Reprinted from INSIGHTS ON GLOBAL ETHICS, the publication of the Institute for Global Ethics, July/August 1995.

Stripped of the predictable global structure that the Cold War provided, diplomats and journalists alike are groping for an equally reliable way to respond to events in a world where it is no longer clear who are the good guys and who are the bad.

Writer and editor Edward C. Pease interviewed leading figures in the fields of journalism and diplomacy and filed this report.

NEW YORK-For diplomats who stage-manage international relations and world events, and for journalists who cover those events and make sense of them, Cold War politics offered a convenient lens through which to view the world.

But on his way out of office in 1993, U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger warned his successors that the post-George Bush world would not be a kinder, gentler place but a more complex and confusing one. "We are in the middle of a global revolution," Eagleburger stated, "a period of change and instability equaled in modern times only by the aftermath of the French and Russian revolutions."

In this unsettled society-a world where the Cold War is no longer a simplistic measuring stick to gauge right and wrong-lies a new ethical challenge. What are the ethical responsibilities of diplomacy in a still-disorganized new world order, and who sets the world political agenda-government leaders, or those who control the images we see in our living rooms on CNN or the evening news?

A New Assessment

For journalists like Bernard Gwertzman, foreign editor of The New York Times, the changes in the global balance have prompted a process of reassessment about the ethical role of international journalism-a process unprecedented in the previous four decades. "When one looks back," he says, "it is remarkable but not astonishing how much of newspaper coverage since World War II was devoted to foreign affairs, and how much hinged on the Cold War and East- West rivalries. This competition consciously and subconsciously dominated government policies, affecting newspaper coverage as well. For instance, virtually any election could be seen as an important index of the Cold War. Were the pro-American parties up or down? Would the Communists be allowed in to a coalition?"

But with the "evil empire" no more, everyone is having difficulty figuring out how to put world events in to context. Three years ago, Jack F. Matlock, Jr., now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, stepped down as what was effectively the last U.S. ambassador to the old Soviet Union. Matlock, a soft-spoken Russian-language scholar and career diplomat who was appointed to Moscow by Ronald Reagan in 1987, says making sense of the new, post-Cold War world remains a difficult task.

"The Cold War did give us certain standards," Matlock reflected in an interview at his Connecticut summer home. "We've lost that. That particular, fundamental polarization is no longer there."

"Now everything is sort of mixed up, and I think the world, including the media, is struggling for some touch-stones."

Government and Foreign Policy: Who Sets the Agenda?

As the media search for those touchstones in the post-Cold War era, one of the emerging ethical concerns of public servants and media observers alike is the degree to which diplomats and the governments they serve are leading or being led by new media. Communications technologies employed by those media, some observers contend, permit the like of CNN and others to set foreign-policy agendas.

For example, Robert MacNeil of PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" says that television images of distant events work to force presidents into near-instantaneous foreign-policy decision. The question of who sets the agenda for governments in a world suddenly stripped of political structures that identified friend and foe raises troubling ethical questions about the responsibilities and functions of both diplomats and the media in a brave new electronic world.

In other words, do governments or the media set the foreign-policy agenda in this electronic age? Former ambassador Matlock says no clear answer has emerged. "I don't think you can make a flat statement that the media set the agenda or simply follow an agenda set by any government. It's an interplay. . . . When sensational things happen, when there are wars and conflict, and particularly when television brings these things into people's living rooms-this tends to deprive policy makers of the option of ignoring them. If that's helping set an agenda, maybe it's not too bad."

But others aren't so sure-among them PBS's MacNeil. "When the United States stumbled into Somalia," MacNeil reflected in an essay in Media Studies Journal, "George Kennan, the revered scholar-diplomat, was appalled. It was a dreadful error of American policy,' he wrote [in a letter to The New York Times], caused primarily by an emotional reaction to the exposure of the Somalia situation by the American media-above all, television."

"Who's Making These Decisions, Washington or CNN?"

