kansas City for the promise of only $100 a month. Mrs. Davis wired her acceptance to Walt on October 28.
Now he had his contract and his star, but he had neither a company nor a staff nor, most important, any money to jump-start the operation. So when Walt met Roy on October 16 at Uncle Robert’s house on Kingswell Avenue in a quiet residential section of Hollywood, part of the plan was to ask their well-heeled uncle for a loan. Since Robert had encouraged Walt to come to Los Angeles, the brothers assumed that getting the money would be something of a formality. But their uncle balked. Walt’s beloved Aunt Margaret, his advocate, had died of pneumonia, and Robert had married a much younger woman — Ruth Disney [Walt's sister] said that he had dated both the woman and her mother, and there was a “toss-up” over which would get him — who was pregnant at the time Walt requested the loan, which seemed to put Uncle Robert in a less-than-generous mood. Moreover, Walt and his uncle, who was as stubborn and disputatious as Elias [Walt's father], had gotten into a silly argument over whether Walt’s train west had passed through Topeka, as Uncle Robert insisted it had, or had not, as Walt insisted. Even after Robert’s new wife, Charlotte, called the railroad and proved Walt right, Robert bristled. “He demanded a lot of respect and didn’t think I gave it to him,” Walt remarked.
Finally, there was the matter of a sixty-dollar loan Walt had received from his brother Ray. Walt still owed him the money when, the previous Christmas, Roy wrote from California suggesting the brothers pitch in to buy their mother a vacuum cleaner and agreeing to kick in Walt’s share since Walt was broke at the time, if Walt would collect Ray’s share. Ray refused to contribute, saying that Walt should cover the cost out of what he owed. By the time Walt reached Los Angeles, Uncle Robert had heard that Walt had welshed on his debt and did not think his nephew was a good credit risk. But Walt, who was not about to lose his opportunity with Winkler over petty family squabbles and who did not want to be considered a failure like his father, was persistent and nothing if not ingratiating. By November Uncle Robert had softened and loaned Walt $200 in midmonth, another $150 ten days later, another $75 early in December, and yet another $75 on December 14, for a total of $500, albeit at 8 percent interest, all of which Walt repaid the very day he received his second payment from Winkler early in January. The Disney brothers were also begging money from their friends and other relatives. Even before receiving the offer from Winkler, Walt had gotten a $75 loan from Carl Stalling, the organist at the Isis Theater in Kansas City, and received $200 more from him after signing the contract; $50 from Robert Irion, who was married to Walt’s aunt; $25 from Roy’s girlfriend Edna Francis and even $200 from Virginia Davis’s mother.
Though Roy had helped solicit these funds — all except the money from Edna, which Walt had requested without his knowledge — it had never been Roy’s intention to join the enterprise, and in any case he had no experience whatsoever in entertainment. “I was just helping him, like you’d help a kid brother,” he later said. But Roy could never resist his younger brother. He claimed that Walt, who was so enthusiastic and innocent-seeming, “would win your heart, and you wanted to help him, really,” and he admitted that he was afraid that without his protection, his “fervent protection,” Walt would have been taken advantage of. To prevent that, Roy, professing a “love of Walt,” agreed to become Walt’s manager and guardian angel in business as he had been in Walt’s life. In late November, when Walt moved out of Uncle Robert’s house to a room in the Olive Hill Apartments, Roy joined him there and moved with him again in December when Walt found another, cheaper room, for fifteen dollars a month, at 4409 Kingswell in an apartment building almost directly across the street from his uncle’s house. The two even saved money by eating at a cafeteria where they could split the meat and vegetable courses.
The room was just two blocks from a cream-colored, one-story brick storefront at 4651 Kingswell with a large display window. Early that October, either in anticipation of the Winkler deal or as a work space for the Pantages reel, Walt had rented a cramped office at the rear of the building behind the Holly-Vermont Realty Company, which occupied the front. (The rent was only ten dollars a month, which was raised to fifteen dollars in December.) By December, with the contract signed, the brothers were also renting a lot nearby on Hollywood Avenue for outdoor shooting and had bought a new camera, lumber and tools, a curtain to separate them from the realtors, and a box of cigars as a thank-you present for Uncle Robert. They had a name for the studio too: Disney Bros.
Excerpted from “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” by Neal Gabler. Published this week by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright (c) 2006 by Neal Gabler.
The phenomenon that is Anderson Cooper stared soulfully with his limpid blue eyes from the June cover of Vanity Fair, thus creating two journalistic disjunctions — the fact that he is staring soulfully when any other news anchor would have a cool, imperturbable gaze, and the fact that he is a phenomenon who makes the cover of Vanity Fair.
It is easy to make fun of Anderson Cooper, CNN’s sleek, prematurely gray-haired poster boy and the star of its nightly two-hour program, “Anderson Cooper 360.” The main knock against him is that he seems created out of whole cloth by a P.R. machine the way the old Hollywood studios once created stars through media campaigns — an assertion that is hard to challenge since Cooper’s face seems to be everywhere these days: not only on Vanity Fair and on billboards but on “Oprah,” “The Daily Show,” “Late Night With David Letterman,” “The Tonight Show” and soon on “60 Minutes” where Cooper will be a correspondent. People magazine has named him one of its sexiest men, there is an “Anderson for President” poster for sale on the Internet, countless fan sites are devoted to him, and gossip sites record his every move. Walter Cronkite never did a fashion spread as Cooper has done in Details. Added to all this attention is the frisson of his sexuality and the hanging question — hanging because Cooper refuses to address it — of whether he is gay or not, which raises the possibility of his being America’s first gay anchor. CNN obviously has invested a great deal in its new wonder boy, and the network has been marketing him aggressively, though no more so than CBS is marketing its new anchor, Katie Couric. In doing so, however, CNN is not just boosting an anchor. It is changing the very paradigm of television news.
