US television
At 7am Washington time yesterday, Iraq’s information minister was briefing in Baghdad, the 101st Airborne was stuck in a sandstorm, and reports of civilian casualties in Baghdad were beginning to cause alarm. And WETA, the Washington area’s main public-service TV broadcaster, was showing a cartoon about magic dragons.
It was a rare oasis — intentional, the channel says, but surely also the result of the public broadcasting system’s woeful lack of funds — in what was otherwise an awful lot of desert, as transmitted through the grainy videophones of the network reporters embedded with American and British troops.
CNN’s top-of-the-hour headlines led with American forces killing 200 Iraqis in the biggest land battle to date.
The bombing of a Baghdad market was third, but largely vanished from all the networks thereafter.
It is the sheer omnipresence of the patriotic sentiment and emotional commitment that stands out.
”If that rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner doesn’t stir you, I don’t know what will,” CNN’s lead morning anchor, Paula Zahn, said a few hours later, when the song was sung on the president’s arrival at MacDill air force base in Florida.
American flags permanently adorn the coverage of CNN’s rivals, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. And while the bereaved wife of a US marine looked too numb to cry in an early morning appearance on CBS, the anchor conducting the interview was so upset that her voice quavered uncontrollably.
At 8am it was time for the networks’ daily competition to invent the most outlandish pronunciation of the country where central command’s briefings are held. All the main channels, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox, went live to Qatar (”cutter”, ”catter”, ”catarrh”, ”cttr”) for the majority of the event.
”OK, so, a lot of negative questions there,” said Fox’s anchor, when it was over. ”But let’s focus on the positive!”
There is a daily routine fast emerging on the all-news networks, and it kicked in properly from about 8.45am, after Tony Blair’s Commons appearance was widely covered. There was a swift shuttling between Pentagon correspondents, anchors in Kuwait, retired generals pacing around vast models of the theatre of war, uneventful footage from fixed cameras in Baghdad and – above all – interviews with the sand-caked ”embeds”.
Embedding has been an astounding PR coup for the Pentagon. The reporters use the words ”we” and ”us” profusely, identifying themselves with the military, and while this has prompted concerns regarding objectivity among US commentators, it is not surprising, given their very personal stake in their units’ success.
Everyone went live to the president’s rousing speech in Florida, coverage of which reached past 11am. CNN led the field in presenting a range of other perspectives, interviewing, through the course of the morning, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who put the case against the war, and the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who discussed the root causes of terrorism. Kofi Annan appeared briefly, expressing concern about civilian casualties.
As noon arrived, WETA was broadcasting a show featuring lion puppets.
Al-Jazeera, Qatari-based satellite station
Al-Jazeera is the most independent TV station in the Arab world and it promises to give its viewers ”the full picture”. On day seven of the Iraq war its rolling news coverage tried hard to do that, broadcasting harrowing images of victims on both sides.
Pictures from yesterday’s attack in the Shaab area of Baghdad led its bulletins for hours, the camera lingering on the splayed, naked legs of a corpse lying by a burned-out car, the upper half of the body covered by a sheet.
Bystanders wanted to show what had been done by US and British missiles, so one lifted the shirt masking the bloody face of another corpse. And there was a long still shot of a lump of flesh half buried in the ruins.
”There is nothing military here,” one middle-aged man insisted angrily into the station’s microphone with its trademark blue and gold logo. ”Everyone is a civilian.”
Later, confirming the Qatar-based channel’s reputation for exclusives, it showed footage of what it said were the bodies of two British soldiers, in bloodstained camouflaged uniforms, reportedly killed in fighting for Zubayr.
Adnan Sharif, the moustachioed, middle-aged Palestinian reading the news, was professional throughout, maintaining al-Jazeera’s tradition of telling it straight.
Correspondents in the field have more leeway, with live pieces highlighting the suffering of the civilian population in the south. Its man in Basra, Mohammed al-Abdallah, was firm. ”The streets are very calm and there are no indications of violence or riots,” he reported.
Omar al-Issawi, at central command HQ, provided detailed military analysis. ”The Israelis got to Beirut quickly in 1982,” he observed in a sharp live two-way, ”but they had the city under siege for nearly two months.”
Mohammed Ali Bilal, a retired Egyptian general, explained coolly from the Cairo studio that the principle aim of the Americans and British was the ”liquidation of the Iraqi regime”.
Al-Jazeera’s War in Iraq set is dominated by the US and Iraqi flags and a large map. Like CNN, it has a stock market and currency exchange ticker, and newsflashes along the bottom of the screen.
Its language is careful. American and British troops are referred to as ”invading forces” not the ”forces of aggression” used by Iraq and other Arab channels.
Where it differs from western stations is the balletic collage of file pictures used between bulletins, set to a rhythmic soundtrack. These are Apocalypse Now- inspired – juxtapositions of a B-52 taking off, a tearful toddler with bandaged head, flames leaping against an orange Baghdad sky, tired American soldiers: war as performance art.
