COMMENTARY : TV & REALITY AS THE LINE BLURS

This is war.

British troops--from the Scots Guards, Gurkhas, King’s Own Borderers, Royal Irish Rangers, Queen’s Regiment, Parachute Regiment and other units--are in a battle. Faces blackened and wearing camouflage gear, they slither along the ground to avoid lethal booby traps and use light machine guns, mortars and antitank guns to hit the enemy and knock out military targets.

These are real troops using real ammunition in such real locales as England, Wales and Scotland. This is war, all right, but not real war.

This is television.

And, in a much broader sense, perhaps the future of television in the 1990s.

The troops are fighting it out in “Combat,” a British series (no relation to ABC’s “Combat” series of the 1960s) that has turned an actual military training exercise into entertainment, tailoring it to TV and carving it into seven programs with the blessing of the Ministry of Defense.

A sort of “Battle of the Network Stars” with live ammunition? No.

The maneuvers were “adapted slightly for the needs of television,” said a spokesman for Central Television, the production company behind “Combat,” which aired on England’s Independent Television earlier this summer.

“But this is very real,” Phil Pilley, the show’s creator, said from London. “We didn’t organize this. This is a legitimate Army exercise in which an element of competition is introduced.”

Although there is a spirited rivalry among British military units, the opposing troops don’t attack or fire at each other. Instead, this is a sort of war game show, with soldier teams from the various units competing to see which is best at executing the maneuvers, with the winning team receiving $7,800 from “Combat.”

There are male and female co-hosts to narrate the conflict and conduct postwar interviews, and a sound track of military music is inserted to keep viewers’ adrenalin flowing.

If “Combat” is renewed, Pilley would like to extend it at least to the Royal Navy and Air Force and perhaps even foreign troops. The mind boggles at the possibilities. NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact? It could outdraw even soccer.

“We’d like to end it with something worldwide,” said Pilley, sounding a little like Dr. Strangelove.

It beats actual war. But is this--the meshing of reality and entertainment to a point where the two may become indistinguishable--where television is headed in the ‘90s? It seems so in America, at least, as the evidence mounts.

Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast made radio history in 1938 by using news-reporting techniques that inadvertently persuaded many listeners that the United States was actually being invaded by Mars. As one frightened man recalled: “We just sat there holding hands, expecting any minute to see those Martian monsters appear over the tops of the trees.”

The process is not new to TV, either. Flash back to 1953-57 and “You Are There”:

Walter Cronkite anchors a CBS News series on Sunday nights that re-creates events in history through scripted interviews and reports from actual correspondents in the field. Cronkite signs off each program the same way: “What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times . . . and you were there.”

An entertainment program that looked and sounded like a news program, “You Are There” was an early forerunner of a mixed-format genre that, ignited a decade ago by NBC’s “Real People,” was to explode in popularity through the 1980s.

The momentum continues today as, increasingly, “you are there” again and again and again, confronted by TV’s disorienting never-never land of quasi-reality and quasi-fantasy.

This time the Martian monsters are dressed like program executives.

Entering the 1989-90 season, the list of TV’s so-called nationally distributed “infotainment” programs is long and getting longer. Take this:

“PM Magazine,” “Entertainment Tonight,” “A Current Affair,” “USA Today on Television,” “Inside Edition,” “America’s Most Wanted,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and the new “Rescue 911,” “Hard Copy,” “Inside Report” and” Crimewatch Tonight.”

Add to these programs the network news division productions: “60 Minutes,” “20/20,” “48 Hours,” the new “PrimeTime Live” and “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” and the coming “Saturday Night With Connie Chung” (formerly “West 57th”).

The enormous cumulative impact of these programs cannot be lightly dismissed.

According to a recent Gallup poll conducted for Times Mirror, TV’s magazine-format shows are confusing the public about what is news and what is entertainment. For example, 39% of those polled believed “A Current Affair” to be news, while 28% considered it entertainment. The figures were 36% news and 14% entertainment for the syndicated “Inside Edition” and 50% news and 28% entertainment for Fox Broadcasting’s “America’s Most Wanted,” which uses dramatic re-creations to depict crimes.

This is frightening, for when viewers become seduced by TV’s aura of authenticity, the potential exists for the medium’s distorted reality to become society’s reality. The unknown is whether TV-influenced perceptions are offset by family, peers, school, religion and other influences.

Less and less, perhaps.

“Younger people, who are lighter consumers of news and who were weaned on television rather than newspapers, were much more apt to perceive . . . ‘America’s Most Wanted’ as news and not entertainment,” the Times Mirror study reported.

Meanwhile, 49% of those polled approved the use of re-enactments in news programs if properly labeled, compared to 44% holding the opposite view. Interestingly, 64% of the respondents under 30 favored re-enactments, compared with only 35% of those in the 50-plus age group.

The inevitable conclusion from the poll is that viewers born after TV emerged as a popular medium in the late 1940s are the most receptive to its arsenal of disorienting devices, which punctuate the entire broadcast day.