And many observers flatly contend that media images are so powerful and pervasive that diplomats and policy makers are reduced to reacting to media accounts of events, not to the events themselves. "We went into Somalia because of TV picture; we pulled back because of pictures," says James Clad, formerly a New Zealand diplomat and South Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

He refers to the fact that Navy SEALS invaded Somali beaches in December 1992 in what was supposed to be a secret mission to relieve tribal warfare and ensure humanitarian aid, only to be met on the beach by a superior force of journalist-much to the Pentagon's embarrassment. later, when Somali tribal forces ambushed U.S. troops and the media showed a mob dragging the bodies of marines through village streets, public opinion-and U.S. policy-on the Somalia mission changed radically.

"Who's making these decisions?" Clad asks. "Washington or CNN?"

"Praise Information Technology! Praise Be CNN."

The immediacy of modern communications technology in a CNN-driven world is another important aspect of this growing ethical dilemma. The lightning speed of today's news delivery systems makes it increasingly difficult for the media to dig for nuances, let alone communicate them. There is simply no time. Indeed, during world crises, leaders no longer have the time to call in ambassadors but instead call the media when they want to respond to events-a practice that raises ethical questions for leaders and journalists alike.

During the failed Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, Boris Yeltsin barricaded himself in the Russian White House and watched the scene outside via CNN, as did most of the rest of the world, marshaling international support via facsimile. Eduard Schevardnadze was quoted as saying afterward, "Praise information technology! Praise be CNN."

Both sides in the Persian Gulf War watched CNN correspondent Peter Arnett's reports from Baghdad. In earlier Middle East crises, parties in various peace initiatives floated trial balloons, responded to events, and rejected initiatives not through foreign envoys but foreign TV correspondents.

Larry King, described as the "father of electronic democracy," says "technology has made obsolete much of what governments do." King points to a statement made by one of his media- savvy guests, Ross Perot. "The truest thing [Ross] Perot said was, 'What do we have ambassadors for? We've got fax machines, phones. What does an ambassador do? Relays a message. We can get the message much faster now.'"

A New Ethical Paradigm and a Desire to Do Good

Many who chart the course of diplomacy and media contend that governments need a new paradigm for factoring in instantaneous news coverage of distant events, and the media may very well have a new and more important role to play-not only in reporting the emergence of the post-Cold War world, but in forming it.

In fact, some suggest that the removal of Cold War constrictions of the media's world view may have a liberating effect, both for the press and the public. "We need new guidelines, which is why I think this can be either an extremely creative period or, if we hang on to too many stereotypes of the past, an increasingly confused period," Matlock says. "I think the media have an extremely important role to play in calling people's attention to this. But to do it, they must report not only the day's new, but also press for more effective means to deal with the new challenges. Media coverage can have an effect, if it is formed by some sort of vision. That's an enormously important role, for both policy makers and the public."

One vision informing the world view of U.S. journalists that may emerge strongly in a post-Cold War era, absent the group-think preoccupation with the Communist threat, is journalists' desire to do good. This trend of American foreign policy and media alike may permit the press-no longer bound by the old imperative of viewing the world in terms of the struggle between democracy and communism-to focus on "human news" designed to relieve suffering. Coverage of the Bosnian conflict, for example, may indicate that an increasingly activist tone has begun to sound in coverage of international affairs.

"Calls for humanitarian interventions in trouble spots around the world may well represent a new, liberal form of imperialism," says Jon Vanden Heuvel, a research associate at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. "I would argue that the media and foreign-policy makers now have a stronger humanitarian impulse. It used to be the raison d'etre of foreign policy was to conquer Soviet influence. Now there's a notion that we have a special beneficent role to play in the world.'

"Television-The Test of the Modern World"

In the best of all new world orders, the electronic media will have a critical role to play as both instigator of policy and partner with government in its creation and implementation. "Television has created a different order of public opinions," says Robert MacNeil. "In the issues that touch foreign affairs, the public witnesses the same apparent reality as its leaders. The public is no longer a mass to be sold a policy after it is decided. It is now active in seeing policy made and, one might even add, getting policy made."

Not that many ever doubted the potential power of television. In 1938, E.B. White, that grand old man of American letters, wrote, "I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television-of that I am quite sure."

Today, 56 years after that assessment, television and its electronic offspring are still testing our patience. And in a post-Cold War information age, the opportunities are greater than ever for the media to prove itself an unbearable disturbance or a saving radiance.

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