Unedited footage is common – yesterday of shocked-looking Baghdadis surveying the gory wreckage of their neighbourhood, chanting Allahu Akbar, flashing V-signs and praising Saddam Hussein.
Al-Jazeera is making a hero out of Ali Abed Minkash, a peasant who reportedly shot down a US Apache helicopter near Kerbala and who was repeatedly shown standing proudly with his ancient rifle.
Another Iraqi who gets a lot of al-Jazeera airtime is the minister of information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, his press conferences dubbed into Arabic from his many BBC appearances.
Adnan Sharif and his colleague Rima Salha also presented clips of Mr Blair in the Commons, comment from London correspondent Yusri Fouda, George Bush in Florida, anti-war demonstrations across the world – and Colin Powell refusing to comment on what happened in Baghdad yesterday morning.
British 24-hour television
At the time of the last Gulf war in 1991 there was only one 24-hour news channel based in Britain: Sky News, only two years old, was lightweight and irrelevant.
Now there are three, available to the 40% of households who have signed up to multi-channel television. According to recent viewing figures, the nation is transfixed.
It is easy to see why: this is not just war, it is live from the frontline. Just before 6pm Sky’s Ross Appleyard came on air from a mobile phone as he cowered beneath a car when his division came under mortar attack from Iraqi positions near Nassiriya in southern Iraq. Half an hour earlier the BBC’s Clive Myrie gave a dramatic account of a coalition bombardment of a 100-strong column of Iraqi troop vehicles leaving Basra.
From the bombing in Baghdad to the battle in Najaf and the continuing confusion over the supposed popular revolt in Basra, there was plenty of speculation, but precious few hard facts yesterday. None of the three British broadcast news organisations has correspondents inside any of the big Iraqi cities – apart from Baghdad – that were the subject of intense fighting during the day; all were reliant upon information supplied by correspondents travelling with the coalition military.
While there are stylistic differences between the three networks: Sky, BBC News 24 and the ITV News Channel, they all occupy the same part of the news spectrum. All have broadly similar news agendas and correspondents in the same places.
Yesterday afternoon all carried the start of prime minister’s question time in the Commons; all showed pictures of Tony Blair leaving to board a plane for talks with George Bush in Camp David, all cut live to the speech by the US president in Florida, and all dissected the latest military information about what BBC News 24 cogently straplined as the Battle for the Cities with resident armchair generals and military analysts.
There was a divergence when it emerged that al-Jazeera had pictures that apparently showed two dead British soldiers and two prisoners of war; Sky News showed the images of the PoWs, although it backed away from the more grisly pictures of the dead soldiers. The other networks held back.
All make attempts at detachment: reports from ”embedded” correspondents and those based in Baghdad are enveloped with health warnings, claims of casualties are covered in caveats, and briefings from Qatar and Baghdad are shrouded in healthy scepticism.
But, perhaps inevitably, the perspective of all three channels is determinedly western. This becomes even more obvious on an analysis of the most frequent location of live two-way interviews: coalition command in Doha, military headquarters in Kuwait, the White House in Washington and Downing Street in London.
Jerusalem, Amman, Cairo and Riyadh have barely had a look-in.
Iraqi television
Surprising as it may seem, Iraqi state television is scarcely covering the war, perhaps because it realises many Iraqis get their information from elsewhere, especially foreign satellite channels.
When mention of the war becomes unavoidable, Iraqi television eschews blood-and-guts images of the kind shown by al-Jazeera, preferring carefully stage-managed interviews with hospitalised victims who invariably praise Saddam Hussein and/or condemn the Americans.
But the station’s main role is to show uplifting, morale-boosting programmes. Much of the time this consists of music — not necessarily martial music, although the songs always pay tribute to President Saddam. Sometimes, as happened yesterday afternoon, a singer is seen performing in front of a statue of the president, or in a similar location where the message is obvious.
If it is a studio performance there are background images of the president as a young man, as an older man, firing a gun, or addressing crowds. There are even occasional flashbacks to last year’s national referendum that allegedly re-elected him as president unanimously.
Children often appear in these scenes, showing adoration for the great man.
The music is tailored to several types of audience. Sometimes there are formal choirs singing in the old Soviet style but with Arabic musical touches.
Alternatively, tribesmen sing in traditional dress, to accompany a man doing a sword dance. As a more militaristic variant of the theme, the tribesmen are from time to time shown dancing with Kalashnikovs in their hands.
For ”younger” viewers (probably those under about 45) there are rather staid Iraqi pop singers who also pay tribute to President Saddam.
Occasional films provide a break from music, typically black-and-white 1960s style. They often have a historical theme, particularly the life and times of the leader. Some of them are quite good.
But apart from the obligatory political speeches, there is surprisingly little that might be classified as news. – Guardian Unlimited Â