In daytime, for example, six law series with varying levels of reality are available to Los Angeles-area viewers, together becoming a numbing blur.

-- “On Trial”: Footage of actual criminal-court proceedings, shrunk to 22 minutes for TV and introduced by an anchor.

-- “People’s Court”: Real judge, real plaintiffs and real cases, but argued in a TV studio and limited to 11 minutes each to accommodate TV.

-- “Divorce Court”: Real judge and real attorneys, but clients are actors and cases scripted.

-- “Superior Court”: Real judge, but attorneys and other principals are actors.

-- “The Judge” and the new “Trial by Jury”: All actors.

In effect, aren’t they all? There are times when you have the feeling that, no matter their profession, everyone on TV is an actor and the gap separating reality and fantasy has narrowed to a barely discernible fissure. Examples abound:

-- In his 1988 syndicated documentary “American Expose: Who Killed JFK?,” muckraking columnist Jack Anderson used a dramatic re-creation to depict conversations he said he had years ago with a prominent mobster. The mobster was played by an actor. Anderson was played by . . . Anderson.

-- Only recently, ABC News used actors on “World News Tonight” to depict suspected spy Felix S. Bloch secretly handing over information to a Soviet agent at a meeting in Paris that ABC was told occurred but didn’t witness.

-- TV-wise, the Reagan White House years were typified by multitudes of photo opportunities showing the Chief Executive greeting visiting dignitaries (with a ban on questions from reporters) and looking Presidential in the Oval Office, creating the carefully orchestrated “reality” of Reagan being firmly in command.

-- Typically, last year’s presidential campaign trail was a continuous stage on which candidates from both parties performed TV-tailored stunts designed by their professional image-makers and media manipulators.

-- Some news documentaries are sprinkled with excerpts from movies and TV series, creating nice production values, but also more confusion by using fictional scenes to underpin and substantiate factual news reporting.

One could argue that regardless of intent, topic or material, TV makes its own reality.

Certainly TV news does, by virtue of its philosophy and self-imposed time limitations. That philosophy calls for presenting news mostly as a series of hiccups--thereby distorting reality through shrinkage. It also calls, locally at least, for a panorama of crime stories that wind up fueling paranoia far out of proportion to the actual community threat.

With a news hole of only 22 minutes remaining after commercials, moreover, no network newscast can begin to adequately cover everything that should be covered.

Like the tree that falls in the forest unnoticed, therefore, news uncovered by television doesn’t exist for the multitudes who learn about the world primarily from the small screen.

Some important stories go uncovered not because of the time factor, however, but because they are not accessible to the camera and can’t be supported by pictures. Hence, TV’s reality excludes them, too.

The anchors themselves become prime players in this skewed truth. On a network level, they’re news stars whose presence on a story--or absence from one--conveys to viewers that story’s alleged importance or unimportance. If Dan Rather or Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw are there, it has to be big. If they’re not there, it has to be small.

At least that’s the message conveyed to viewers.

Anchors are theater in quite another way as well. As chief reporter for the recent NBC documentary “Gangs, Cops and Drugs,” set mostly in Los Angeles, Brokaw was shown on the city’s mean streets, getting the real scoop from gang members. It was impressive and may have gotten Brokaw some new viewers for “NBC Nightly News.” But wasn’t this, too, a form of artificiality, a pretense that meaningful dialogue was possible, with a famous anchorman interviewing gang members out in the open in front of a TV camera?

The reality of the moment was shaped not only by the presence of Brokaw, but also by the presence of the camera.

And speaking of the camera, what of “Cops,” the documentary-style Fox series that purports to show truth by recording police in the line of duty? Turn on the camera and voila, a series that feeds TV’s ravenous appetite for action and excitement.

It’s riveting TV. Are we to believe, however, that the police are oblivious to the camera and not influenced by its presence? Do they always slap hands when making a big bust, as Broward County, Fla. sheriff’s deputies did in the presence of the “Cops” camera? Did the camera just happen to be present--out on a boat--when a male cop proposed to a female cop?

Information and entertainment merge not only on the small screen but also in the backgrounds of many of the key production people behind “infotainment” programs, as if these people had become living embodiments of their contributions to TV.

Take, for example, the syndicated series “Hard Copy,” which debuts locally Sept. 18 on KCBS-TV Channel 2 and which co-anchor Alan Frio says is designed to “complement local and national news”:

On one producer’s resume, productions with Bob Hope and Della Reese surface alongside news specials and documentaries. Another person’s credits range from specialty videos to Cable News Network. And another worked on rock music videos and “Soul Train” before becoming a local news producer/director.

Although surely impressive for career purposes, such pedigrees are a metaphor for the perilous route television seems to be following into the age of the ‘90s, where viewer confusion will prevail and reality will be what you make of it.

That too is the message of “Combat,” where soldiers are not only soldiers, but now also are beamed coast to coast in England as stars of their own action series.

Would “Combat” work in the United States? Why not?

All’s fair in war and television.