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depicted people hit by weapons.
Media Tenor, the international media monitoring
organization, studied newscasts in six countries.
It asked: “To which degree were journalists
in the U.S. and abroad serving the interests of
their governments, intentionally or not? Was the
media merely part of a larger war strategy?”
Media Tenor continues: “Many facts about this
and other facets of the war will surface only over
the course of the next decades, but our research
does indicate that news media in different countries,
if they did not lend outright support to
their governments, cloaked in voices of patriotism
and criticism, certainly did not oppose them.
“Not surprisingly, we generally found overwhelming
agreement with issues related to the
war on U.S. news broadcasts.”
So what is the bottom line? According to Burton,
the former TV reporter: “The war with Iraq
may indeed signal the decline of independent
journalism in times of war and the loss of the
adversarial role journalism once played with the
U.S. government. With 24-hour coverage, Americans
are seeing more wartime video than ever
before, but less of the big picture than any other
war. So far, the White House strategy to sell the
war through the U.S. media has succeeded.”
All of this gives me second thoughts about my
own imaginary request. I guess I don’t want that
embed slot in Washington after all.
Watching this White House is hard enough.
Living there could be soul-sucking. ●
WINNERS AND LOSERS
35
IRONY AND REALITY IN
REPORTING THE POST-WAR WAR
NEW YORK, MAY 16, 2003 – We are watching a
TV scene in Baghdad: A group of Iraqis is marching,
marching in anger, with signs in English for
a CNN camera that is recording their demands.
They want a government, they want to get paid,
they want the lights on, they want the garbage
collected. Their rage is palpable.
The camera cuts to an American military officer,
smiling at them, motioning to them to calm
down. He offers no response to their specific
complaints.
Cut to the sound bite that was used, for the
benefit of the folks back home: “Isn’t it wonderful
that these people finally have freedom of
speech and can express themselves?”
You can’t make this up, but news networks are
not very good at dealing with irony. Their focus
on routinized news reality cannot cope with the
surrealism that now characterizes post-war
reporting. As optimism pours out of Washington,
pessimism stalks the streets of Baghdad. Arab
News commented on the irony of the irony, even
as most American outlets do not:
“It is an irony that a nation so often accused of
imperialism should prove so incompetent when
it comes to playing the colonial administrator;
the French and British are still so much better at
these things, even decades after their empires
have gone.”
The liberation of Iraq was barely a week old
before most of the U.S. news army staged its own
withdrawal. There was a murder to cover in Cal-