Beginning with George Bush’s unprecedented prime-time ultimatum, the war in Iraq played out as much on the airwaves as on the battlefield itself. In the opening hours, the Anglo-American camp seemed assured of a swift victory in both arenas. Network news images confirmed not only the coalition forces’ overwhelming superiority, but also their commitment to targeting the Iraqi regime rather than its subjects the people they ostensibly came to liberate.
Then the images changed.
Even the most jingoistic American networks could not ignore footage of coalition POWs, military and civilian casualties and furious anti-war demonstrators. But if these pictures received scant attention from the networks, others were conspicuous by their complete absence: Shiite throngs welcoming their liberators with open arms Iraqi troops capitulating in their thousands at the first sign of trouble.
This wasn’t the war Bush sold to the American public.
“What you are seeing is not the war in Iraq,” said an uncharacteristically flustered Donald Rumsfeld, “what you are seeing is slices of the war in Iraq.” The Defence Secretary’s choice of words was telling, their sentiment perhaps truer than he realised. For despite unparalleled access to the frontlines, the American broadcast media have failed to present a rounded view of this war.
The networks are practised at delivering slices: easily digestible, bite-size chunks of action. But they fail lamentably when it comes to
serving up the whole pie. One reason: each field reporter was constrained to a single perspective a slice of a war in which the participants, both willing and unwilling, numbered in their millions.
A disparity quickly emerged between reports from the field and analyses back at HQ. It was in the studio that the pie was pieced together, with the assistance of military officers, yanked out of retirement to parrot the Pentagon’s official view: the war is going to plan.
Ten days in, the disparity reached fever pitch when NBC’s man in Baghdad lost the plot. Peter Arnett told Iraqi television that the initial coalition attack had failed and NBC axed him on the spot. You can’t blame them. Arnett of all people should have known that whatever he said would be churned out as propaganda on Iraq TV.
But Arnett’s crime went deeper than the interview itself. It went to the heart of the sentiments expressed therein. He was guilty of a momentary lapse of patriotism.
Like other networks, NBC is keenly aware that patriotism is necessary for its own war: the war for ratings. Its flagship cable affiliate frequently airs photomontages featuring US soldiers leaving tearful loved-ones, or handing out candy to Iraqi children, replete with stirring soundtracks and captions like “May God bless America our hearts go with you.”
Perhaps it is naive to expect mainstream media to defy the popular patriotism of wartime. But one does not expect unabashed cow-towing either, especially when it threatens the very ethos of public debate that America supposedly wishes to export to Iraq.
That irony was highlighted in a decision by the New York Stock Exchange to ban al-Jazeera from its trading floor, following visuals of dead and captured coalition soldiers on the Qatar-based network. Interestingly, despite their own broadcasts of Iraqi prisoners, the US networks retained their accreditation.
Al-Jazeera is no less partisan than its American counterparts. Indeed, a journalist with the network recently confided that straying from the anti-American line, “even to simply say that Saddam is partially responsiblecould cost you your job even cause you physical harm.”
But the NYSE’s patriotic action will no doubt be used to defend future expulsions of Western journalists abroad. Perhaps television audiences in America should be thankful for their slices of this war. When the next one comes around, they may be scrounging for crumbs.