The CNN Effect has struck me several times over the past few weeks. Or last few years might be a better timeframe. The headline this morning was an extrapolation on the unusual Cuomo Brothers story. You know it- a popular primetime anchor talked to his brother to help him weather the storm of personal and professional misconduct by the Governor of New York State, and the brief moment that particular official was mentioned as a Presidential figure. The subtext to the story was that the network- CNN- had lost 80% of it’s viewers since the last election. That brought back a lot of memories on the nature of our information flow, and how it affects our policies- and lives.
I will confess- we are Fox watchers at The Farm. Now, the narrative about that habit is pretty clear. Fox watchers are deniers of fundamental truth, locked in deplorable thoughts. We took a poll and agreed with the morning modifications that seemed necessary to the rest of the broadcast media cycle. There is no question in our minds that Fox is part of the same gigantic media machine, and the reason they talk about some things and avoid others like all the rest. But the parallel truth is that “truth” itself is secondary to the coordinated media messaging that looks to some of us like the information warfare campaigns we tried to adapt back when working comprehensive war strategies in the Government and trying to carry out the policies of those above us. This was as a minor functionary in the J2- Intelligence- section of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. It is now thirty years ago, and a reflection of changing times. CNN was new then, and the power of that youth was profound. In 1990, I was recently returned from an assignment on USS Forrestal and a deployment to the Mediterranean. The cruise was dominated by the collapse of the communist system that had ruled the USSR since the days of Lenin.
Tracking the moving pieces in the collapse was daily business, and we had a relatively fine line to navigate. The Russian were still armed to the teeth. Our role was to be firm but not provocative. Let the pieces fall and not provoke anything in spectacular stupidity. We returned to Florida in peace, and I received orders to report to the Pentagon. That timing- leaping from the Fall of the Wall in Berlin to other events confronting the Sole Remaining Superpower- was an adventure in the new landscape. I only had 13 years as a Cold Warrior, and CNN had established a new way to look at it all. 24x7x365 was the means to do so, in color with good production values, and it ripped our old standards of time and chronology apart at the seams.
I won’t bore you with a discussion of the Intelligence Cycle, which has some commonality with the production schedule at Socotra House. We still like to get product on the street early enough to impact the day. It involves written stuff that requires research, composition, editing and posting. All are accomplished in a linear fashion, each taking some time. At the office, in the cycle of Intelligence, things worked in a similar manner. It was driven by the orbital mechanics of the National Technical Means of collection. A snapshot of a Russian port might drive a series of actions, and deceptions, conducted by both sides. CNN brought a dramatic change to the way information was processed in an increasingly digital age.
A quick look at the history of the network provides a glimpse at how the news cycle evolved. Some of the early triumphs of the capture of public information included a story about a young girl trapped down a well. It was powerful. The manipulation of the story, minute by minute, provided a new way for content to be displayed and to capture the viewer’s imagination. That was transmogrified by coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. The embedded correspondents, alive and in context with the events on the ground a world away “catapulted” CNN past the three networks who had dominated news coverage since the advent of television.
Here was the key to it: CNN was the only news outlet with the ability to communicate from inside Iraq in the initial phase of our bombing campaign. In the old process, we derived that through intelligence collection methods, both spaceborne, aerial and sometimes with risky Human Intelligence missions. CNN transformed it into live reporting frm the al Rashid Hotel with people who seemed to join you on the couch, or in the Pentagon cubicles that were our daily surroundings.
If you don’t remember, this was the nature of the change: “This is Bernie Shaw. Something is happening outside… Peter Arnett, join me here. Let’s describe to our viewers what we’re seeing … The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. … We’re seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky.”
We used that reporting stream, balanced against our immense commitment to objective truth, to convey to Chairman Powell and Secretary Cheney how the show was going. There was peril in that, but any good source is a useful thing, even if CNN was partly targeted against “human interest,” rather than our attempt at explaining how effective our missions were in accomplishing the Administration’s goals. CNN avoided depictions of the graphic and violent images, but we had plenty of that from the people who were conveying the carnage. I remember one congressman- Duke Cunningham, a former Navy fighter pilot from California, who wanted the latest up-close combat footage. We were happy to comply.
That formed the means of framing the information in a way that enhanced impact. It was profound, and that led to a brief moment of synergy. Our little briefing team came up with the idea, which was to connect our network of watch desks and combat reporters in the classified world to a classified network, protective of the secrets, but available to decisionmakers up and down the chain of command. It is still a good idea and has been incorporated over time into the Way Things Work. But then, the idea that we could use new secure transmission systems with the actual machine that was conducting the business of the Department of Defense was pretty cool.
Problems? Plenty. There was only a handful of us available to be the “correspondents.” Our talents were mixed. There were no dedicated support crews of skilled professionals to manage broadcasts from the “sets” from which we worked. But the idea of putting satellite images on air that conveyed real truth was something exciting. We began to pay attention to what CNN was actually doing, which was often commentary from people who did not actually know the significance of what they were seeing.
I remember one pitch we made to our leader in J2, RADM Mike McConnell. CNN video displayed a picture of tanks rolling somewhere, with the admonition that they were en route some deadly kinetic operation. The clip predicted trouble. An Armor officer on our staff looked at the same images of vehicles festooned with equipment and made a simple and convincing counter analysis: “The way they are loaded suggests they are relocating to go into garrison.”
Or in simple terms, a practical assessment that based on the evidence, there would be no trouble. Bad for ratings in the commercial world, but absolutely compelling in the world of those who were in the business of destroying the opposition. Ours was a great idea without resources, a Pentagon term normally reserved to describe hallucinations. Our effort to adapt the CNN Effect to cover real world events with accuracy and truth was a compelling idea.
We tried for a few months, with other events playing out in their own order. The early 1990s had a slew of them, including the Battle of Mogadishu, which all had their impact on the conduct of the operations. Ultimately under-resourced, the experiment expired in the course of events. But we had reached out to Wolf Blitzer, one of the centerpieces in CNN coverage. Wolf came to the Pentagon to do a bit on how the military was reacting to the CNN Effect of information flow.
He was polite and smiled in his minutes with us, understanding as our Tank Officer did that what was being seen was not necessary what was going on. He had the advantage of being the CNN effect, while we were just stumbling along in the vortex of the flow.
They lost what was the unquestioned leadership in new reporting in the years that followed. In fact, that journey is a story in itself and not widely understood. The information flow could be manipulated in the production process to covey something other than what was captured, and tailored for transmission.
The power of 24-hour coverage on the policy-making process is part of it, of course, since outside the government it was ratings and advertising that provided the fundaments of “why” things were presented as they were. The collapse of ratings after Trump was successfully brought down is understandable. The current Administration’s parade of bumblings is to no one’s interest, not for supporters and not vicious enough for opponents. I am sure that can be turned around in time and over the issue of who will be demonized in the public good.
But I do recall that brief visit, and the sudden connection between the figure on the television in the corner and what was going to happen after he made his piece. Our little Defense Intelligence Network – appropriately nicknamed “The DIN”- was a blip in the process. It was a great idea, but the much larger machine had goals we did not share. We tried to support policy through accuracy. The CNN effect logically verged off into something else. We were going to take a poll on how they were doing, and then lost interest. There might be something good on Fox later to help us understand.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com