UPDATED - ColdType

alongside the reporters in Iraq,” PR Week
reports. “The Pentagon also maintains the Coalition
Press Information Center (CPIC) in Kuwait,
a base of operations for public affairs officers not
traveling with troops. A 24-hour operation
designed to keep up with news cycles in every
time zone . . . one of the CPIC’s most vital roles is
to discourage ‘rogue’ journalists from venturing
into dangerous areas by providing the information
they might otherwise attempt to get on their
own.”
The Wall Street Journal praised the Defense
Department’s PR Strategy. “The embedded
reporters will continue to be a brilliant strategy
by the Pentagon – one that should echo in the
rules of corporate communications,” the Journal’s
Clark S. Judge writes.
Dehumanization: Order of the day
AS for the content of the coverage, I usually
quote the big city press but Pierre Tristam of the
News-Journal in Florida has some brilliant
insights: “The American war effort is a study in
total control, too, of a war positively dehumanized
at every level: Politicians, military leaders
and their media lackeys, in bed with the military
rather than embedded within it, are daily producing
a scripted war of advances and virtue
more divorced from reality than Max’s dream in
‘Where the Wild Things Are.’
“News stories from the front (for the most part)
are clips for the military’s ‘Army of One’ ads – produced
in a void of analytical perspective and
brimming with self-important reminders of
inflated secrecy (‘I can’t tell you where we are,’ ‘I
can’t tell you where we’re going’).” Of course not!
“These reporters have not only been embed-
SURROUNDING BAGHDAD
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ded, they’ve been captured. A picture is supposed
to be worth a thousand words. In this war,
a picture is worth a thousand veils. At home the
networks’ anchored news streams have been
closest in kind to porno movies: A little meaningless
chatter sets things up, and then money
shots of bomb blasts over Baghdad or the Pentagon’s
latest dirty videos of things being blown
up. The human and emotional cost is an afterthought.
There is purpose behind the veil. When
war is so positively dehumanized, the possibility
of defeat is eliminated. Setbacks become narrative
devices, stepping tombstones for America’s
moral superiority. It is war as magical realism.
But it isn’t real.”
Freedom of expression at risk
FROM Canada comes this report: “As the war in
Iraq enters its third week, several IFEX members
have raised concerns over free-expression
violations committed by United States-led coalition
forces, including the bombing of an Iraqi television
station and the expulsion of four foreign
journalists accused of being spies.
“The International Federation of Journalists
(IFJ), Reporters Without Borders (Reporters
sans Frontiers (RSF), the Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ), the International Press Institute
(IPI), and Canadian Journalists for Free
Expression (CJFE) have expressed alarm at the
US bombing of Iraqi state television facilities on
26 March in Baghdad. Although US military officials
claimed the facility was part of a commandand-control
center, IPI and CPJ say the bombing
could be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
“Broadcast media are protected from attack
and cannot be targeted unless they are used for