TV Watch: Showing 'Shock and Awe,' but No Blood nytimes.com
[ Sorry about "jump on Karen" day here. This might give you just a little bit of heart. Apologies to all for the formatting, the NYT screwed up on this one somehow. I will allow myself one emphasis, without comment. ]
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
In the swirl of confusing facts, the first scenes of the invasion of Iraq were astonishingly clear. Television did more than bring viewers closer to the front lines of battle than ever before, however. It looked at warfare through an entirely new prism.
Television cameras' usual route to battle is the trail left by its victims. Whether in Kosovo, Israel, Chechnya or Afghanistan, combat is mostly conveyed by shots of a crowded refugee tent or a collapsed high-rise, a bloodied sidewalk, a full hospital ward or an open grave.
This time, the Pentagon took viewers on a thrilling ride-along with the warriors.
Videophones, portable satellites and night-sight scopes brought the world a riveting display of American power, but it was a sanitized look, showing a little sweat, not blood and tears.
"What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld warned Pentagon reporters on Friday. "What we're seeing are slices of the war in Iraq."
Different slices began to emerge as coalition troops drew closer to the capital and met scattered resistance; in Baghdad, camera crews were able to pan signs of destruction after a second night of intense bombing. But in the opening moments of the war, 24-hour cable news shows and network newscasts seemed almost drunk with their access, filling television screens with astonishing images. The mushroom clouds rising from bombed government buildings in Baghdad were shown over and over, as were the tableaus of a marine tearing down a poster of Saddam Hussein surrounded by a handful of cheering Iraqi villagers. Columns of advancing coalition tanks were counterposed against columns of surrendered Iraqi soldiers marching with their hands over their heads in single file.
Television correspondents like David Bloom of NBC, in helmet and bulletproof vest, delivered reports live from a specially designed moving armored vehicle. They hollered updates from the flight decks of aircraft carriers, and even through gas masks.
A few seemed so caught up in the adrenaline of battle and the thrill of access they sounded like sports reporters on the sidelines of the Super Bowl.
"How do you feel about your performance tonight?" Frank Buckley of CNN, assigned to the aircraft carrier Constellation, asked a pilot who had just returned from a bombing mission over Baghdad. The pilot replied that he was just glad everyone had returned unharmed.
In the newsroom studios, anchors and commentators adjusted their tone to wartime solemnity, focusing on the worry and grief of family members and filming the yellow ribbons tied to trees in small towns. The American flags that went up on MSNBC's screen after Sept. 11, 2001, returned (they never left Fox News). Antiwar protests in the United States and throughout the Arab world were shown far more fleetingly.
Viewers saw many touching portraits of hard-working reporters and dedicated young American military personnel. They saw and heard the relatives of killed servicemen, some expressing anger, others bereft but proud. They heard anchors urging their correspondents to stay safe, and correspondents wishing soldiers well.
What they generally did not see in the first phase of the invasion of Iraq were very many Iraqis.
"When I looked at the news on television, it did not look like anyone had been killed or was in danger of being killed," Amelie Hastie, a professor of film and digital media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "It didn't look like anybody was even living in Iraq."
There were practical reasons: once the bombing began, camera crews in Baghdad had almost no opportunity to roam the nearly deserted streets. Troops making their way through the desert on the way to Baghdad saw few signs of civilian life.
"This is the biggest, ugliest desert I've seen in my life," a weary Ted Koppel told Peter Jennings on a special extended ABC newscast on Friday night. He said his convoy had made no contact with the enemy, "only a few Bedouins and their sheep."
Refugee camps, a staple of war reporting in other conflicts, paled next to the images of high-tech weaponry blazing in real time.
Television also has a way of freeze-framing the deceptive beauty of war — the red and gold of burning government buildings along the Tigris River was almost painterly, like a sunset by Sisley.
Yesterday morning, the CNN reporter Martin Savidge, traveling with a Marine batalion, filed fresh images of marines reacting to a grenade launched toward them from a village in southern Iraq, and later of marines blowing up empty Iraqi tanks. Some observers seeking to comprehend the tactics of the war argued that the proliferation of dramatic war images was more confusing than helpful.
"There is this fetish that only immediate proximity to war allows you to understand what is going on," Fredric Smoler, a professor of literature and military history at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, said. "What looks on television like orderly control could be something else entirely, like Fabrizio in the Charterhouse of Parma," referring to Stendhal's glory-seeking hero who joined Napoleon's army and stumbled unknowingly though what turned out to be the battle of Waterloo.
"If the alternative is still pictures with a correspondent's radio voice, then what technology and embedded journalists has given us is a window that is authentic and real," said Dorrance Smith, who has worked as a producer at ABC and as an adviser in both Bush administrations. "It serves the journalists and the military's interests."
Even as reports of American and British casualties grew, death has not been very evident on television in these early days. Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, a military contributor to Fox News, was in a marine helicopter flying near the Ch-46E Sea Knight helicopter that crashed near the Iraqi border, killing four American and eight British soldiers. Col. North told viewers he gave a tape to the Pentagon crash investigators, and said he would not show what he called "a Fox exclusive" until United States and British military authorities had notified all the family members and given him the all-clear.
Some of the most searing images were captured by the BBC. Mr. Jennings introduced one BBC report that showed, through grainy green night-vision scopes, British commandos getting into helicopters right after the Sea Knight crashed, and later, clashing with enemy soldiers. It was one of the few television reports that showed Iraqi dead and wounded.
"Even with this degree of access, television cannot ever adequately convey the sheer brute force of war, the noise and utter violence," the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said by telephone during a break in his newscast on Friday night. "It somehow gets filtered through the TV screen, and that's probably just as well." |
