Bagdad-Bob, menige Jessica Lynch och Cirkus Saddam

television news is compiled and distributed.
Different documentaries are
sent, new commentators and expertise
are presented but the basic studio concept
remains basically unaffected.
That television news services could
be handled in the form of staging categories
became particularly interesting at
the beginning of the 1980s, when American
news channel CNN began sending
news 24 hours a day. It was now
possible to go from conventional TV
programming to direct broadcasting if
this proved popular and commercially
profitable. The Gulf War in 1991
brought a radical breakthrough: record
ratings and a devastating blow to the
old network’s news reporting. It did not
matter if the war was temporarily uneventful.
A patient CNN could afford to
wait. Everyone was holding their breath
anyway: Would Saddam survive Would
the pilots who were shot down and captured
in Iraq be executed, tortured,
drugged, or used as human shields
Would Iraq attack Israel Millions of
viewers in the US and Europe wanted
to know. Night after night, American
bombs and Iraqi counterfire lit up the
skies over Baghdad. CNN had full control
over the events – better than the
combatant countries’ military commands
- and reality could be directed in
Acts. Dramatic stagings were alternated
with epic and didactic stagings, and
directed in studios.
Dramatic stagings are not completely
dependent upon live broadcasting,
however. Repeats reduce the dramatic
qualities, and this reduction continues
as the time interval between the real
and the witnessed event widens. Time
is a relative concept in the power of
human experience, but an event that is
more than half a day old can hardly be
experienced as “ongoing”. It becomes
something that has happened, something
that is described in the imperfect
tense. Newspapers’ news producers are
also aware of the psychological conditions
of time that determine the dramatic
quality of news. Many producers
know how to create “here-and-now”
and the time margins that make this
possible. This is the context in which
we will view the growth of well-produced
stagings with effective headings and
fascinating pictures.
SVT’s opportunities for sending live
news broadcasts are of course minimal
in relation to TV giants such as CNN,
Fox or the BBC. But something is better
than nothing at all. Åsne Seierstad’s
reports from Hotel Palestine in Baghdad
were a success, despite the fact that
these live broadcasts did not describe
the events of the war, but her own
experiences in Baghdad. Her up-todate
reports in Dagens Nyheter did not
receive the same response. Traditional
epic statements in critical situations can
never compete with dramatic statements
depicting an event that is currently
taking place. The essential part
of this form of news service is, as previously
mentioned, that the home office
can ask questions.
Otherwise, the strength of SVT lies
in its didactic news service. It has other
resources: access to experts, its own
110 | irakkriget iscensatt i svenska medier