UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
tough house-to-house fighting and a long war.
At first, the Americans were chararacterized
as e hated by the Iraqi people. Then they were
projected as liberators. Conjectures as to the
extent of casualties did not coincide with numbers.
The question is whether the ambition to be
first justifies everything. The first lesson a journalism
trainee learns is that unconfirmed news
is not news. It is unlikely that any audience
would really chose quick and unchecked information
over thoroughly researched news if they
had the choice,
RTL not only relied on its military correspondent
Ulrich Klose, but also on its reporter Antonia
Rados in the Iraqi capital. As cited earlier,
ARD and RTL correspondents in Baghdad put
the main emphasis on the suffering of civilians,
rather than on warfare, whenever Iraqi protagonists
were in the picture. The newscast RTL
Aktuell even devoted a slight majority of coverage
to this topic. German television reporting on
victims clearly focused on the Iraqi side. Since
Rados and Tilgner will receive a journalism
award for this type of coverage, it must mean
that it is considered to be proper and even politically
correct
German journalists had ventured into the coverage
of the war with real concerns. They felt
they did not want to be taken for a ride by the
Americans (again). This they did manage. But
there was also a sense of self satisfaction among
German TV executives that appeared out of
place.
The question arises, did the news coverage
went to another extreme: After assuming a position
of sharp criticism of the American military
actions, which was abandoned only with the
increasing success of the operation, and after fix-
276
ating on the Iraqis as suffering victims, they created
a representation of the war for the German
television-viewing public which was neatly in
line with the position of the German government.
Critical questions, concerning, e.g., the
extent to which the unrelenting German position
contributed to the escalation of the conflict, were
thus widely kept from public scrutiny.
An alternative approach?
MOST worrisome, across the board, was the
overt reliance on coverage of military actions,
compared to which political discussion took a
back seat. This was true both in Europe and in
the U.S. Journalists appeared as reluctant to
allow for arguments of the other side as their
respective governments, leaving us to wonder
whether the goal of journalistic objectivity was
missing or misappropriated in the name of infotainment,
while political and moral arguments
were presented in an almost indistinguishable
fashion.
News programs in the U.S. and abroad were
drawing a very sharp line between talk and
action. But, what about all the repetition. Anyone
who subjected themselves to a few evenings of
war coverage on TV will to attest to the level of
redundancy which rose steadily with each hour
of viewing. Action, we learned, can be cheap, too,
especially when it is dotted with flags and interspersed
with dramatic musical interludes aimed
at consolidating the national spirit.
To escape the patriotic sheen, viewers had to
turn to other media outlets, foremost the BBC.
An April 28 article in Business week described
how “‘the Beeb’ is gaining viewers from around
the globe with its sober, authoritative coverage