The first noteworthy war to occur in the television age was the Korean War (1950-53). Television was in its infancy as a mass medium at the time and, as a consequence, the Korean conflict is not widely thought of as a televised war. Not only did relatively few viewers have access to television sets, but, because satellite technology was not yet developed and television film had to be transported by air to broadcasters, by the time such film arrived its immediacy was much diminished. Often, therefore, newspapers and radio remained the media of first choice for timely information. Nonetheless, in August 1950, a CBS television news announcer reported an infantry landing as it was in progress. The controversy caused by this putative security breach foreshadows conflicts  that would long continue between military authorities waging war and television reporters covering warfare.

     Years later, these concerns  persisted and found one of their most surreal expressions in connection with the 1992 U.S.-led occupation of Somalia, when early waves of U.S. occupation forces landed on Somali beaches at night and found their landings illuminated by the television lights of international news organizations. Criticism of the security risk this illumination entailed harks back to similar criticism of the 1950 CBS report on the infantry landing in Korea, and it seems a valid military concern, as does concern during the second Gulf War that certain television correspondents reported in real time on troop movements. Other aspects of the media-military relationship, however, are less clear-cut, especially as to whether military manipulation of the media is a proper military concern or an undue intrusion into civilian politics.

     In many national contexts, concerns about troop security and public perceptions have led to formal legal censorship of television war coverage, although, perhaps as frequently, physical or technological obstacles inherent to television broadcasting from theaters of war, or erected by military personnel at the scene of a conflict, have often served a similar censorship purpose. While debates about formal censorship raged during many of the 20th century's wars, informal censorship was, presumably, even more frequent, as early on when during the 1956 Suez expedition British media were requested to refrain from reporting certain information but were not forced to do so under penalty of law. Or, as almost half a century later, when U.S. military authorities, as a prelude to the second Gulf War, purchased all available time on orbiting photo­ satellites to make their images publicly unavailable, and unavailable also to besieged Iraqi forces.

     Other post-World War II conflicts notwithstanding, television coverage of the U.S. war with Vietnam (1962-75) seems to have inspired the most controversy worldwide. Despite clear evidence that the U.S. war effort was less than successful in objective terms, U.S. popular opinion and much expert military opinion continue to regard the Vietnam War as one that could have brought victory to the United States on the battlefield but was lost in the living room (where viewers watched their television sets and many eventually withdrew their support for the effort). Reporters who themselves covered the Vietnam War in the early 1960s remember, however, that most of that early coverage was laudatory and, in the words of Bernard Kalb, who would later join the Cable News Network (CNN), that there was "an awful lot of jingoism ...  on the part of the press in which it celebrated the American involvement in Vietnam .' ' Methodical scholarly accounts of televised coverage also report that television coverage was inclined overall to highlight positive aspects of the Vietnam War and that viewers exposed to the most televised coverage were also those most inclined to view the military favorably. Nonetheless, domestic social schisms attributed to controversy about the Vietnam War and that war's ultimate failure to sustain a noncommunist regime in Vietnam are often blamed on television and other media.

     Whether the public turned against the Vietnam War because television, in particular, and the media, in general, presented it unfavorably, or whether the public turned against the war because the media accurately depicted its horrors and television did so most graphically of all remains an open and hotly contested question. There is, however, no historic evidence to prove that a graphic portrayal of war disinclined a viewing public to engage in a war. Some scholars even suggest that the opposite may be the case when a public considers a war justified and that public is exposed to images of its side enduring great- and presumably righteous- suffering.

     Despite a still less-than-definitive understanding of the relationship between television coverage and popular support for war efforts. military strategists continued to integrate domestic public relations  (PR) strategy into overall military strategy during and after the U.S .- Vietnam War. As the war progressed, analysts continued to debate whether it was appropriate for the military itself-rather than some other government agency-to attempt to influence civilian public policy through such efforts. Within military circles in the wake of that war, most such debates were left behind and the military's media relations strategies began moving far beyond censorship and toward a full­-fledged engagement (some say co-optation) of televised media. This trend remained strong through the second Gulf War as documented most recently by PR experts who authored Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush: War on Iraq.

     Hints of this new military strategy surfaced soon after the U.S.-Vietnam War. During 1976 naval conflicts between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights, for example, various strategies to influence televised coverage were used by the Icelandic side to depict Britain as the aggressive party, while the British Navy (then less media savvy) refused to allow television crews on its ships. As late as the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, during which Great Britain successfully reclaimed South Atlantic islands that Argentina's military dictatorship had occupied, British military strategists had yet to develop a comprehensive media strategy. Although by then the British Navy did allow television and other media personnel to travel aboard its ships to the South Atlantic, the British did not systematically endeavor to control the content of the war coverage by influencing television media.