Network anchors traditionally have been fellows who have earned their spurs. They worked their way up through the ranks, covering politics, wars and the White House, gaining seasoning and authority. The Murrow generation, out of which came Cronkite, the old anchor paradigm, was annealed by World War II, but even its successors — Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings — were newsmen with experience. Rather burst on the national scene covering the Kennedy assassination, and he did duty in Vietnam and as CBS White House correspondent during Watergate, leading to his famous confrontations with President Nixon, before he assumed the anchor chair. Brokaw toiled in local news in Iowa and Nebraska before becoming a local anchor in Atlanta and Los Angeles and then an NBC correspondent, pulling White House duty during Watergate just as Rather did. Jennings worked at the CBC and then CTV in his native Canada as parliamentary correspondent before joining ABC as an anchor (briefly at age 27), and then, when ABC realized that he was too green, he left to become a foreign correspondent, opening the network’s Middle East bureau and serving as its chief for seven years. These men were not just pretty faces or good teleprompter readers. (Rather, in fact, was execrable at reading the prompter, and Brokaw famously swallowed his “l’s.”) The implicit idea behind them was that the news was a public trust, both in the sense that a network produced the news for the public good and in the sense that it needed individuals who had enough credibility they could be trusted.
And so it was, right up through Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson. Despite his relative youth at 39, Anderson Cooper is not exactly a novice, as his recent bestseller, “Dispatches From the Edge,” is designed to demonstrate, nor is he just a pretty face. He has been in the field. After graduating from Yale, he landed a job as a researcher at Channel One, the teen-oriented network that is beamed directly into middle schools and high schools, then, after six months, he decided he would rather see the world and became a one-man television crew, visiting war zones like Rwanda and Myanmar and sending back video dispatches to his old company on an on-again, off-again basis for roughly five years, including a year he spent in Vietnam learning the language — a far cry from on-deadline reports of most broadcast journalists. He eventually landed a job as a newsreader at ABC, then as host of the reality show “The Mole,” and then migrated to CNN, where he has acquitted himself as something more than an airhead. But even so, this is not exactly the résumé of an anchorman, hoisting his way rung by rung and assignment by assignment up the ladder, which is precisely the point. Cooper was a free agent — the journalistic equivalent of a soldier of fortune. He was a lone operator and a swashbuckler with boyish élan who worked on his own schedule and on his own terms. The news wasn’t a trust for Anderson Cooper. It was an adventure.
This is the idea that CNN is trying to sell because the network has obviously concluded, along with everyone else, that the function of the news has changed and so must the presentation. The news is no longer regarded as a trust. It is just another competitor for viewers’ time, another distraction in a world of entertainment, though what it is distracting the audience from is essentially itself. No one but old people watch the news today; the median age of the network news broadcasts on ABC and NBC is just under 60 and on CBS just over 60, and the cable network audiences aren’t any different. The young people that advertisers covet apparently feel they have better things to do than watch news, which means, in effect, that the news providers are in the awkward position of finding a way to attract people who really don’t want their product.
CNN’s innovation (unless you count MSNBC’s halfhearted attempt a few years back with bespectacled Ashley Banfield) has been to turn the news into a backdrop for its handsome young star, Anderson Cooper. London, Haifa, Sri Lanka, Baghdad — these are locations for the movies in which Cooper plays, effectively foregrounding the anchor while backgrounding the news. Yes, young people may hate news, but they love celebrities, and Cooper is a celebrity — or at least he is rapidly being made into one. Or put another way, CNN is trying to discover how to make the news not event-driven, which forces the network to rely on things it has no control over, so much as star-driven, which is something that can remain constant night after night. You tune in not because something happened. You tune in because Anderson Cooper is reporting it.
And how does he report it? With feeling but without gravitas. Most famously, when Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana thanked Congress for an emergency $10 billion appropriation during an interview with Cooper after Hurricane Katrina, he interrupted her in high dudgeon saying that there was a body being eaten by rats. “Do you get the anger that is out here?” he demanded, and then stammered for someone to take responsibility. It was great drama, but not exactly a distinguished moment. And then there was the fawning interview with Angelina Jolie where Cooper and Jolie traded sensitivities on Africa like two old friends at a kaffeeklatsch and where Cooper preempted Jolie to talk about his own feelings. Or there was the Mother’s Day segment in which Cooper interviewed his own mother, saying afterward, “How many anchors would have their mother on the program?” Exactly.
This is a defining change in news because, among other things, stars do not behave as anchors have traditionally behaved. Indeed, when Geraldo Rivera tried the same gambit, making himself into a personality larger than the news, he was laughed off the stage and into syndication purgatory. An anchor intones impersonally, solemnly and objectively. While he may be a performer — Cronkite was avuncular, David Brinkley wry, Jennings dashing, Rather alternately folksy and intense — no anchor has exactly been movie star material because none has done what movie stars are paid to do: create identification between themselves and the audience by tapping their audience’s emotions. The news was an oasis from emotion, and the great anchors were stoics. When Cronkite’s eyes began to mist ever so slightly as he announced President Kennedy’s death, it became a signature moment in our culture. One felt the magnitude of the event by the fact that Cronkite had to fight to keep his composure. Not so, Anderson Cooper, the new model of anchor. He is a professional emoter — the “conscience of the nation,” Vanity Fair called him. His job is to feel.
