Darkness in the Global Village

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Peace and understanding were supposed to follow once the world was wired together into one global village. Knowledge would ricochet off satellites out in space, bringing us instant views of coronations, street riots or Olympic Games. What the world saw together it would feel together. But that seldom happens.

The technology is there, but only rarely, as in Poland, does an odd set of circumstances permit a real glimpse of turmoil across an ideological barrier. Even then Americans saw much more on television than the Poles were allowed to see, and the rest of the Communist world was told about it sparingly. (Soviet readers were told only after the strike was settled that the Poles had reached "agreement on a number of socioeconomic matters.")

Poles themselves give the impression of being a people constantly shushing one another. They have to; the message is always clear: Let's not go too far; remember Czechoslovakia. But if there were only shushing, hardships would never be eased. As in all Communist regimes, Poland's leaders have made it hard for the Western press to report the nation's problems. Most Western reporters are let in only for brief periods on single-entry visas. Forehandedly, after months of planning, the New York Times was able to get accreditation for John Darnton, now the only U.S. correspondent resident in Warsaw. (Even so, when the trouble broke out in late August, the Times's former chief European correspondent, Flora Lewis, was in Majorca and had to begin her new foreign affairs column: "There is a special poignancy in hearing the news from Poland on this quiet, sun-soothed Spanish island...")

Western reporters flying into Poland did a good job of unsensationalized coverage, with the help of sympathetic Polish technicians and newspapermen, whose own opportunity to cover the story was circumscribed, and English-speaking Polish intellectuals well informed on the situation. On American television, such unprecedented coverage may have seemed so much like home as not to appear novel: there stood an American correspondent, mike in hand, talking in front of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk exactly as he might outside a struck factory in Akron. Overnight, Strike Leader Lech Walesa--whose appearances on the state-run Polish television were kept to a minimum--became a familiar American-television face. With the usual American gift for hype, Republicans trotted out Walesa's father, who lives in New Jersey but doesn't speak English, to pose for TV cameras with Ronald Reagan against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty.

Polish television, which rarely shows Poland's powerful Roman Catholic Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, found it expedient to broadcast a sermon of his, perhaps because of its shushing appeal for moderation. Since then, however, the government has allowed some freer discussion in the press and on television as well as radio broadcasts of church services, an encouraging turn that may prove temporary. "Don't go yet," a Polish airlines clerk said to the Times's John Vinocur as he bought a ticket to leave Gdansk. "It's good if somebody's watching."

In Afghanistan, where outsiders are no longer able to do much watching, the difference shows. Whatever story is there can't be covered properly. News must be gathered from diplomats, whose own movements are limited, or distilled from travelers, whose passionate descriptions often outrun their knowledge. The Associated Press hasn't been able to get anyone into Afghanistan since Edie Lederer, posing as a rug-buying tourist, traveled through the countryside last May. She came out with a colorful story and four rugs. In Iran, no American correspondent can get accredited to Khomeini's regime; to cover the story, news-gathering organizations must make use of foreign reporters and other stratagems they don't like to talk about.

Still, dictatorships too have their problems of acknowledging stories they can't conceal, or giving a televised look of actuality to their own version of news. Chinese newspapers, in the confessional mood of the new era, speak of "lies and distortions" in the past and admit that they "still often carry false, boastful and untrue reports." South Korea's newly installed army dictator, Chun Doo Hwan, has ordered Ms press to proclaim that the U.S. fully supports his rule, despite repeated State Department protests that the U.S. objects to his suppression of opposition. South Koreans aren't told that. The technology may be there, but there are a lot of dark corners in the global village.

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