America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

In the totalitarian world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell imagined that the Thought Police would rely on a ubiquitous "oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror" to keep the citizens of Oceania brainwashed and obedient: "The instrument (the television, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely." That prophecy turned out spectacularly wrong. TV, along with radio, computers, modems, copiers and fax machines, caused big trouble for Big Brother in 1989. Once the more repressive precincts of the global village were wired for glasnost, legions of little brothers whispered subversion in everyone's ear.

What has been called the third industrial revolution, the transformation of society by high technology and mass communications, has made it possible to infiltrate competing images of reality across borders. "Terrestrial overspill" allowed East Germans to watch West German TV, tempting them with what they saw advertised. Young Estonians have learned idiomatic American English from reruns of Dynasty shown in neighboring Finland.

When communism began to self-destruct last year, TV journalists did more than just report the phenomenon -- they participated in it. The presence of foreign cameramen seemed to embolden the demonstrators. Once the Chinese authorities decided to shed blood, they literally pulled the plug on television coverage. Rumania's Nicolae Ceausescu also kept the press out of his country while he slaughtered its citizens. Not until TV aired footage of his lifeless body were many Rumanians convinced that the despot had really been executed.

The blank screen is a license to kill. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, China's regime implicitly acknowledged its vulnerability to short waves by singling out the Voice of America for charges of slander and fabrication. In fact, the VOA had broadcast the truth back into the People's Republic, jamming the Big Lie.

David Webster, a former director of the BBC and now a senior fellow of the Annenberg Washington Program on Communications Policy, calls high-tech information gear "the essential hardware of freedom." He rightly urges the U.S. to ease restrictions on the export of such equipment to communist lands, since it will serve the ruled better than the rulers.

While the collapse of communism made for some great visuals in '89, it is worth remembering that the third industrial revolution can cut both ways, complicating the lives of American Presidents as well as communist leaders. To the fury of Lyndon Johnson, TV brought the Viet Nam War home to the U.S. and hastened its humiliating end. Some former advisers to Ronald Reagan suspect he might have stuck by Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 had it not been for the extensive and sympathetic coverage of People Power.

But most of the signals with which the U.S. bombards the planet transmit not news but pop culture. Hollywood has more influence on the Third World than does Washington. The barrios of Latin America bristle with antennas. There are VCRs in rural India, satellite dishes around the slums of the Caribbean and in northern Mexico. In some parts of the world, the poor and desperate can ponder the life-styles of the rich and silly on Dynasty. The experience teaches viewers more than English. It can make for an explosive combination of envy, hatred and determination to break out of wretched surroundings, or to burn them down.

Everywhere on earth, tantalizing, sometimes infuriating images keep coming from that oblong metal plaque. But Orwell was right about one thing: there is no way of shutting it off.