This isn’t some waggish criticism. This is how Cooper sees himself. On a recent “Oprah,” he told the host, “I had been searching for feeling for years,” and said he found it in journalism. Journalism became and presumably remains his therapy, which has turned Cooper into the first Method anchor — the first anchor to draw on his own life experience to infuse the news with feeling rather than authority. In a way, he was born to emote. Cooper’s back story — all stars have a back story — is that he is the son of the heir to the Vanderbilt fortune and the former jeans maven, Gloria Vanderbilt, and of a handsome quondam actor and screenwriter named Wyatt Cooper. Wyatt Cooper died when Anderson was 10, leaving Anderson, his mother and his 12-year-old brother, Carter, bereft and numb. In 1988, when young Carter was 23, he inexplicably dove off a terrace of his mother’s apartment and died in the 14-story fall. His last words were, “Will I ever feel again?” So Anderson Cooper knew hurt. He lived with hurt.
But if he was the putative Brando of news (or maybe the more sensitive Montgomery Clift), he needed his “Streetcar Named Desire,” and New Orleans in the wake of Katrina provided it. Drawing, as he himself says in his book, on his personal tragedy, Cooper channeled the tragedy of New Orleans for the audience. Brian Williams and Shepard Smith at Fox emoted too, but Williams and Smith quickly returned to anchorman implacability when they returned to the studio. Cooper didn’t. He personalized the anguish, and CNN turned his anguish into the story. “I feel connected to what’s around me,” Cooper has written, showing how literally he deployed the Method, “no longer just observing. I feel I am living it, breathing it.” CNN head Jon Klein is effusive: “He brings such a passion to the storytelling that it is infectious.”
That attitude has been infectious among news executives too, and CBS is certainly relying on it with its new anchor, Katie Couric. Like Cooper, Couric is being sold as a star, a person to whom the audience can relate rather than as an authority figure and someone to whom the news is subordinate. Peter Jennings had his romantic peccadilloes, but they seldom made the tabloids. Couric’s romances are reported as avidly as any movie star’s, which is certainly different from anything you would have read about Dan Rather or Bob Scheiffer, her CBS predecessors. And her approach is different too — Anderson-like. She recently said, “My job isn’t telling people what happened. It’s getting them to understand why they should care.” She’s an emoter.
The only seeming problem with the Method approach to news is that no one much is watching “Anderson Cooper 360.” He regularly gets trounced by Greta Van Susteren on the Fox News Channel both in total ratings and in the much-desired 25-54 demographic, and until the blitzkrieg P.R. campaign in June, his ratings were well off those of his predecessor, Aaron Brown, the personification of the middle-aged, saturnine anti-Cooper anchor who provided reassurance and comfort rather than heat — 36 percent off in the young demo that Cooper seemed to target like a missile. As one cable news executive told the New York Observer, “I just don’t get it. I watch the show and there’s nothing there for me.” Still, citing the “60 Minutes” gig, the executive said, “It keeps rolling along, this media-sensation thing.”
The dearth of ratings certainly isn’t lost on CNN, but it may not matter much either, because the promotion of Anderson Cooper, the “media-sensation thing,” may not be about ratings, and neither is cable news generally now, which is another paradigm shift. When measured against the larger universe, cable news draws minuscule numbers; two weeks ago, on the day of the announcement of the foiling of the British terrorist plot, roughly 1.5 million people watched “Anderson Cooper 360,” while roughly 2.5 million watched “The O’Reilly Factor,” typically the highest-rated program on cable news. Last week, Cooper had 1.37 million total viewers during his first hour and 859,000 in his second, losing the first to Van Susteren and the second to an O’Reilly repeat. Those numbers are up over the nearly 700,000 Aaron Brown averaged during his last week — but, then, Brown never got anything close to Cooper’s publicity push. And lest one be surprised by how few people are watching cable news, the numbers on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” are worse. The show is lucky to break 200,000 in the demo, and 500,000 among the general audience at each of its two airings. In short, cable news is a very small niche even when big news is breaking.
But in the same way that companies now exist to drive up stock value rather than stock value’s existing to drive up companies, it is entirely possible that CNN sees Cooper’s stardom as its own reward — a way to brand the network as hot even if no one is watching and to try to get advertisers aboard on the assumption that CNN as the “home of Anderson Cooper” is an easier sell than CNN as the “most trusted name in news.” No one watches “Hardball” either, and yet Matthews, albeit a pundit rather than an anchor, is a big, ubiquitous commodity in the media — the smiling face of MSNBC. Though, according to a Gallup Poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans had never even heard of Anderson Cooper, thanks to the media campaign he now has an aura, if not exactly a recognizability, that he can bequeath to CNN. And because cable executives (and advertisers) live not only in the world of ratings but also in the world of buzz, this is important. Of course CNN is hoping that people will eventually watch Cooper now that he has been anointed a star, but the fact that he has been anointed a star, even if they did it themselves, makes the CNN executives seem hot too and puts the network on the cutting edge of trendiness. In all this, Cooper’s rumored homosexuality doesn’t hurt; it gives him East Coast/West Coast media cachet as the hot young vaguely mysterious guy, just as it gives him more license to emote.
But if viewers don’t matter much to cable news and if the pretense of media stardom is the new strategy to create heat, one might very well ask: Who needs the news at all when you’ve got the cover of Vanity Fair? The answer may turn out to be, “No one,” which would be the biggest paradigm shift of all.