     The following year, when the United States invaded Grenada, concerns regarding less-than-favorable television coverage prompted military planners to exclude civilian camera crews entirely in favor of military television crews. Sensitivity to unfavorable television coverage was heightened at that time by the deaths of 230 U.S. Marine and 50 French peacekeepers in a bomb attack during operations in Beirut. But in 1989, when the United States invaded Panama, the exclusion of civilian television crews was not feasible, and thanks to satellite technology and round-the-clock CNN coverage, television viewers were able to watch the progress of military operations with much immediacy. As had been the case, however, during the early 1960s in Vietnam, the television media were generally inclined to stress the salutary aspects of the Panama invasion, and U.S. planners also did a more effective job of controlling the public perception of the invasion.

     The very short duration of the Panama, Grenada, and Falklands/Malvinas operations may have fore­ stalled adverse reactions among the civilian populations who watched their governments wage war on television. This led some observers to argue that short­-lived military engagements are suited to the television age, as they are less likely to generate adverse television coverage and public opposition. Yet a surfeit of short-lived military endeavors notwithstanding, long­ term warfare is still waged in the television age. Still other observers suggest that a lack of widely available independent television coverage, especially in developing nations, was what long made extended warfare in certain regions palatable to the international community. The rise in the rest of the world of major television networks dedicated to independent coverage of news, such as Al Jazeera, is bound to factor into that equation in the coming years.

     Meanwhile, no clear relationship between television coverage and a war's intensity or duration seems apparent. On the one hand, for example, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) received often negligible international television coverage and lasted years; on the other, civil wars  in   various   parts  of   the   former   Yugoslavia (1991-98) continued for years as well, despite often extensive international coverage. Other extended or particularly brutal conflicts. terrorist campaigns, coups d'etat, civil wars, and genocidal endeavors also received widely varying levels of television coverage. Such latter-day wars have been waged in Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan. Cambodia, Chad, Chechnya. El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Guatemala, Liberia, Nigeria, Peru, Rwanda, the Sudan, Yemen, the former Zaire, and in other places far too numerous to mention. Through these myriad conflicts, horrific imagery also found its way to television screens, sometimes leading to calls for and the deployment of peacekeeping missions, sometimes not. The Balkan wars of the 1990s, in particular, featured horrific scenes of emaciated prisoners of war and poignant images of civilians shot down in the street-notably, images televised for days of corpses belonging to Admira lsmic and Bosko Brckic, Romeo-and-Juliet-type  lovers from opposite sides of the Bosnian conflict shot down by snipers during a clandestine rendezvous atop a Sarajevo bridge. Broadcast scenes of those sorts led ultimately to international intervention in the Balkans, though similar scenes of civilians, both adults and children, shot by automatic gunfire in the Occupied Territories of Palestine led to no such intervention. Disturbing televised images from that conflict include those of 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Dura being shot dead, while Jamal, his father, attempted in vain to shelter him from a hail of automatic fire (television cameras captured the Al-Dura shooting in almost its every detail, and as of this writing, a video of the event is available through the BBC website, news.bbc.co.uk).

     Other campaigns of mass armed atrocity, such as those in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), received less televised coverage or none at all. It is noteworthy, however, that conflicts in Liberia and other parts of Africa received major televised coverage when European and U.S. troops became involved  as peacekeepers. The 'Zanzibar Chest, by a Reuter's reporter who covered Africa's many wars during   the   1990s,  and  Charlie   Wilson's War, about covert U.S. support to one-half-million Afghan and other Muslim troops fighting Soviet occupation in the 1980s, both provide vivid details about warfare not prominently televised; but, especially as regards Afghanistan, it is unfair to suggest that those struggles were entirely ignored by Western television. Most famously, Dan Rather, head anchor of the CBS Evening News, donned disguises and reported from among the Afghan troops on two occasions. Other Western television journalists also habitually burnish their reputations by covering certain major wars on location.

     Nonetheless, even the example of Eastern Europe further bolsters arguments that regional conflicts removed from centers of Western interest garner significantly less coverage. The most far removed of these Eastern European conflicts, Chechnya's efforts to end Russian control over that part of the Caucasus, received less coverage than did the Balkan wars and much less than the various earlier uprisings that ended Soviet hegemony over the area.

     Removed geographically but not economically from the Western sphere of influence, the two Persian Gulf Wars received the most televised coverage of any armed endeavor in recent years, with the single exception of the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. mainland. In the aftermath of both Gulf Wars, television and other media were criticized for having failed to provide balanced and complete accounts. Ent­ man argues, in addition, that the media simply gave up trying to construct a coherent narrative for viewers in the long occupation of Iraq after the second Gulf War. As regards the first Gulf War, some critics, most notably Douglas Kellner in The Persian Gulf TV War. argued that television and other media failed to provide a balanced and complete account of the war because the corporate owners of commercial networks felt it was not in their business interests to do so. Other critics, also as regards the first Gulf War, suggested that television coverage simply reflected popular prejudices.

     To a great extent, however, during the conduct of the Gulf Wars, as in almost all wars, the various national media had to rely on the military forces for access to events and for access to their broadcast networks. According to the Wall Street Journal's John Fialka, the central importance of military cooperation is seen in this: that U.S. Marines, despite their smaller role in the first Gulf War, received much more U.S. news coverage than the U.S. Anny, in part, because U.S. Marines were more dedicated to opening the lines of communication between reporters in their operations area and the reporters' news organizations back home. Interestingly, British television coverage-benefiting from thoughtful media access policies put in place after the Falklands/Malvinas War-featured the timeliest reports on frontline action during the first war. The British military forces were at that time in the early 1990s the only ones to allow satellite uplinks near the front lines.

