The Third World War: August 1985 полностью

In this propaganda battle the Allies had another weapon on their side — flexibility and speed of decision. The US President made one ruling of major importance immediately upon the outbreak of war. He resisted demands that a censorship board be established to guide and select the flow of television material overseas. ‘We must trust the networks and the individual broadcasters,’ he said. ‘We must rely on them to be both patriotic and sensible.’ An ad hoc organization of television professionals was set up and given scope to make the constant, split-second decisions on the choice of material to be transmitted throughout the world upon which television depends. They were guided — and in the last resort could have been controlled — by military advisers whose task was to ensure that no information of positive military value to the enemy was sent out. For instance, no coverage was given of the points of embarkation or the detailed composition of air loads from the US, still less of the location of their points of arrival in Europe. There was no coverage of the assembling of the CAVALRY convoys, no disclosure of their exact contents or destination. Shots which showed secret equipment in detail were excluded. But even such material as this was treated much less stringently than in previous wars, for, as has already been pointed out, it was known that the Soviet Union, by means of satellite surveillance, active pre-war espionage and the early capture of much equipment in the fighting in Germany, had access to most of these secrets anyway. By and large the broadcasters were free to treat this material very much as they wished, within the general understanding that it should be fairly selected so as to give a reasonably accurate picture of the broad strategic scene. This meant that coverage of Allied losses and withdrawals was balanced by coverage of Allied resistance and counter-attack. Within this broad understanding, however, the broadcasters were left to make their own judgments.

This had two results, both of considerable value to the Allied cause. It meant that the material from Allied broadcasters reached the screens of the outside world ahead of that coming from the Soviet bloc; and that it reached those screens in a form that made it all the more convincing. It contained, if not the whole truth, at least a reasonably rounded version of the truth. Certainly it was more truthful than the coverage which came from Moscow. The communist material was not only less plentiful, there being fewer peacetime camera resources to deploy, but it was also dangerously delayed by their censorship machine. All Warsaw Pact footage of the fighting had to be screened, in both senses of the word, by Soviet officialdom. It arrived hours — and sometimes days — later than the Allied coverage. Day after day the first impression of the fighting available to television stations all over the world was that supplied by the Allies — and it was an impression of embattled countries which, whilst suffering heavy and grievous setbacks, were holding on strongly enough to enable the massive power of the United States to be brought to bear. This did a great deal to sustain the morale of key countries like Iran, a great deal to ensure the continued but friendly neutrality of the Far Eastern bloc, and a great deal, as post-war research has already shown, to raise anxieties within some African and Middle Eastern states that they might have backed the wrong side.

Within that most television-addicted society in Europe, the United Kingdom, television played a curiously subdued role. By 1985 it had become in every way the main source of information and entertainment for the public. The various view-data systems which were then commonplace had added the dimension of a journal of record, a development which had weakened still further the impact of the newspapers. When war came, the public turned to television for news, guidance and information, and for that measure of entertainment for which the human spirit, however closely facing disaster, still has a craving. The first of these the television organizations were able to supply, in copious measure. For the first few days of the fighting the screens were given over almost entirely to continuous news programmes, interspersed with messages about air raid precautions or emergency services, with administrative instructions on such matters as rationing and evacuation. There were also frequent speeches from government leaders.