UPDATED - ColdType

interest up close and personal stories are on the
way, as a means of sustaining interest. This is
another dip into the Hollywood playbook, in
which narrative storytelling calls for strong characters.
After the press conference, one of those
ever-present military experts beamed with pride.
As we now know, there seems to be a great deal
more that “sucks” about a war plan that keeps
being cited but is rarely explained. Another 30,000
troops are being rushed to the front as 1,000 paratroopers
“invade” northern Iraq. (Actually they
landed in friendly Kurdish territory.)
The BBC did not indulge the drama of the
wounded men, and instead did some hard
reporting on the shortage of humanitarian aid
and the anger in Iraq with the UN which pulled
out its western aid workers before the war and
left inadequate staffs to cope with what may be
the largest humanitarian crisis in history. While
there still do not seem to be reporters “embedded”
with the humanitarian teams, perhaps
because covering the work of peace is not as
sexy as reporting on the sands of war, you could
see that horror with that snatch of pictures of
desperate people clawing for food and water.
BBC’s correspondent in Baghdad reported that
authorities there say their hospitals are well
stocked and that are sending a convoy of food
and medicines to the south. Such a caravan is
likely to be a target, just as the British ship with
food aid has been stopped because of mines in
the port.
Media war under scrutiny
THE media war is being escalated too, as Lucien
Truscott, the Vietnam war vet and author
explained in The New York Times: “From the
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first moments of the war, television screens and
newspaper pages around the world have shown
and described it with images of exploding
palaces and an armored phalanx rolling rapidly
toward Baghdad. Reports from the Third
Infantry Division do everything but cite highway
mile-markers of their progress. Reporters are
embedded so deep into the war that they are
subsisting on the same dreadful rations eaten by
the troops.
“The Pentagon may have been dragged kicking
and screaming into its current embrace of
the news media. But it is making the most of it.
Planners must have contemplated advances in
media technology and decided that if they can’t
control the press, they may as well use it.”
Power worshipping
AND use it they are, as Matt Taibbi explains in
this week’s New York Press: “The preposterous
facsimile of journalism that had marked the
months leading up to the war vanished, replaced
on every network by a veritable blizzard of video
gadgetry and power-worshipping bullshit.
“There were so many video effects that it was
sometimes hard to see the actual people who
were reading the news. Many of the channels (in
particular Fox and MSNBC) adopted a two-box
format in which the newsreader occupied a
smallish hole on the left side of the screen, while
the other side contained a live shot of the subject
location (Baghdad, Kuwait City). Surrounding
the two boxes: a dizzying array of crawls and
logos, which from time to time would morph into
cutesy, 3-D-rendered graphics of deadly weapons
that would literally fly in from the edge of the
screen and then stop to rotate proudly in the