The "Self-Restraint" Brownout

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Egypt's Anwar Sadat thinks the Ayatullah is a lunatic, but, as Richard Nixon told a TV interviewer two weeks ago, "if he's crazy, he's crazy like a fox in one respect. He knows how to manipulate the media. He in effect has convicted the Shah in the minds of great numbers of Americans, as well as people throughout the world."

Nixon can never resist a chance to get in a lick at the press. About the Shah's fallen reputation, Nixon is dead right, but not simply because Khomeini manipulated the press: the Ayatullah has been able to take noisy advantage of a bizarre news brownout, a month of "self-restraint" unparalleled in American life. Johnny Carson confesses on TV that he is having a harder time with his opening monologues; Art Buchwald, who gets most of his humor columns out of topical events, hasn't done a single column about Iran. Even presidential candidates have been biting their tongues about Iran, except for Connally's early macho outburst and Teddy Kennedy's intemperate denunciation of the Shah. In this distorted situation, nightly television news has done the poorest job of balancing its coverage.

With their appetite for visual excitement, newscasts often open with the latest rant from the cross-legged Ayatullah, then move to shots of Death-to-the-Shah street crowds, who by now economically wave their fists most fervently when they see the camera's red light upon them. Next the "students" appear, enjoying the dream of every terrorist and airplane hijacker: to have television cameramen vying to record their loudest threats and wildest allegations. This has usually been balanced, if at all, by a brief low-key response from the State Department spokesman, and by the infrequent appearance of an unimpressive publicity man for the Shah. Anchormen and their producers are generally scrupulous about presenting "the other side" of any story, but they do not consider it their business to generate one. That, to them, would be news manipulation. On any lively issue they expect counterarguments to surface normally in the news, and just this has been missing in the news programs from which most Americans get their information, under the brownout of self-restraint.

The Shah has been the real loser. While hostages are in jeopardy, the only minidebate that has been allowed to erupt publicly is over who-let-the-Shah-in. When Carter's foreign policy again becomes fair game for partisan attack, it is doubtful that the strengths of the Shah's regime can ever be asserted as full-throatedly as before. Those televised sweeping panoramas of massed Iranians seem to dispute whatever public support the Shah once had. The Shah's secret police may not have tortured so widely or viciously as the Ayatullah's propagandists claim, but at least some torture seems to be conceded. How many millions of dollars the Shah and his family got away with--those "umpteen billions," in Kennedy's phrase--amounts to a quarrel about numbers.

Khomeini did not create U.S. television's imbalance between self-restraint and rant, but he has profited from it. Once he seemed bent on expelling all foreign correspondents, but now more than 200 of them are "persona grata" in a land where American diplomats are not. Journalists walk the streets of Tehran encountering little hostility, despite Iran radio's constant and strident anti-American propaganda. In their on-the-air questioning of the student militants, however, they too seem inhibited by the fear of jeopardizing the hostages. When Khomeini gives televised interviews, he chooses which submitted questions he will deign to answer and allows no follow-ups. His advisers are smart enough about American public opinion to recognize that a star like CBS's Mike Wallace deserves three times as much interview time as the two other networks, and to conclude that public television rates fourth.

With such advantages, the Imam who rejects modernity needs no flying carpet to speed his message round the world. Television's latest technology, and the unaccustomed restraint of the press, does it for him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.