Ordinarily when a celebrity transgresses — when Lee Tracy urinated off a Mexican hotel balcony in the 1930s, or Ingrid Bergman bore twins out of wedlock in the late 1940s, or Tara Reid does her impersonation of “Girls Gone Wild” — the moralists descend and mea culpas are issued. So it has been for Mel Gibson. Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade during his DUI arrest last weekend may not be your garden-variety misbehavior, but Gibson was quick to act as if it were recanting, apologizing and blaming alcoholism for his remarks, on the assumption that he was, as he snarled at the arresting officer, “fucked” and that he needed immediate rehabilitation. (Gibson did check himself into a rehab center Monday.)
Gibson may very well have been right had this occurred, say, 10 years ago. He probably would have been fucked. Sexual peccadilloes and frat boy stunts are forgivable. Hate is not. No matter how many people may harbor the same sentiments as Gibson, hate speech has typically been condemned, and no matter how often hate raises its ugly head, it has usually been beaten back by the forces of relative enlightenment in journalism and the federal government if only because it fails to comport with how most Americans want to see themselves.
Thus when the Ku Klux Klan was revived after World War I, it met general opprobrium even as it professed to be carrying the cudgels for morality and even as it was taking over several jurisdictions, including the state of Oregon. Thus when the popular and populist radio priest of the 1930s, the Rev. Charles Coughlin, began spewing anti-Semitic bile, he was quickly quarantined by the Roosevelt administration, which pressured the church into removing Coughlin from the airwaves after having successfully pressured radio networks into dropping his national broadcasts.
Thus even as racism was the prevailing order of the South, blatant racists like Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi were excoriated in the national press and ostracized by polite society. And thus in Hollywood itself, where many of the scores of anti-Semites were collected under the shingle of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, they felt the need to seek cover by enlisting Jewish screenwriter Morrie Ryskind as an officer. Call it hypocrisy, but it was hypocrisy that underscored just how uncomfortable Americans were with overt, publicly declaimed hate.
Or so it was. Mel Gibson, however, does not operate within that elevated environment, because America itself has changed — one might even say has been radicalized — since the election of George Bush. The merger of evangelical Christianity, which has long had a tinge of racism and anti-Semitism, with right-wing Republicanism has had many effects on American culture and politics, but perhaps the foremost among them is that it has legitimized attitudes that were previously considered illegitimate by the custodians of the social order. Mel Gibson has not only been the beneficiary of that change; he has courted those who effected it — those for whom extremism in the defense of their version of liberty is no vice.
This isn’t to say that President Bush has actively sanctioned hate speech. Of course he hasn’t, and he would be upbraided had he done so. But Bush, in fomenting the culture wars and polarizing the country rather than uniting it as a way of solidifying his base, has given license to hate-mongers under the cover this time of an impending cultural Armageddon. Every time the president insists that he is standing on conviction while his opponents are not, every time he implies that abortion or stem cell research on embryos is a form of murder (despite press secretary Tony Snow’s rapid retraction on the latter point), every time he permits Karl Rove to attack Democrats as treasonous and weak on terror, he feeds the hate machine. He doesn’t have to be explicitly hateful. He can be hateful by implication. In the past, anti-Semites used words like “internationalist” to blacken Jews without having to come right out and attack them. Now the right has “secularist” and “liberal” that do the same job.
While it’s true that some evangelical leaders have become vocal supporters of Israel, it’s because the return of Jews to a Jewish homeland fulfills the prophecies of the Book of Revelation, not because they harbor any particular affection for Jews. As E.L. Doctorow once put it, these Christians welcome the apocalypse in which Jews will be condemned to eternal damnation. Some love! Still, it is important to note that the default settings for showing intolerance remain, and the subtle anti-Semitism that evangelical leaders may espouse is not the teeth-baring Nazi kind. Rather it fingers Judaism culturally in contradistinction to Christianity. The trouble with Jews is that they do not accept Christ and yet they seem to insist on their prerogatives in this Christian nation.
This gives vent to the position that in seeking to secularize public education, for example, as a means of defending their own religious beliefs against the majority, Jews are really denying Christians their right to their religion. Seen this way, the subterranean anger toward Jews, which is never openly expressed as anger at Jews but rather an anger toward secular liberals, speaks not to any inherent inferiority of Jews but rather to the danger they pose to Christian values — the latest manifestation of the old anti-Semitic canard that Jews do not subscribe to American traditions and thus threaten to undermine them.
For whatever personal reasons, and God knows what demons lurk in him, Mel Gibson has been spoiling for a fight with the Jews and got it by baiting them. “The Passion of the Christ,” which was widely accused of anti-Semitism for its exaggerated portrayals of Jews and for assigning them primary responsibility for Jesus’ death, was really not the story of Jesus’ passion; it was the story of Mel Gibson’s. He was the one being nailed to the critical cross. Gibson certainly could not have been caught unawares by the criticism; in fact, in many of his so-called secular movies, like “Mad Max” or “Conspiracy Theory,” Gibson had also played Christ. One might even say that he made “The Passion” precisely so that he would be persecuted by liberals and Jews — essentially crucified — and consequently celebrated by evangelical Christians for his sacrifice.
As it turned out, martyrdom was good business. The film earned nearly $400 million, not, one assumes, because it was a great piece of entertainment or even because it was a great religious experience. What it was, was a great cultural statement — a thumb in the eye of liberal, secular American popular culture from which Gibson himself had once benefited and which was now vilifying him as the Jews had once vilified Christ. It also proved that Gibson didn’t need the old mainstream American audience anymore. He had his evangelicals who would go to his movies to demonstrate how much they hated Hollywood.
