Public Media Monitor, Winter Hyperedition (December 1993),

Review of:

War and Television by Bruce Cumings London: Verso, 1992, 309 pp.

By Doug Kellner

In War and Television, Bruce Cumings explores the role of television in the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars. Cumings also offers some general reflections on the topic of war and television and a fascinating account of his role in producing the TV series "The Unknown War". A member of the 1960s anti-war generation, Cumings studied the Vietnam war’s predecessor, the Korean war, which he helped document in a TV series on the war. These experiences made him aware of the distorted ways in which the media transmit both the news of the day and accounts of past historical events. Such a critical perspective lets Cumings see the lies and distortions in the television version of the United States’ most recent major military intervention against Iraq. The result is a book that attacks the ways in which U.S. television presents false views of history and excludes more critical and complex views. A historian and documentarian, Cumings reflects on history, television, and documentaries and attendant notions of objectivity, bias, and truth. "The historian should be a skeptic, a doubter, a detective, and an honest person, writes Cumings. So should documentary makers who claim to do history. While Cumings’s reflections on these themes are interesting, I want to turn to his account of continuities and differences in the three wars which he surveys, focusing on the role of television and the media in manufacturing consent to government policy.

In his own view, all three wars under investigation had an objective quality in which the greatest power on earth pulverized a small Third World country that dared to challenge it, and therefore, ideological pleading to the contrary, all had an incommensurability of the enemy that allows no human being, on reflection, to exult in American victory. If David took different forms, from the unknown Kim Il Sung to the avuncular Ho Chi Minh to the central-casting villainy of Saddam Hussein, Goliath was ever present (17).

As he writes, both the Korean and Gulf war appear to begin with naked aggression. . . . The United States runs the show, however, and over time the unambiguous beginning unravels in questions about whether some Americans saw the enemy attack coming, and chose not to do anything about it. . . . In both cases a containment victory is won (the aggressor is expelled) and in both a 'rollback’ victory is lost (Kim Il Sung and Saddam Hussein still reign). War 1 returns Korea to the status quo ante, restores a dubious regime in Seoul, resolves nothing, and festers to this day; War 3 returns the Middle East to the status quo ante, restores a dubious regime in Kuwait, and, at this writing, resolves nothing in regard to Middle East peace. Between the Gulf war and Korea was, of course, Vietnam, and throughout his book Cumings points to the links between these events: Vietnam as another Korea and the Gulf war as an attempt to avoid another Vietnam and to overcome the Vietnam syndrome. There is also a certain historical symmetry in these juxtapositions: Korea began the proliferation of the Military-Industrial Complex and National Security State with maintenance of a permanent huge and expensive peacetime armed force at home and abroad in the interests of global hegemony. The Gulf war, arguably, comes at the end of this era, occurring simultaneously with the apparent obsolescence of this same far-flung complex (its primary enemy -- the USSR -- having given up the fight), providing it a new breath of life.

Yet the role of television and the media in these three wars was significantly different: in Korea, television appeared on a national scale at the same moment that the war erupted and the military really didn’t know what to do with television. Nor did the new medium know how to cover a war in part of the world relatively unknown to U.S. television audiences. Vietnam appeared during the apex of U.S. empire and during a period in which television achieved undisputed hegemony as a medium of information and entertainment, yet fierce debates continue as to the actual role that television played in Vietnam. The Gulf war was a war made for television, the culmination of serious military and political reflection on how to manage public opinion and stage a spectacle that will achieve certain political goals. It was one of the most brilliant public relations campaigns in history, although its after-effects seem to be rather minimal compared to Korea and Vietnam. After laying out some of his presuppositions about how the media transmits pictures of history and plays a political role in social life, Cumings proceeds in a somewhat strange chronological order, analyzing, first, the relation between war and television in Vietnam, then turning to the Gulf war, and finally, focusing in the most detail on the Korean war, which in Cumings’s theorization is not just forgotten but unknown. Cumings’ account of Vietnam and television follows the parameters established by Dan Hallin, Bill Gibson, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, all of whom contest the right-wing myth that television lost the Vietnam war by presenting bloody pictures and critical commentary that turned the country against the war. Cumings provides copious examples of media cheer-leading for the U.S. military during Vietnam, attacking the myth perpetrated by Richard Nixon, George Will, and scholars and activists on the right that TV turned the country against U.S. Vietnam policy.

