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I never thought I'd be saying this, but I think all TV directly broadcast from the battlefields of Iraq is an abomination. Normally I'm an absolute proponent of free speech, but now my vote would be to turn off all the cameras.
Like many Americans, I spent the first days of Gulf War II glued to the TV, switching from ABC to NBC to Fox to CBS. Most of the time, I had National Public Radio on, too. The net result of all this viewing and listening is that I still have no real idea of how the war is going. What I do have is a sick feeling in my gut.
The trouble with the blow-by-blow TV coverage is that the war is quickly getting sucked into the greedy maw of world popular culture. It's as if this deadly serious conflict in which real people are being killed and maimed were just another episode of reality TV -- Survivor Iraq. Throughout the weekend, pixelly, digital footage from the "embedded" correspondents at the front was interspersed with regularly scheduled broadcasts of golf and basketball tournaments and NASCAR racing. It was all so surreal.
HOLLYWOOD'S COMPLICITY. The ironies multiplied on Sunday evening, Mar. 23, during the broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony. Though it's hard to know for sure, most of the Hollywood stars who took the stage seemed to be against the war and wanted to make their qualms clear in their 45-second acceptance speeches. The most dramatic speech was from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who accused George W. Bush of being an illegitimate President prosecuting a war for "fictional" reasons.
I'm against the war myself, but I couldn't help thinking how complicit Hollywood is in the general brutality of our era, given the mindless violence of many of the movies it produces. Just that same morning, when TV crews flocked to tiny St. Anne, Ill., to interview the parents of Ryan Beaupre, a 30-year-old Marine pilot killed in a helicopter crash at the beginning of the fighting, his mother Nicky said her son had decided to become a pilot after seeing Tom Cruise in the movie Top Gun.
"There's nothing we could have done to stop him," said his father, Mark Beaupre. If all these Hollywood peaceniks are sincere, why don't they make fewer movies glorifying war?
INVISIBLE HORROR. The real-life images coming out of Iraq, such as a firefight filmed through night-vision scopes, are as riveting as any movie. But how very unsettling were those images of the two American pilots from a downed Apache helicopter who had been taken prisoner by the Iraqis.
The worst pictures of the war's early days were the ones we didn't see. These were in the horrible footage released by the Iraqis to Al Jazeera, the independent Arab satellite-TV station based in Qatar, of five captured Americans soldiers, some of them wounded, including one woman with bare and bandaged feet. Several dead Americans were also shown.
U.S. networks didn't air the Al Jazeera report, though as I write this, CNN has started showing a few of the images in the name of fully covering the war. The full footage will be broadcast -- or Webcast -- eventually. Just imagine the agony of the friends and family of the soldiers, all of whom apparently had been stationed at Fort Bliss, Tex., who are potentially among the dead or captured.
GRUESOME FOOTAGE. Indeed, Anecita Hudson, the mother of Army Specialist Joseph Hudson, one of the captives, recognized her son being interrogated by Iraqis during a broadcast on a Filipino channel she subscribes to. TV camera crews descended on the Hudson home in New Mexico for interviews with the weeping mother. Happily he appeared to be uninjured. But what kind of people are we that we gobble up this stuff in the name of "informing" ourselves?
Viewers outside the U.S. saw an entirely different -- if no less gruesome -- war. The footage of the dead and captured Americans was aired almost everywhere in the world except the U.S. I don't have access to Al Jazeera, which is broadcast across the Arab world, but according to press reports from people who do, its coverage has been full of reports about civilians (including some children) injured during heavy U.S. bombing of Basra.
In that sense, this war -- like past wars -- is being fueled on both sides by propaganda. Every conflict in the last 150 years has followed a similar pattern of demonizing the enemy and glorifying the home forces, according to the 1975 book The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam, the War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker by the Australian journalist Phillip Knightley. The title underscores Knightley's well-documented thesis that the "first casualty" in any war is truth, as reporters scramble for competitive advantage over rivals, and governments do everything they can to slant coverage in their favor. The version of events you see varies dramatically, depending on whether you're in the U.S., Europe, or the Middle East.
FRAGMENTED PICTURE. The problem in Gulf War II doesn't seem to be censorship. The embedded reporters traveling with coalition troops seem to have remarkable freedom. For instance, the "fragging" incident in which an American soldier attacked fellow soldiers with grenades, was reported as soon as it occured. Embedded reporters for both CNN and the Sydney Morning Herald, citing an officer in the field, reported that U.S. forces used napalm (which has been banned by the U.N. since 1980) in taking Safwan Hill near Basra. A Pentagon spokesman back in Washington adamantly denied that napalm was used.
The main problem seems to be the chaos of war and how it fragments the big picture through the TV lens. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was correct when he cautioned that TV reports from the front only offer a tiny "slice" of the war.
And all the dozens of retired generals and other TV experts didn't add the context needed to answer what to me are the key questions about the war: Are civilians in places like Iraqi city Al Nasariya, where resistance was fierce, welcoming the coalition forces as liberators, as had been hoped? Is a dangerous war-within-the-war about to break out between the Kurds and Turks in Northern Iraq? How many civilians have been killed? Is Saddam readying a chemical attack? How likely is it that coalition forces will have to hold siege to Baghdad, which could turn the whole conflict into a quagmire?
Such questions may be unanswerable for weeks, even months. In the meantime, TV demands powerful, graphic images, and they're coming at us in overwhelming, confusing profusion. I, for one, am not sure that's a good thing. Of course, it's too late for that now. But heaven help us -- for this is probably the model for coverage of all wars to come.
Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online. Follow his weekly Moveable Feast column, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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