But just as Gibson has sought martyrdom, so his evangelical audience was always in search of Christian martyrs: a public school teacher who wants to discuss religious issues in class but is proscribed from doing so, a science teacher who denies evolution but is disciplined for not teaching it, a football coach who wants to pray with his team but is not allowed to do so, a mayor who wants to put up a crèche in a public place but is accused of violating the separation between church and state. Gibson had simply taken his persecution to a larger arena — from the local news and Fox News to the national screen. Now, with his ill-tempered remarks, he has upped the ante once again. If Disney backs out of distributing his new film, “Apocalypto,” or doesn’t air his proposed television series on the Holocaust, of all things, Gibson could be screaming that he is yet again suffering for his faith at the hands of infidels.
But as he yells he is unlikely to be marginalized as a bigot, despite the charge by one Hollywood publicist that Gibson had committed a “nuclear disaster,” because bigotry in Bush America is just another salient in the battle against the left wing. In the end, Mel Gibson, who avoided the code words and spoke more plainly than his supporters, may not have died for our sins, but he did get drunk for them. For that he is likely to receive a measure of sainthood among some acolytes in a country where hate doesn’t carry the stigma it once did.
Earlier this week when, like millions of others, I logged on to the Internet and accessed a site with video of the young Pennsylvania businessman Nicholas Berg being beheaded, my hand hovered above my mouse momentarily. Do I double-click or don’t I? Do I really want to see a man being beheaded or don’t I? In the end, I decided that I didn’t need to see a decapitation, that I could easily imagine what it would look like, and that images of Berg’s death would not inform or deepen my understanding of Iraq or terrorism or the American mission or of brutality generally. I would just be another voyeur.
But millions, I am sure, did not share the same compunction or, if they did, double-clicked anyway to see what amounted to a snuff film. As far as do we or don’t we, it wasn’t lost on many of us that at the same time Nick Berg was being beheaded continuously on the Internet for anyone who cared to watch, members of Congress were looking over grisly photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — photographs that the Pentagon would not release publicly, on the basis that no good could come of doing so, and much harm could. No one but the congressmen and senators, the Pentagon decided, needed to see these images.
Whenever particularly gruesome photographs or videos are either made available or embargoed, a moral debate automatically rages over the effect on the American psyche. On the one side are those who argue that these images should not be viewed. At best they can only inure us to atrocity, coarsen our sensibilities, desensitize us. By framing the violence as television and distancing us from it, they make us more willing to tolerate the heinous. At worst they trivialize it and turn it into just another prurient entertainment, the Nick Berg Show.
On the other side are those who argue that viewing cruelty is admittedly awful but may be necessary because it compels us to face evil more forcefully than anything else possibly can, compels us to see how the world really operates and what is really at stake, not just in Iraq or in the war on terrorism or in any specific situation but in life itself. Just as Thomas Aquinas believed that one needed evil to understand good, so too may one need tragedy to understand the human condition. Otherwise one lives in a gloss. This was the argument deployed when the horrific images of the Holocaust were first being released 50 years ago. One needed to see them because one’s imagination could not comprehend the enormity of the crime. One needed to see them to bear witness.
And so the issue has been framed once again with the Nick Berg tape and the Abu Ghraib photographs. We should see them. We shouldn’t see them. But as this debate continues, there is another possibility — the possibility that images like these neither inure us nor sensitize us and that this dichotomy may even be an antiquated way of thinking about them. There may be an entirely different and new sensibility at work that beckons one to see the horror without experiencing any moral or psychological aftertaste. That sensibility is the irresistible urge to feel knowing — to see what other people in the prow of culture are seeing. You watch Nick Berg being beheaded or you go on the Internet to see the unpublished photos from Abu Ghraib because you know other people are doing so and you don’t want to feel left out.
Ours is certainly not the first generation to value knowingness. Those supposedly “in the know” have always been a kind of information elite, and more democratically speaking, gossip, in large measure, is predicated on the notion that a good many people want to know what’s going to happen before it is publicly announced or just want to know what others hope to hide. But in a society like ours where there is a glut of information — so much to know and so many venues from which to know it — knowingness has become one of the newest and most powerful forms of status. Talk to any teenager and you are likely to be staggered by how much he or she knows — the music of the most obscure rock stars, the dating habits of the most obscure television performers, the names of the most obscure clothing designers — virtually all of it, by the teen’s own admission, useless in any intrinsic sense but useful in the sense that it is empowering among other teenagers. Knowing all this cultural effluvia is like being captain of the football team or head cheerleader. Not to know is to be condemned to eternal geekdom.
But knowingness is not just a status; it is a force that is increasingly driving the culture. If Marshall McLuhan was wrong, as I believe he was, and technology does not determine culture so much as culture determines technology, then the Internet might be regarded as a knowing machine designed expressly to satisfy the ever-growing community of individuals who need to know in order to empower themselves. One can find anything on the Internet, from the Paris Hilton tape to the Taguba report to the Nick Berg decapitation, and those who watch these tapes or read these documents have the satisfaction of knowing that they have joined a new band of cognoscenti. Indeed, the images on the Internet seemed to advance the Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg stories not because seeing is believing or because everyone wants visuals but because mainstream print outlets don’t have the same cachet of knowingness as the Internet, where you have to navigate your way to the plum — itself a form of knowingness. So the Internet not only provides the opportunity to see what one could not see elsewhere; it plays to an emerging sensibility that regards finding and then watching these images not as horrors to be shunned or terrible realities to be viewed but as pieces of information one must see because not to see them is to be left out, which is why the hand may not linger long over the mouse before double-clicking. It is less voyeurism than a kind of validation. Man, have you seen the Nick Berg tape?
