For all the talk about unprecedented battlefield access, amazing new broadcast technology and 24/7 coverage on numerous channels, TV’s first few days of Operation Iraqi Freedom were largely a muddle. Sure, things got dramatic when the bombs dropped on Baghdad today. But for the hours leading up to the big bang–and the minute it stopped–what did we see? What did we learn? Practically nothing.
To some degree, the unenlightening nature of the coverage could be blamed on the war’s surprise opening. Even the military hadn’t expected to begin the battle on Wednesday night, so you can hardly blame the news outlets for getting caught flat-footed. Still, other than the vivid scenes of the Baghdad bombing, we’ve witnesses precious little news, or at least anything that adds up to much insight into what’s happening. Lots of troops are moving, lots of sirens are sounding, lots of maps are flashing by. But does anyone know where the war is at any given time? Getting better? Worse?
You can get a good idea of the sketchy nature of the TV coverage by looking at how TV has handled the biggest question so far: is Saddam Hussein dead? Is he alive? Was that him on the taped statement? The networks turned themselves into a giant Magic 8 Ball–flip the channel and you could find any answer you wanted. NBC implied strongly that Saddam was dead at the very same moment that CNN reported absolutely that he was alive. One network said that the government’s voice analysis proved that it was absolutely Saddam on the tape; another said it proved he wasn’t. The award for most enterprising reporting went to ABC, which said that one of Saddam’s mistresses insisted the images were most certainly that of an imposter. Never doubt the word of a man’s mistress.
Of course it’s not fair to blame the media for not having all the answers. This is a war, and wars are messy, tricky, unpredictable affairs. It’s just that what the television media doesn’t know is sometimes so glaring, it’s impossible to ignore. One of the most shocking aspects of the early war coverage is that, despite the almost jingoistic reminders about how the United States is the most powerful nation in the world, it’s those pesky foreigners who have most of the best video, especially of Baghdad. When missiles struck government buildings there, the feeds all came from Italian, British and–most embarrassing of all–Al-Jazeera television. It was fun to watch the American networks try to hide the empty cupboards: Fox News played cat-and-mouse with its British affiliate Sky News by trying to superimpose its logo onto Sky’s. On all the networks, the images were so sparse, most took to playing the same ones over and over again, which resulted in the embarrassing situation of having the LIVE logo posted the first time the footage still in place during the umpteenth broadcast. How can something be both “live” and “recorded earlier” at the same time? NBC came up with its own interesting hybrid. When it wanted to report that oil fields in the south were on fire, the network discovered that it didn’t actually have footage of the fires in question. So it showed videos of fires from 1991 and helpfully informed us that the fires of 2003 were like just like them.
Not that there isn’t plenty of actual live coverage. The great innovation of this war was supposed to be how the government allowed scores of reporters to “embed” themselves with the soldiers so that the story of America’s military victory could be told properly and copiously. One of the great failings of the first Persian Gulf War was that the media was kept at a great distance. And as everyone knows about the proverbial tree falling in the forest: if television isn’t there to witness a great victory, how great can it be? The result: journalists now eat, sleep and live with the military in order to bond with them and report their triumphs. It has been a smashing success for the government–and an utter disaster for the state of American journalism.
The “embed” agreement requires journalists to withhold certain sensitive information from the public. The result is that all these reporters with all this access tell us almost nothing. They are not allowed to give us their position. Sometimes, an ashamed reporter will try to hint at what’s going on around them, even going so far as to say that while he or she is not “at liberty” to disclose details about an event, a print outlet has already published the information. Perhaps that’s why we’ve seen hour after hour and of troops rolling unimpeded toward Baghdad, yet when our troops have not fared as well–as in the two battles in which U.S. Marines were killed–the information is sketchy and the video is nonexistent.
No one wants a journalist to inadvertently aid the Iraqis or imperil American lives, but the censorship has turned these reports into little more than travelogues. Bad travelogues. The images are grainy, often little more than gray blobs rolling along an ocean of tan and sky blue. When it comes to the journalists’ deal with the military, “embed” is apparently a synonym (and homonym) for “in bed.” No wonder much of the most comprehensive reporting has come from the BBC, where journalists are not beholden to government sources for their information–and where they’re not afraid to provide a more worldwide perspective on the war.
Only when the attack on Baghdad began did the television coverage become more than a series of grainy images and unhelpful speculation. “Shock and Awe” did turn out to be precisely that–a frightening, overwhelming barrage that lit up the sky and instantly reminded us of how terrifying and powerful war can be. A funny thing happened when “Shock and Awe” began. All those embedded reporters disappeared from the screen. So, too, did the army of middle-aged men who always seem to be pointing at a military map. We were left with raw video, much like the indelible images we saw from the first gulf war.
Ironically, the coverage of Gulf War 2 shared one other trait with the original: the most riveting images and insightful descriptions came from the same man. He is Peter Arnett. Arnett has long been acknowledged as a premiere war correspondent–he won a Pulitzer for his work from Vietnam and will forever be associated with his front-lines coverage of Gulf War 1. But 10 years ago, Arnett was basically fired from CNN amid questions about a flawed story about nerve gas used in Vietnam. It’s a sign of how low he sunk that Arnett is actually covering Gulf War 2 as a correspondent for National Geographic.
Or was. Since NBC (along with most networks) hustled its own reporters out of Baghdad just before the war began, Arnett has found himself a job as a NBC’s “special” correspondent. In a war that so far has been covered in sketchy, predigested blather, Arnett is proving himself to be special indeed.
