The real-time media coverage of the unfolding war on Iraq is both a showcase for modern news-gathering technology and a boon to US commanders adapting their plans to the changing situation on the battlefield.
Never before has the world been able to witness a conflict covered from so many angles within the forces of both protagonists. With more than 500 journalists ”embedded” with US and British troops and a few dozen holed up in Baghdad, Gulf War II has become the ultimate in reality television — and a fragmented window on very real violence.
The immediacy of the air strikes and invasion was most often brought to military strategists and commanders by all-news channels CNN and BBC World, as evidenced by the permanently on television sets. ”The media product is as useful as other information coming in,” said one coalition military representative, British Lieutenant Colonel Neal Peckham, adding that his own media liaison office was constantly monitoring broadcasts.
But he cautioned that, while senior commanders were kept abreast with major breaking news, they in no way relied totally on those reports. Intelligence from their officers on the battlefield, satellite imagery, communication intercepts, aerial eyeballing by warplane pilots and commandos behind enemy lines all completed their picture.
”If a piece of information comes in and is current and real, then that can be fed into the news stream” to the generals, Peckham said. That news stream itself was carefully filtered at several points, however, because ”the danger with today’s technology is information overload,” he added.
”If you give a top commander too much information, he gets caught in the clutter as it were,” he said.
Viewers and readers around the world, in contrast, were being flooded with a surfeit of information minute-by-minute. But much of it was disjointed, out of context, sometimes difficult to confirm and beset by glitches in the technology that made the constant feed possible.
Thus many live broadcasts from the journalists travelling with armoured units speeding their way across the Iraqi desert, for instance, often contained pixellated images from small cameras linked to satellites that resulted in blurry figures of tanks and sand.
Sound links to the correspondents were plagued with choppy moments of silence, and wire reporters and photographers had to struggle to send their data during the brief pauses in the advance.
In Baghdad, lack of freedom of movement imposed by authorities limited correspondents to occasional day-time forays outside. And on both sides — coalition and Iraqi — restrictions on publishing reports identifying targets damaged or troops killed, and anything else that might be deemed useful to the enemy, curtailed the amount of useful information given.
But despite the imperfections, there was no doubting the impact the live coverage of the world’s biggest story was having in sitting rooms, and in war rooms, in the Gulf and beyond. – Sapa-AFP