UPDATED - ColdType

some kind of ignorance acknowledgment, but no
matter, they are harmless if you hit the mute button.
Reporters in the war zones are, for the most
part, quite different. Some are new at it, as we all
were, but they won’t be innocent for long. War
vastly speeds up the initiation process. Clears
the mind of flotsam too. Journalists are already
among the allied casualties.”
Robot reporters in the wings?
SOON we may be able to dispense with human
reporters and replace them with robots (if this is
not what we have in no short supply.) The AP
reports: “Frustrated by what he considers a
dearth of solid news from the Afghan conflict, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher
has set about trying to build a roving, multimedia
reporter. A remote-controlled robot
could help journalists troll for news in the
world’s hot spots, witnessing battles at close
range and even conducting interviews, says
Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Computing
Culture group at MIT’s Media Lab. The invention,
modeled on NASA’s Mars Explorer, would
not only help keep reporters out of the line of
fire, but could also help overcome the U.S. military’s
restrictions on press access, the
researcher thinks.”
Meanwhile, back in
a very White House
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
WE have embeds all over Iraq, but as I have
noted, none with Iraqi families. We also have
none really in the White House where, nevertheless,
some revealing insights are emerging on
the Emperor without clothes. Some revealing
120
moments have now come to light. TIME reports
the President’s nuanced view of his adversary
about whom we are not hearing all that much
these days: “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him
out,” said President George W. Bush in March
2002, after poking his head into the office of
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
TIME reports. More recently Knight Ridder
reported: “Minutes before the speech, an internal
television monitor showed the president
pumping his fist. “Feels good,” he said. Feels
GOOD?
Village Voice columnist Richard Goldstein brilliantly
takes us deeper in this morass: “As the
first bombs fell on Baghdad, George Bush was
getting his hair done. We know this because a
rogue technician broke protocol by beaming a
candid image from the Oval Office to the BBC.
Millions of people around the world saw the
president primping and squirming, his eyes darting
to and fro, for a minute and a half before his
here-comes-the-war address. The White House
was up in arms. ‘This kind of thing has happened
more than once,’ fumed a senior aide, vowing
that it would never happen again.
“It’s evident why Bush’s hairspray moment
was taken so seriously. The blooper must have
played like a clip from America’s Funniest Home
Videos dropped into the middle of Monday Night
Football. Not only did the President seem vain
and prissy; he looked uncertain, a real blow to
the mastery that the White House is determined
to project.
“Not to worry: The American networks never
picked up the subversive footage. Nothing was
allowed to intrude on the spectacle of bombs
falling on Baghdad that unfolded before our eyes
last Wednesday night.”