TV Goes into Diplomacy

By LANCE MORROW

When their television sets at last went dark, the global villagers were left feeling vaguely unsettled. Seldom has history seemed so thoroughly televised. As if to validate all of Marshall McLuhan's electromystical prose, the events of Anwar Sadat's mission to Israel appeared to many to have been profoundly influenced by the participation of TV --its superstars and its world audience.

CBS's Walter Cronkite served as a kind of electronic matchmaker in helping to set up the visit--though it undoubtedly would have occurred in any case. During Sadat's flight from Cairo three of his four journalist guests* on the plane were ABC's Barbara Walters ("Barbara, so you did come!"), Cronkite and NBC's John Chancellor. For three days the late 20th century's video technology monitored the principals in one of the planet's oldest enmities, as they performed for the world on their biblical home ground. The effect was eerie and complicated. Sometimes it produced a charming bathos, as when, under TV's smiling gaze, former Premier Golda Meir made fond Jewish grandmother's banter with Sadat about his new grandchild. In October 1973, the two had hurled armies at one another across the Sinai.

Was there something potentially sinister about television's intrusion into this striking moment of history? Did TV in fact serve history well in the episode? Or was TV, as the networks defensively insist, merely a neutral professional bouncing its images off a satellite with no intention--or effect--beyond good journalism? Oddly enough, the answer to all three questions is probably yes.

It is sometimes difficult to deal sensibly with television. In some people, TV excites grandiose and quasireligious visions --the future zoom of its open-ended possibilities, the way it collapses old relationships of time, space, sight and sound, or can tear up reality and reassemble it to the point that the medium's ambitions seem extravagantly metaphysical. To others, TV is all of civilization's banality crammed into a buzzing home appliance designed to cause brain damage. As a witness to actuality --its "news function"--television can be journalistically incomparable (Newton Minow exempted news from his famous 1961 charge that television was a "vast wasteland"), but its effects are complicated.

The presence of television undoubtedly changed the significance of the Sadat visit. The Egyptian President said that 70% of the Middle East problem is psychological--and TV produced stunning effects in establishing a new psychology in Israel and Egypt, if not in the rest of the area. TV surely influenced the way that Begin and Sadat behaved. It was as if they were governed by something like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which says that merely observing an event subtly alters it. Though both are experienced hams, Sadat and Begin knew (as televisionwise antiwar demonstrators of the '60s chanted) that "the whole world is watching." They both understood quite well the effect they were creating; they consciously used the medium. Golda Meir said later: "I am not sure whether in the end they will get the Nobel, but for certain both should get the Oscar." Yet the very nature of the event and the presence of the medium enlarged their behavior and their gestures--which in this case were gestures in the right direction. (Television, which feeds on the dramatic, has also of course incited terrorists to their own larger deeds.)

Television affected the way the project was set up. Had Sadat proceeded through diplomatic channels, feeling out the Israeli response to a visit, the trip might have been delayed; also, by advancing secretly, step by step, either party could have backed down at any time. When Cronkite and other TV reporters got involved, it was irrevocable; the world was a participant. Thus TV hurried the affair along, without actually causing it to happen.

Once the visit began, television's reporters and commentators did not do a very distinguished job. It was purely as a wide onlooking eye that TV served a magnificent function. It authenticated the improbable events and gave them a rich, subtle reality. The attentive world could see the look on Sadat's mobile face -- so dour at rest, then suddenly exploding in his quick laughter; could watch the effect on Begin, the glint in his eye; and could see the Israeli children waving Arab flags. When Sadat returned to Cairo, anyone inclined to think -- from reading a paper -- that his welcome there was staged could watch the jogging excitement of the crowds. As Television Critic Michael Arlen remarks, "TV is a kind of language that people have learned how to read."

Some fear that TV's pervasive presence at such events can be dangerous. The anchorpersons played their roles discreetly enough this time, but suppose, say, that ABC had dispatched Howard Cosell to interview Sadat at a delicate moment ("Now, Mr. President, in your fortuitous peregrinations . . .") or that CBS had sent the prosecutorial Mike Wallace ("Do you really expect us to believe . . ."). Television has a hazardous appetite for the dramatic, a way of demanding more and more, of propelling events with its own requirements for momentum. It can also, quite simply, falsify reality. Indeed it has frequently done so; film editors go for the fast and turbulent scene, even if everything is calm two feet out of camera range. Perhaps the Sadat trip was such effective the ater, because it was an event of enough inherent size and poignance to live up to TV's dramatic requirements without needing to be hoked up.

A few observers have complained that television, now seeming to intrude so thoroughly in diplomacy, has set itself up as a kind of fourth branch of the U.S. Government. But television governs nothing, forms no diplomatic policies, in fact had a lot less to do with the Sadat visit than William Randolph Hearst's newspapers had to do with the Spanish-American War. No doubt its technology has changed society; technology often does. It has been argued that the developing use of the stirrup, which enabled a rider to carry a lance, created the system of land payments to knights and hence created the entire system of feudalism. Television can draw the world into a single experience -- a moon shot, an assassination. McLuhan himself takes a benign view of the televised Sadat visit. "That," he believes, "was the human family sitting down together. It by passed history unexpectedly." Before anyone grows excessively mystical about television, however, it is probably well to remember that a few minutes after the President of Egypt set foot in the ancient enemy's land for the first time, ABC-TV cut back to the Ohio State-University of Michigan football game. TV, like history, has its priorities.

* The fourth: TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn.

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