Cumings draws on a wide range of critical commentary on the Gulf war to demonstrate that it was really the first television war and that it was a response to U.S. failure in Vietnam, a carefully-crafted attempt to overcome the Vietnam syndrome. As he writes in his chapter, "No More Vietnams: The Gulf war sequence reversed Vietnam": "whereas television served state policy in the first phase of the war and questioned it in the second (after Tet), Gulf coverage interrogated the war in the months before Desert Storm, and served the state once the storm broke." This is just about right, although in fact mainstream media and the loyal Democratic opposition were almost totally uncritical of Bush Administration/Pentagon policy during the crucial build-up of the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and only began a debate when Bush doubled the deployment after the November 1990 elections. Then the media debate took place over whether sanctions should be given time to work or whether only military action could solve t he crisis. The mainstream media rarely suggested that a negotiated settlement was possible and pretty well shut out the voices of the peace movement.

War Mythologies

When he turns to the Korean war, Cumings takes a different approach, focusing on his experiences in making a documentary series about the war, rather than analyzing the actual role of television and the media in the Korean war. He points out that there was little critical reporting during the Korean war, that the reporting on the war tended to support without criticism U.S. policy, and that today not only is the Korea war forgotten, but it was never really known because of the failure of the mainstream media to provide an accurate account. This is unfortunate, Cumings maintains, because the Vietnam war was largely a continuation, or extension, of the Korean war, which Cumings argues was perhaps the most terrible war of the twentieth century. Few people are aware that 600,000 tons of U.S. bombs almost totally destroyed North Korea, that U.S. forces engaged in many atrocities against the North Koreans and Chinese, including torture and mass murder of prisoners of war, mass bombing of civilian villages, and perhaps biological and chemical warfare against civilians. Few people are aware that as many as two million civilians were killed in the war and perhaps 1.5 million soldiers. The Korean war is also, as Cumings’ book demonstrates, one of the most contested events in contemporary history concerning its origins, trajectories, and effects. Obviously the two Koreas have their own firmly established mythologies concerning the origin s and motivations of the war and there are a variety of interpretations of the war throughout the West, with Cumings being a major player in these debates. While Cumings and his colleague Jon Halliday, who came up with the idea for the television documentary, wanted to contrast the different interpretations and correct the historical record, they found that the television bureaucracies in which they were working made it impossible to articulate their own key ideas concerning the war.

Cumings points out the fallacy of many documentary filmmakers who privilege the participants in the events, as if those who were there provide the most direct access to the truth. He points out that the participants in such events have their own axes to grind, their reputations to protect, and usually sound-bite their views in conventional phrases and interpretations. Documents in archives, unorthodox interpretations, and views that go against the grain are thus marginalized and usually excluded in TV documentaries, which tend to rely on the usual suspects for commentary. Indeed, the documentary which the author participated in replicates the dominant form of documentary by privileging historical participants, illustrating their recollections with raw footage and supportive narration. This is not Cumings’ fault, for, as he makes clear, he was merely historical consultant for the series and was cut out of the final editing process of the PBS version of the documentary. Perhaps the most interesting chapter both for scholars of the Korean war and students of history and documentary is the study of "The Politics of The Unknown War," which describes how the Boston PBS affiliate seriously re-edited the documentary, distorting and in many cases altering the interpretations in the British documentary to suit the interests and views of right-wing pressure groups in the U.S. This account reveals the shameful extent to which liberal PBS producers capitulated to right-wing forces during the Reagan and the Bush years and the way that the right was thus able to filter out content and perspectives uncongenial to its ideology -- all in the name of balance, objectivity, and avoiding bias.

This chapter will be of great interest to historians of the Korean war who can see what details of the British version were omitted by PBS and why. The editing (read censoring) in each case had to do with ways that the British version challenged conventional wisdom and standard conservative interpretations of the Korean war. The discussion is also interesting to media critics as evidence of the ways the pressure groups and prevailing views constrain articulation of positions that run counter to dominant wisdom. Cumings’s interesting account should make readers and TV audiences highly skeptical of the version of history transmitted by TV news and documentary and to be aware that TV history is a symbolic construct highly mediated by questionable TV practices, pressure groups, and the bounds of conventional wisdom. More accurate renditions of history transmitted through media like television are thus going to require alternative practices and strategies. War and Television provides fascinating insights into the perspectives and experiences of a scholar trying to produce responsible television history. Ultimately it might help provoke widespread interest in what really happened in the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars, as well as lead to see how television creates mythological and distorted versions of these key events of our modern history.