All of this wrests Nick Berg and Abu Ghraib from the old moral context and categories. There may have been a time when knowing led to knowledge, which made considerations about the cultural and psychological impact of what one saw or read seem appropriate. But now knowing is an end in itself, and a debate over the effects of watching abominations may be irrelevant in a society where information no longer exists to be assessed but only to be accessed.
Even before the nation went to war, one of the most persistent criticisms that Europeans, especially the French, leveled at President Bush is that he is a cowboy. Part of this is just an elaboration on the president’s boots, twang and down-home manner, all of which suggest the anti-intellectualism that Europeans abhor in Americans. Another part is an elaboration on the western myth itself, or at least on how Europeans interpret it. The president appears cocksure and reckless, always ready to draw his guns and shoot. It is, in truth, an image the president seems almost eager to cultivate. He has warned in western lingo that we would get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, that some missing al-Qaida operatives aren’t ever going to come back, and that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to get out of town.
“The notion that the president is a cowboy — I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea,” Vice President Cheney recently remarked on “Meet the Press.”
In invoking the cowboy, the Europeans are right to think that images matter, that they can penetrate the national consciousness, and that they can shape how the country conducts itself. And they are right that the president and his posse often do behave like a bunch of gunslingers who seem to love frontier brinkmanship. But in a much deeper sense, the Europeans are wrong, largely because they don’t really understand the western and its values. As much as Bush may look like a cowboy and act like a yahoo, his foreign policy generally, and the Iraq war specifically, are actually a dramatic departure from the paradigm of the dour, sensitive gunslinger that for generations seemed to serve as a kind of template for American conflict. Under George W. Bush, America is no longer a cowboy nation. It is more like a cyborg nation with a brand-new paradigm — not the cowboy but the Terminator, the robot from the popular films of that name. Call it Pax Schwarzenegger.
As the Europeans caricature the cowboy, his signal characteristic was that he shot first and asked questions later. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the idealized cowboy of our westerns was always under control and never acted precipitously, preemptively or wildly. It was the gangster who sprayed his machine gun indiscriminately, the gunfighter who made his bullets count. More, the cowboy never chose to fight and certainly wasn’t eager to do so. A reluctant warrior, he usually had to be goaded into battle, breathing a heavy sigh as he finally strapped on his guns and lumbered down that dusty street. As the critic Robert Warshow described it in his classic essay “The Westerner,” “[T]he drama is one of self-restraint: the moment of violence must come in its own time and according to its special laws or it is valueless.”
If anything, this image both reflected and informed the country’s deep isolationist impulses — impulses that prevailed right up until Pearl Harbor. As a nation, we didn’t hanker to get involved in someone else’s fight. We weren’t quick to anger. “No American blood for Europe” was one of the isolationist rallying cries after the German invasion of Poland. It was only when we were drawn upon that we knew we had to draw ourselves. We were reactive rather than proactive, though sometimes, as in Vietnam, we thought we were being threatened when we weren’t. When we did enter a fight, there wasn’t much joy in it and, despite President Wilson’s crusade in World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” seldom a sense of higher moral mission. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” was the cowboy’s pragmatic motto. In a way, it was the nation’s motto too. There was no such thing as a war of choice, no saber rattling, no conceivable alternative to fight, only the sad recognition of the inevitability of violence and the resigned acceptance to use it.
In the western, and in warfare, this reluctance was less a function of the gunman’s caution than of his humility. He was clearly a moral figure who believed in his cause, which typically was to defeat the villains, and establish a democratic order; yet his code was instinctive, not ideological. He appreciated complexity and difficulty, and he realized that no matter how noble the end, the outcome was never certain. (In fact, the concept of “mutually assured destruction” that framed defense policy during the Cold War was really nothing more than the idea of two gunfighters facing each other down, knowing each could be killed in the fight.) As a result, cowboys didn’t swagger or vaunt. They exuded a quiet confidence rather than arrogance.
Perhaps, above all, there was always, in the best and most enduring westerns, a tragic dimension. The cowboy was fighting to facilitate a social order and a civilization of which, poignantly, he knew he could never really be a part because he was, by temperament and profession, outside its boundaries. He did his job and left. He also understood that when one assumes the obligation to vanquish evil, one must sacrifice one’s own personal comfort and gratification.
Look closely at the films of John Wayne. What one sees is that Wayne must always choose between his duty to society and his personal desires, especially the desire for a family, which is why Wayne is usually alone in these films. (His best movie, “The Searchers,” is partly about this sacrifice.) This accounts for the weariness one often feels in the western hero — that stern, sad countenance, and that slow gait that seem so much a part of the national iconography. American soldiers often have the same look and attitude. It is a form of virtue. As Warshow put it, “The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength.”
It is not at all incidental that in reciting all this, particularly the notion of honor, one could just as easily have been talking about the American soldier as the American cowboy. In the past, when the country marched to war, it recognized patience, duty, sacrifice, the possible consequences of battle and the undercurrent of tragedy, and it eschewed hubris. And when the wars were over, America recognized that just as the cowboy was an agent of civilization rather than a force of retribution, so too America must seek reconciliation rather than revenge — the precept that guided us in redrawing the map of Europe after World War I, and instituting the Marshall Plan after World War II. This was a powerful image, and it appealed, as the western did, to Americans’ vanity: the nation itself as the last gentleman in a cruel and unforgiving world.
