TV Avoids Showing Deadly Side of War
By Antonia Zerbisias
Deeply embedded as I am in war TV coverage, my remote control thumb seeing as much action as a B-52 pilot's trigger finger, my faith has been restored, almost.
Not so much in the networks themselves, most of which are parading the Pentagon line, but in the reporters assigned to one of the deadliest journalistic minefields ever: The White House Press Briefing Room.Let me explain.
Yesterday, when the America bombardment of Baghdad — and parts untelevised — began, the excitement among the anchors was palpable.
"`Shock & Awe' underway'' read the onscreen graphics. Finally, explosions! Mushroom clouds! Towering plumes of smoke! CNN even had little graphics to count them off, so viewers could see how closely spaced the bombs were.
Was ABC's Peter Jennings serious when he repeated the propaganda about this being a "precision" campaign, as if the Tomahawks and Patriots, which sound more like baseball teams than deadly missiles, were programmed only to search and destroy brutal vicious dictators?
But for the light and sound show, all seemed calm and bright on Baghdad's streets, thanks to the stationary cameras left behind by the networks. Why was nobody saying, "Hmm, this is a city of 5 million people, do you think any of them have been hurt?"
The full horror didn't hit until later on CBC, where the Dubai Business Network's Tamara Al Karram, voice quavering, was providing a boom-by-boom account for Peter Mansbridge.
"Are you on a rooftop?" he asked. "Are you with other people?"
Then a blast, followed by a numbing, chilling, silence.
"All right, we've lost her," he said, his voice just a little too steady for me.
Flipping from CBC's "Attack On Iraq" to CNN's "Strike On Iraq" to CBS' "America At War" and on and around up to the business-oriented CNBC's "The Price Of War," I kept searching for signs of death. If this is a war, people are being killed. Where are the bodies?
But, if any of the 500 reporters traveling with the troops found any, they didn't reveal them when they did their here-I-am on an aircraft carrier sniffing the fumes stand-ups — was that an NBC flag on one tank turret? — asking the boys how they feel as they're moving in.
In the words of the distinguished journalist Russell Baker, these embeds are "serving as megaphones for fraud."
So far anyway.
(Incidentally, one thing U.S. TV didn't show but BBC beamed around the world: live video of President George W. Bush having his hair pouffed as he fidgeted in the Oval Office just before Wednesday night's speech announcing the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Knight-Ridder newspapers reported he pumped his fist and said, "Feels good.")
But who could blame the networks when they had been issued their marching orders from the Pentagon?
Just before 2 p.m., U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference where he lectured reporters on the TV coverage: "I heard various commentators expansively comparing what's taking place in Iraq today to some of the more famous bombing campaigns of World War II.
"There is no comparison. The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one every dreamt of in a prior conflict. They didn't exist."
Okay, but when is when?
"We're having a conflict at a time in our history when we have 24-hours-a-day television, radio, media, Internet, and more people in the world have access to what is taking place," Rumsfeld continued. "You couple that with the hundreds — literally hundreds of people in the free press — the international press, the press of the United States, from every aspect of the media — who have been offered and accepted an opportunity to join and be connected directly with practically every aspect of this campaign ... and I doubt that in a conflict of this type there's ever been the degree of free press coverage as you are witnessing in this instance."
Translation: Don't mess with us or we're court-martialing your embeds.
But not all was lost, thanks to an increasingly irate White House press corps.
Throughout most of the briefing that chief Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer held mid-afternoon, they hammered him about what the president was watching on TV. Had he seen the horrific images? Had he contemplated the effects of his decision to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction even as he was unloading megatons of the same on the country?
Try as they did though, the journalists could not penetrate Fleischer's defenses.
"(T)he president deeply regrets that Saddam Hussein has put innocents in a place where their lives will be lost," he said. "The other portion of what the president remembers when he thinks about the innocents are the 3,000 innocents who lost their lives on Sept. 11th in the United States. And if it were not for the worries that the president had about an Iraqi regime, in defiance of the United Nations, possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he fears could again be used against the United States, you might not see this developing."
Just in case you were wondering.
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