Powell also understood that live press conferences meant that the public would see both questioner and responder. Ever since the Vietnam war, the public viewed the media as fighting to get “the truth” from a military hiding behind a cloak of secrecy and a government spending $600 on toilet seats. During the Gulf war, Americans saw both media and military on the TV screen. Powell writes, “when the public got to watch journalists, even the best reporters sometimes came across as bad guys.” Perhaps the strongest evidence of the shift in American perceptions was a Satruday Night Live skit. Toward the end of the Gulf war the media was ridiculed on Saturday Night Live. They were portrayed as enemy Iraqis trying to wrestle Americans war plan secrets away from an Army spokesperson.

As General Powell correctly asserted, the American public could not sustain support for the images before their eyes. Meanwhile, the media’s reporting of these events, in a war without a front, biased American opinion as to whether America’s military was winning or could win the war. The disturbing images on the TV screen were in sharp contrast to the official reports by the government and military leadership that the US was, in fact, winning the war and would be out of Vietnam soon. But the initial reports on Tet also were misleading. In his definitive work on media coverage during the Tet period in Vietnam, Peter Braestrup writes:

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One demonstration of this effect can be seen in variations in inquiries at breast cancer detection clinics. For a number of years there has been widespread dissemination of the relevant statistical information concerning the importance of early detection, the cure rates associated with early detection, the desirability of regular mammograms, and the like. However (as noticed by Nisbett, Borgida, Crandall, & Reed, 1976), it takes the occurrence of well-publicized individual cases demonstrating the importance of early detection (e.g., Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan) for inquiries at detection clinics to be increased sub­stantially.

At a minimum, one can confidently say that the relationship between discrepancy and persuasive effectiveness is not simple. Some investigations have found that-at least under some conditions-greater discrepancies are associated with greater effectiveness (i.e., a positive relationship between discrepancy and attitude change; e.g., A. R. Cohen, 1959; Hovland & Pritzker, 1957). But other studies have reported that, at least in some circumstances, with increasing discrepancy, persuasive effectiveness is reduced (a negative rela­tionship; e.g., A. R. Cohen, 1959; Hovland, Harvey, & Sherif, 1957).

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