It was not, however, an image to which the administration of George W. Bush wanted to subscribe. Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had another idea. In 1991, after the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz, a protégé of Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s, and now deputy defense secretary, wrote a white paper outlining prospective American approaches in the post-Cold War period that has become the blueprint for foreign policy in the administration of Bush II. Wolfowitz didn’t like the idea of a reluctant warrior, probably because he thought it might send the wrong message to the rest of the world — a message of weakness. (Being a “wimp” in the administration of Bush I, who had been accused of wimpishness himself, seemed to be the ultimate insult.)
Wolfowitz didn’t like the idea of sacrifice or recognition of consequences or humility either, and he certainly didn’t like the idea of accepting the tragic dimension of conflict. As he saw it, America had to be unassailable and implacable. It had to be so mighty that it would terrorize any other nation or coalition of nations. It had to convincingly demonstrate that this was now a unipolar world, that the pole was the United States, and there was nothing that anybody could do about it and thus no reason to try. Basically, the country had to become the Terminator.
As aesthetics go, it was a thrilling concept, and it made for a much more vicariously satisfying movie than the western with its moral calculus and uncertainties. It may even turn out to be a successful policy in the long run. But it was also a hard sell in a country that prided itself on its basic decency and sense of honor … or at least it was a hard sell until 9/11. If you think of 9/11 as the first scene of a Schwarzenegger movie, like “Collateral Damage,” where his family is brutally murdered, you realize that it effectively justifies whatever the hero, in this case the United States, wants to do, which is why 9/11 is now the all-purpose rationalization for everything from the invasion of Iraq to the bullying of our allies to the threats to Syria and Iran. With foreign policy suddenly turned into a long revenge movie, the Terminator could at long last supplant the cowboy as the country’s model of behavior and repository of values.
And how different those values are! A Terminator, virtually invincible and omnipotent, doesn’t do what is necessary; it does what is possible. It acts rather than reacts. It shoots first. It cannot compute reluctance or hesitation except as a ploy. A Terminator harbors no moral qualms, none of the weary obligation or doubt the cowboy has. It is programmed and then follows its program with absolute certainty. (Indeed, in the first Terminator film, the cyborg is evil; in the second, released in the year of Wolfowitz’s paper, good.) It does not negotiate or temporize because it needs no one and does not act in concert.
A Terminator cannot make sacrifices and cannot comprehend them. A Terminator has no tragic sense because it isn’t subject to the human condition. It exists above that condition. A Terminator is all hubris and nothing but hubris insofar as that term is even applicable. It sees taunting as a psychological weapon. It cannot be reasoned with or reckoned with. It cannot be stopped once it is set in motion. It inspires shock and awe. In short, it is the ideal metaphor for Wolfowitz’s, and now President Bush’s, concept of American power.
While Americans argue over whether they want their nation to be a cowboy or a Terminator, the administration should be aware that if the Terminator is seemingly indestructible, it is not necessarily infallible. For all its technological capabilities, it can be dogged and harassed and waylaid — witness not only the first Terminator picture but also America’s adventure in Somalia and the early days of this Iraq war. A Terminator may be almighty but it is not nimble. More seriously, it can be victimized by its own sense of indomitability.
The cowboy recognized his vulnerability. He operated with the knowledge of the vagaries of the world and of his place within it — a knowledge that the current architects of American foreign policy disdain as soft. What they propose instead is to act as if nothing but power exists. And so the Terminator, able to intimidate but not conciliate, plows ahead, inducing fear and wreaking destruction but unable to understand anyone or anything beyond its own certitude and its own brute force.
Meanwhile, the cowboy rides into the sunset.
After days of watching the same images of the Baghdad skyline, a still life with the occasional eruptions of American missiles and thick billows of smoke, or of coalition troops rumbling through the desert, often in the grainy/greenish hues of “night vision,” Sunday brought us something new, courtesy of Al-Jazeera. We were shown briefly, before Al-Jazeera decided to exercise discretion, American bodies in an Iraqi morgue and American captives paraded before the cameras. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was quick to accuse Iraq of violating the Geneva Conventions that forbid humiliating prisoners of war or subjecting them to what the conventions call “public curiosity,” though it was unclear whether Iraq was in violation simply by inviting news media to videotape the troops (the media might have been committing an ethical breach, but that is another issue); in any case, American media have videotaped rows of Iraqi POWs, their hands cuffed behind them. Does that qualify as humiliation or public curiosity?
Assuming that the Iraqis hadn’t executed any POWs — and we really don’t know whether they did — one suspects that the real transgression here, in Rumsfeld’s mind, is not against the POWs but against the rigid control of images by the administration. What Al-Jazeera provided was unauthorized. It was a peek behind the backdrop to the stage the administration had carefully constructed. No more stand-ups in Kuwait City or reporter “embeds” telling us breathlessly either how the troops were moving or how ready they were for combat. This was the other side of war — the ugly side, the real side.
When the administration concocted the idea of placing reporters with military units, it was overcoming nearly 30 years of antagonism to the media, dating back to Vietnam. The reporters then roamed freely, documenting the chaos, the brutality and ultimately the futility of that ill-fated mission, and the military blamed them when public opinion turned against the war. As a consequence, from Grenada through Afghanistan, the military kept the press at a distance for fear they would undermine not necessarily the military’s efforts on the battlefield but its public relations campaign at home.
