Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

It is easy to exaggerate the point and arrive at the wrong conclusion. Credit first the Filipinos, who won their own victory. Credit Cory Aquino's popular appeal and her surprising firmness and spunk, the steady and subtle support of the Catholic Church, the defection of the two military leaders. Then credit American diplomacy, which wanted Marcos out, but not so precipitously that chaos would follow. Presumably this helps explain Reagan's early waffling. What hastened the President's change of mind was the discovery that Congress and the American people were ahead of him in wanting Marcos out. The public response was an astonishing and all but unanimous American plebiscite that required no ballot. The visuals on American TV did Marcos in.

It wasn't Dan Rather or George Will. It was the pictures -- the nuns, and the crowds wearing a touch of yellow, blocking the path of the armored cars. It was the sight of ballot boxes being dumped. Read in a newspaper, Marcos' bluster might have been convincing, but seen on that palatial King and I set, with the ruler feebly speaking those strong words, it was not. In a precarious few days, it was the total collapse of Marcos' American support that sped the end. TV proved its awesome power.

That it happened in English helped too. Posters were meant to be read by the crowds, as well as seen by foreign cameras. The Filipinos easily made their own case on American talk shows. By contrast, the fall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti made less vivid TV. Cameras could show the undernourished Haitian country people, happy but still fearful, but much of the expression of their emotions got lost in translation. The problem was once wryly summed up in a book title by Edward Behr, who had covered the Congo: Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

Still, it was the pictures, not the words, that counted most. Les Midgley, who for some years produced the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, is convinced that had the space shuttle Challenger flown only a few miles farther and then exploded off-camera, the story would have created far less of a sensation. The image of white plumes scattering in a giant Rorschach pattern is now engraved on every American's brainpan. Endless repetition did it: television believes that something shown only once has not been seen at all.

Television might be a more dangerous medium if its fondness for violent action always produced a hot response in its watchers. Sometimes it does: the picture of police dogs in Alabama changed history. But repeated scenes of snipers ducking around doorways in Belfast eventually generate a feeling that this is an interminable quarrel. The endless car bombings in Beirut, the sight of young armed soldiers, arouse the feeling that we just do not belong in Lebanon.

To evoke a real response in an American audience jaded by nightly violence, strong pictures must produce the reaction that there is something we can do about it. The pictures of famine in Africa did that. So, until recently, did the news from South Africa. The sponsors of apartheid kept off their own TV screens the sight of cops clubbing protesting blacks, while not caring what the rest of the world thought. But foreign outrage began to matter when international banks shut down on loans to South Africa. With TV cameramen forbidden to photograph scenes of violence, foreign correspondents have had to conjure up with words alone the reality of the day's death toll. It isn't effective TV. Now that South Africa has ended its state of emergency, will cameras really be allowed to show what is going on? South Africa's leaders have a healthy respect for what visuals can do, and much to hide.