UPDATED - ColdType

Put this warning on your TV set
FINAL note on the media coverage. It can be
harmful to YOU, reports The Wall Street Journal.
I hope the New York Post columnist, who
told readers how “addicted” he has become,
reads this:
“Studies show regular television exposure to
traumatic events can increase risk for stress and
depression and it can even weaken our immune
systems. Doctors think excessive war viewing
before bedtime can cause stress-induced nighttime
snacking and interfere with sleep. Even
young children who seem oblivious to events on
the screen may suffer ill effects simply as a result
of leaving the television on throughout the day.
“If you start watching it at 6 p.m. and the next
thing you know it’s 8:30 and you feel like you’ve
been on the battlefield, then get away from it,”
says Joseph C. Piscatella, author of ‘Take a Load
Off Your Heart’. “Excessive watching of TV during
these kinds of events can be a major stressor,
and it’s just as unhealthy as if you spent 2 1/2
hours at a smorgasbord or never exercised.” ●
PERSONALITIES TARGETED
AS PROBLEMS EMERGE
ON the 7th day, the Lord rested. But the U.S. military
can’t catch a break. After a week of triumphant
coverage, something is bogging down
the hoped-for quickie war.
And it’s not just the sandstorms, which make
Iraq look like the lunar surface. Some of the coverage
is over the moon. It is hard not to feel
some compassion for all the media embeds who
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were telling us how swimmingly everything was
going until a real war got in their way. If you had
read their clips and watched their coverage, our
liberators should have been by now welcomed
into the Casbahs by the belly dancers of Baghdad.
It was in the plan.
Over and over the “coalition” media has been
reporting on the plan, the plan, the plan. You
have heard and seen it a million times. “We are
on plan . . . The plan is working.” But now reality
has intruded. The New York Times tells us the
plan that could do no wrong is being changed. As
every psychologist knows, frustration leads to
aggression and now there seems to be more
bombing of the “non precise” kind. There were
more civilian casualties in the Iraqi capital
Wednesday morning. We didn’t see them but we
were told they were there, and that the people
who have yet to stage an uprising are “angry.” No
kidding.
Howard Kurtz, a mainstream media watcher, at
the Washington Post is turning critical of media
coverage, as are many analysts around the
world. Others, including Kenneth Bacon, former
Pentagon media chief, says the media is now the
military’s biggest asset. “The Wall Street Journal
revealed that Tori Clark, the military’s media
czarina, is modeling her operation on the way
she used to run media campaigns.
In some ways, the past was prologue in terms
of the coverage we are seeing. Back in l991,
much-quoted Republican strategist Michael
Deaver, President Reagan’s PR spinner, prefigured
Bacon with words to the same effect: “If you
were to hire a public relations firm to do the
media relations for an international event,” he
said, “it couldn’t be done any better than this is
being done” At the time, Democrat Hodding