     The second Gulf War brought new innovations to media relations with the public and the military. Critics continued to suggest that complicit media ownership constrained critical coverage during the war, but, more notable still, jingoistic attitudes fostered  in  the  media by the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., created a strongly promilitary television audience in the United States that found FOX News coverage and other ardently promilitary television coverage very much to its liking. The major development in media relations with the military itself was the "embed" system: a military practice whereby reporters were "embedded" with specific military units for the duration of the war.

     The implications of this system, as opposed to the "pool" system whereby groups of reporters in earlier wars were given tours at some distance behind the front, are still being examined as of this writing. Some critics suggest, however, that the embed system creates a kinship between reporters and the troops that precludes the critical distance some believe reporters need to report objectively on what they see. Others argue the embed system makes it difficult for reporters to glean an overview of the military situation as a whole. Meanwhile, reporters who remained in Baghdad as it was besieged were able to provide a different viewpoint to television viewers worldwide. Also, the Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera, free of close ties to the West, provided yet another alternative. Thanks to many such media developments in recent years, it has become possible to see military actions from multiple perspectives, to hear interviews with political and military leaders from all factions, to witness human interest stories from within the very combat zone, and to examine battles and shelling from civilian points of view as well as through combatant or diplomatic eyes. Many viewers have, however, decided instead to gravitate to media that parrot their prejudices. As for televisual scenes of war, during the 1991 Gulf War, military cooperation with the media made possible that war's most striking television images. These were otherwise closed-circuit video images that emanated from camera-equipped high-tech weaponry directed against Iraqi targets. Thanks to access provided by the military, television viewers were literally able to see through the crosshairs of missiles and other weapons as these bore down on Iraqi civilian and military targets-mostly vehicles, buildings, and other inanimate infrastructure. Significantly, however, according to Fialka, videotape from cameras mounted on U.S. Army Apache helicopter-gunships "showing Iraqi soldiers being mowed down by the gunship's Gatling gun" was seen by a single Los Angeles Times reporter but was suppressed thereafter and made unavailable for television broadcast.

     During the 2003 Gulf War, by contrast, the most striking images emanated from Baghdad itself, and not from military lenses either, but from television cameras based in the Iraqi capital city, especially from lenses equipped with night-vision equipment. That U.S. military forces could not prevent the broadcast of such televised images seems, however, not to have deterred them from pursuing their bombing-far from it, perhaps because they recognized, as several scholars have argued, that the American public had already been sold on the war.

     During the second Gulf War, the U.S. military also appears to have overlooked ABC News interviews with troops in the field who criticized the U.S. secretary of defense, though a similar battlefield complaint by a U.S. lieutenant during the U.S.-Vietnam War led to a court-martial. Yet the military leaders' relatively sanguine attitude toward such irregularities notwithstanding, the control of televised imagery still seems a goal of theirs. They seem willing now to engage the media relations aspects of warfare, as if exercising this control were just another aspect of military strategy and not a looming threat to the continued distinction between military and civilian political authority. U.S. military propagandists are, for instance, suspected of having instigated the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad and of having staged the rescue of captured U.S. troops who, other reports have it, were not being guarded at all, fleeing Iraqi troops having left their captives to the care of civilian medical authorities. The U.S. military's staging of such events would, if not strictly in keeping with the highest traditions of military nonintervention in civilian affairs, at least ac­ cord with its tradition of remaining at the cutting edge of technological and tactical developments, for event management, as such dramatizations might be deemed, is indeed a cutting-edge tactic for the purposes of public relations.

     Far from the contentious early days, when most military organizations considered television coverage a mere nuisance or a possible security risk, military planners today use many aspects of television to promote wars, and even to prepare for them. As Der De­rian and other futurists pointed out several years ago, televised image technology is used to provide military personnel with virtual reality training using authentic images of war conditions and maneuvers; moreover, the next leg of military technological development they predicted is now in its nascent stages. This is the phase of "virtual warfare," during which military and paramilitary personnel remain safely ensconced at distant locations as televised imagery and other telemetry allow them to direct weaponry against remote targets. Remote missile attacks on suspected Al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and Yemen are the most well­ publicized recent uses of such technology. The use of such technology, now a part of our world, adds weight to the words of yet another forward thinker: the media guru Marshall McLuhan, who wrote in 1968 that "television war (will have) meant the end of the dichotomy between civilian and military."

     That dichotomy did not, however, become moot ex­actly in the manner McLuhan predicted (i.e., thanks to televisual technology's facilitating the prosecution of war at a distance); rather it happened in precisely the opposite fashion, when war was prosecuted up close by Al Qaeda operatives flying fully-fueled jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Subsequently, every single broadcast on television has been at first or second or some further removed a broadcast of war on television.