War and Television (review)

208BOOK REVIEWS particular, there is virtually no discussion of the environmental costs associated with development. There is scant treatment of the military's role in settling labor unrest and there is virtual silence on the potential role of nongovernmental organizations and other alternative development approaches. The perspective is quite mainstream. The credentials of the authors are impressive. Almost all hold doctoral degrees from top American universities and many occupy high positions in academia and government . These are the same men who have been responsible for engineering many of the ideas, policies, and programs that have emerged in Korea. While they are, for the most part, highly informed participants, it would have been interesting to hear from some alternative voices (perhaps even female) on issues relating to the social costs and benefits of development. I would hope that, in the future, policy evaluation plays a more crucial role in public administration and planning in Korea. A Dragon's Progress does represent a breakthrough in terms of Korea's self-reflection in that it does contain some shards of a critical evaluative perspective. All in all, the book is well worth reading. However, there still is some distance to go before achieving a truly critical or "cutting-edge" analysis of the Korean economic miracle. Given Korea's recent history and the extent to which voices of dissent have risen to high places, one can expect to hear from other voices in the not-too-distant future. Karl E. Kim University of Hawai'i at Mänoa War and Television, by Bruce Cumings. London & New York: Verso, 1992. 256 pp. $29.95. Bruce Cumings's War and Television is about a lot of things. It's about the Korean War. It's about the Vietnam War. It's about the Gulf War. It's about how television as a medium produces meanings and engenders attitudes and ideologies. And last, but hardly least, it's about Bruce Cumings, with special emphasis on his media experience, his firsthand, on-the-scene war experience, and his political attitudes. (Like the TV detective of the 1960s, Maxwell Smart, he was even occasionally in danger—"and loving it.") However, despite the pervasiveness of the biographemes, there is a lot of good analysis and information on the politics of war in War and Television , and often Cumings's experiences add depth and substance to the discussion. Most significant, Cumings understands that for most of us, modern war is a television docudrama. In addition, he has a well-developed politi- BOOK REVIEWS209 cal sensibility with which to frame questions about the war-media relationship . This is especially evident in his excellent discussion of the politics of the Gulf War where he, like other commentators, has discerned the "pride is back," post-Vietnam identity-shaping impetus and the emptiness of the geopolitical rationales expressed in official discourse. Although Cumings has little to add to the already well-elaborated views of visual media developed by contemporary culture theorists, he has a very competent, pedagogically oriented discussion of how cameras lie, even as they enjoy the illusion of showing an unmediated facticity. Framing and cropping are the mechanisms through which attitudes are expressed while maintaining a pseudo-objectivity. There are also good discussions of how television representations of war achieve an ideological end through narrative legitimation and through various economies of discourse , the patterns of the mentioned and the unmentioned. Conceptually, what the book has most to offer are insights into the way that meanings are constructed by the structure of representations in film and television. Although this is available elsewhere, here it is mobilized effectively to treat representations of war. What wars are about is never a closed question. Every war is subject to an ongoing interpretive agonistics. This, Cumings conveys effectively, especially in his discussion of the epistemology of Claude Lanzmann's ten-hour documentary film about the holocaust, Shoah. Although War and Television has many strengths, there is a strange glitch in Cumings's intellectual structure for politicizing the war-television nexus. On the one hand, he is well aware of theoretical materials that show how various media are used to denaturalize official and dominant perspectives and resist closure. On the...