It was something of a surprise, then, when the administration decided to provide what seemed to be full access to the battlefield, permitting the public to see the war in combat boots. It wasn’t that Bush and Company, perhaps the most tight-lipped administration in American history, had suddenly gotten the religion of openness. It was that they realized while our troops were fighting the Iraqis, our reporters would be fighting Al-Jazeera and other new cable outlets. This was to be a war of images — a war in which what the public saw and subsequently thought would be every bit as important as what our soldiers did. It was a war the administration knew it had to win.
With this in mind, the idea of embedding journalists with troops was a masterstroke. The White House certainly knew that reporters would bond with their units and identify with them. In effect, the press would serve as P.R. flacks for the operation, especially since one of the stipulations in granting the media access was that every interview would be on the record. So much for any of the soldiers criticizing the prosecution of the war. This was coverage that was virtually certain to be uncritical and supportive, essentially cheerleading, which, with a few exceptions, like the piece by embeds in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on Iraqis who are “furious about the continuing military assault against their country,” is exactly how it has turned out in these first days of battle. But the administration wasn’t just relying on proximity. It also felt confident enough to embed the press because it knew this current generation of reporters, unlike the skeptical Vietnam generation, was not likely to challenge the conventional wisdom. This bunch was reliably docile. It was one of this claque, after all, that actually asked President Bush at a recent press conference how his faith was sustaining him in these troubled times. These guys were patsies.
Just how compliant the administration expected the journalists to be is illustrated by what seemed to be their second duty after their primary one of boosting the war. They were to bear witness to the notorious weapons of mass destruction that were the alleged causus belli, since the rest of the world thought the American military command itself was about as trustworthy as Vic on “The Shield” procuring evidence of drug dealing. But it wasn’t just a matter of seeing the weapons being displayed. To be honest, there probably isn’t a single reporter out there who could tell a canister of chemicals from a can of beans. It was a matter of experiencing them if need be. In last week’s New Yorker, Hampton Sides described how he went to Kuwait City for training, largely to learn how to protect himself from biological and chemical attacks, before taking his assignment with the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 1st Marine Division. It was while undergoing that training that Sides had an epiphany as to why the military was really permitting embedding. He realized that the reporters were to serve as the canaries in the coal mine. They would provide the proof of the WMD, even if they had to endanger or even give their lives to do it. Sides turned in his credentials, got on a plane and headed home to his wife and children.
Still, even if the reporters were docile, there was a general expectation that with journalists in the field, beaming back reports while events were occurring, this war would look like no other. The Gulf War was the video-game war because it was viewed largely through the pilots’ bombsights as if the public were sitting at a video-game console. Then Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf would appear with his pointer to tell viewers what they were seeing. The Iraq war was to be the Webcam war because every reporter was equipped with a camera or videophone to transmit the action. We were told we would see things we had never seen before, that we would experience battle as we never had before. This time we would taste the sand.
In some respects, this has been true, though once again the administration seems to have anticipated the effect and orchestrated it. Most wars are reported in what movie critics call “mise-en-scène.” You get a sense of the whole thing, generally because the military command provides press briefings, like Schwarzkopf’s, that provide the larger picture of what’s happening: troop movements, campaigns, strategies, victories and defeats. The job of the reporters in the field is to provide texture and fill in the gaps. This war is being reported as montage. You get a series of quick cuts from one area to another but because there is virtually no larger picture being provided — Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of command, faced the press only once in the first week of battle — all the public gets are disparate pieces, and even those pieces cannot be assembled in any meaningful way. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, “What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we are seeing are slices of the war in Iraq.”
To prove Rumsfeld’s point, while CBS ran a snippet of the Al-Jazeera POW tape and other networks posted stills from it, the American media are not showing the images that have grabbed the attention of the Arab world: The corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the wounded civilians in the hospital, the general destruction.
With slices instead of the whole, the administration has provided action without context, lots of trees without any forest as one anchorman put it, which is exactly what the president wants. The White House knows that so long as viewers are focusing on the troops, there will be public support for the war, though the one thing the administration might not have bargained for is that when things go badly, a war in montage can look an awful lot like chaos.
No doubt the White House also knows that while the battlefield images have the look and feel of reality, of being taken right in the middle of the maelstrom, reality isn’t what it used to be. Most Americans nowadays process it differently. So-called reality programming has made the public more receptive to documentary images, but it has also taken out most of the bite and converted those images into another style of entertainment. That may be why the embed coverage of the Iraq war, which should be terrifying, instead seems like just another reality show. (At a press briefing last Saturday, Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, bristled when a reporter referred to the bombardment of Baghdad as a “show” and a brief argument ensued, but the reporters, mostly foreigners it seemed, were clearly on to something.) Anyone watching cable news very early Sunday morning could see a tank battle outside Umm Qasr in southern Iraq and the effect was not very different from watching an extended episode of “Cops.” One felt surprisingly disengaged.
Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Alessandra Stanley observed that “Television cameras’ usual route to battle is the trail left by its victims,” and she cited the familiar images of refugees, hospital wards and open graves from recent wars. Her point was that the embeds were providing “an entirely new prism” through which to view war. Perhaps so, but the images on Al-Jazeera were an awful reminder that bodies and POWs still matter and that this war is not just a spectacular limited-run reality show that will end inevitably with Saddam’s demise. They also reminded us that while we are seeing more of war via those embedded reporters, we may actually wind up knowing less — which is probably just how the administration intended it to be.
