UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
ifornia, tornadoes terrorizing the Midwest, a socalled
“road map” in the Middle East, a New York
Times reporter blew it badly in Midtown, and, as
feared and predicted, there was an ugly surprise
from the Osama bin Laden brigade.
In America this week, the first of two sequels
to the movie “The Matrix” opened in theaters.
One of the lines in the original film had inspired
the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, to entitle
his book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.”
But many analysts of the film, according to Adam
Gopnik in The New Yorker, view it as inspiring
the sense that “reality itself has become a simulation.”
Gopnik cites Jean Baudrillard’s book, “The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” as a sign of the
difficulty many face in determining if the great
victory we saw in the media did indeed take
place. In the spirit of a once popular commercial,
many of us who are now in recovery from war
news addiction syndrome (WNAS) are asking,
“Was it real or was it Memorex?” How real was
the widely pictured desert of real war? Do we yet
know why it ended with a whimper, not a bang?
The current issue of The Atlantic carries an
excerpt from “Martyrs Day,” a ten-year-old piece
by former editor Michael Kelly, who died covering
this Gulf War. He saw it as necessary to finish
the unfinished business of the first one. Back
then, after Gulf War I, he wrote:
“I think even then there were the beginnings
of a sense that we had come out of this thing
with a great deal less than we should have – that
we had in a sense muffed it. This sense that we
had somehow managed to snatch a quasi-defeat
out of victory soon grew much stronger and
became much more defined.” This same sentiment
is being whispered today.
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Even if the TV war has ended, the real war is
not over in Iraq, or for that matter, in
Afghanistan. The deadly terrorist strike in Saudi
Arabia demonstrates that Al Qaeda has lived to
fight another day. We have not heard the last
from them, even if many in the media forgot the
warnings from critics that the war will not make
us safer, that more terrorism is likely, that
actions bring reactions.
Will these developments lead to a new wave of
retrospection in an American media system that
was nearly indistinguishable from the Pentagon
operation throughout the conflict? Will hard
questions and tough investigations finally puncture
the spirit of triumphalism that President
Bush is counting on to tough it out for five more
years?
Don’t count on it.
In Washington, it is back to business. According
to the Financial Times, Rupert Murdoch, who
served the administration well throughout the
war, awaits his reward in the form of a lifting of
FCC restrictions on the number of TV stations
he will be able to own. That is expected to come
down June 2, once Colin Powell’s son, Michael,
the FCC Chairman of a regulatory commission
who never saw a regulation he liked, is able to
deliver. Powell Jr. has said that more media consolidation
is needed to insure that there are
news organizations big enough to cover future
wars. That circle is about to be squared.
Meanwhile, dissenters look on in anger but
without the clout to stop the give-away of the
public airwaves, or this anschluss and expansion
by the big players. The dissenters are still asking
for counts of casualties in the war, and assessing
how badly the media system turned them into a
casualty by marginalization.