USD Magazine, Summer 1992

her USD students-who give her lectures rave reviews– and she continues to cast a critical eye at the relationship between TV news and foreign policy. A book chapter on CNN and ABC coverage of the Gulf War will be pub– lished soon, and she is planning a study of TV's role in the reaction to the Rodney King video, the Simi Valley verdict and the aftermath that gripped much of the coun– try this past spring. And it is an election year. "I sat down to watch the movie 'Risky Business' on TV last night and ended up taping all the political ads," she laughs. "But I would need at least four VCRs to monitor everything."

• Dramatic, still images often represented complex events. When ABC News accompanied reports of the 1985 TWA hijacking with a photo of pilot John Testrake being watched by a dark-skinned gunman, it reinforced the idea of "civilians as targets, commercial passenger jets as prisons, hostages as heroic, and dark, Islamic extrem– ists as terrorists," Dobkin says. • Reporters used the passive voice in telling stories. Saying "Three Americans have been taken hostage" rather than "Hijackers have taken a number of hostages, including three Americans" focused attention on the American as terrorist victim. • The networks occasionally criticized Reagan as a "paper tiger" who used strong rhetoric to lambaste terror– ism but had done little to back up his talk. At the same time, they presented military scenarios that supported the administration's preference for military action. Th.e combined result of these and other broadcasting methods, Dobkin says, was that the desire for military action was reinforced, both on the part of the administra– tion and the public. If Reagan's foreign policy required military action in order to give Americans a sense that something was being done about terrorism, television helped give it a chance by subtly reinforcing the need for military action in the minds of its viewers. The "terrorist threat" waned in the eyes of the pub– lic----despite a relatively constant rate of terrorist activity before and since-when the Iran-Contra investigation diverted the attention of both administration and media and exposed the hypocrisy in negotiations with terrorists, Dobkin says. George Bush has been too busy with Pana– ma, the Gulf War, the economy and now the loud foot– steps of Bill Clinton to renew the war against terrorism. Meanwhile, the hero narrative nature of TV news con– tinues with other stories, from the economy to the "drug war," and Beth Dobkin spends more time than she likes to admit perched in front of a television and two VCRs, remote control in hand. She shares findings with

Beth Dobkin

TERRORISTS, TELEVISION JOURNALISTS AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MAY MAKE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, BUT IN THE 1980s THEY WERE ALL SHARING AN UNCOMFORTABLY SMALL SPACE.

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