Soldier Charles Horgan, after a bomb had blown part of his right heel off in Operation Iraqi Freedom: “I looked down and saw I had my legs and I was pretty happy about that,” Horgan said. “It was just like in the movies.”
What isn’t like the movies, according to Horgan and other soldiers, is the fact that Iraqi troops aren’t rolling over and playing dead, but rather fighting for their lives. It’s a hard lesson to learn, especially for many young soldiers, many of whom have spent their whole lives having had life’s experiences filtered through television and the Internet. Think about Evan Marriott, TV’s doltish Joe Millionaire, and Trista Rehn, The Bachelorette. Think about beautiful people committing to marry someone they’ve never seen before, based on the whims of Mr. and Mrs. America. Think about “celebrities” being dropped in various exotic locales, all for our vicarious, voyeuristic pleasure. Now think about these same folks being dropped in the middle of the barren Iraqi desert. Shocking? Perhaps. But the ultimate reality television — the war we’re all watching unfold — is much more than that. It’s “shock and awe,” and, despite what some of the images being sent back might lead you to believe, it’s also very much life and death. You know, real.
For some time, television’s harshest critics have claimed that the medium was dangerously blurring the line between TV and reality. The recent glut of so-called “reality” shows has pretty well confirmed their point. But with Americans now watching a real, live, “hey, they’re firing back!” war from the comfort of their sofas or barstools, the question becomes “Whose reality?” Does the Bush administration’s “embedding” of reporters within armed forces units keep them from telling anything other than the government’s PR version of the war? (The embedding, by the way, includes rules that forbid reporters to talk to soldiers “off the record,” quashing attempts to get the GIs’ “real” — there’s that word again — views).
Beyond the issue of whose version of reality we’re absorbing from TV’s war coverage, the past three weeks have raised another longstanding, even darker criticism of the medium: we’re losing track of the distinction between reality — in this case, wartime’s death and destruction — and our own entertainment.
Don’t think that our government wasn’t concerned about how they were going to market the war to the people back home. The US built a new multi-million dollar press center in Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar, replete with fancy plasma TVs and a Star Trek-like backdrop (interestingly, the high-tech building was built months ago, even as UN resolutions and inspections were still being carried out). You don’t get ready for what you expect to be the biggest show of the year without a quality set.
The government’s slick handling of the technical necessities of war reporting, along with letting some reporters tag along, has largely worked — at least on the American press, who have generally delivered the daily scripts desired by the government while keeping the televised bloodshed, especially that of Iraqi civilians, to a minimum. Indeed, even the fighting itself has been co-opted by the media — turn on TV coverage of the war and you’ll inevitably hear a reporter hurriedly report back that “we’re coming under fire,” or “we just took out an armored transportation vehicle.” The use of “we” in these combat situations “embeds” the idea in viewers’ minds that the American soldiers’ view of what’s going on is the only real one. If “we” are all fighting this war together, the soldiers and their ride-along Hemingway wanna-bes, who’s left to report with any objectivity what’s really going on?
And just why are these reporters risking their lives? To bring you, the viewer, the most up-to-date and crucial information? Or to beat the other rival networks in the ratings game?
Remember “Scud Stud” Arthur Kent? The dashing, Italian-leather jacket clad reporter who became a minor star during the first Gulf War, for no other reason than he managed to stay level-headed and un-mussed despite Scud missiles firing all around him? Well, now he’s got company. Newsman Ted Koppel is already filing reports from the Iraqi desert, clad in a specially designed suit engineered to withstand a chemical attack. Messrs Brokaw and Jennings and Rather, already fixtures in our news consciousness, now seem as omnipresent as family members. Nic Robertson? He’s so familiar, he might as well be driving one of those Bradley Fighting Vehicles. And in a postmodern twist, Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera have become the news while covering the news — both of the veteran reporters were sent packing for not following the script.
Yes, being in the right place at the right time in this war can make you a star. However, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can mean a permanent vacation, desert-style. As in Death. Dismemberment. Reality. As in what hapenned to Atlantic magazine editor-at-large Michael Kelly last week, killed while covering a battle in Iraq.
“I think how the media is covering this war is great,” says Bryan Smith, a UNC-Charlotte student. “I like sitting down every now and then to see what’s going on. I believe it’s about time we went to war, and (that) it should have happened a long time ago. . . .I like seeing the images from over there — I have friends there and I wonder if they’ve walked by that spot too. The technology has definitely come a long way in warfare and the media. I’m thankful for the job they are doing.”
Smith is part of a generation that has, in many ways, grown up watching the news — indeed, watching everything — as entertainment. We want highlights, and we want analysis of those highlights. Signs of the “here we are now / entertain us” mindset are everywhere: the NBA now sells the game by emphasizing flashy individual star players over team play. Musical soundbites are now de rigueur, and we’ll take them either as an MP3 or a Jaguar commercial. We want TV shows that neatly prepackage our thirst for skin and violence and general naughtiness, at the expense of having to sit through an entire hour of boring old real life. We want our rock stars and movie icons to remind us what our drab lives could be, at the expense of living our own.What we absolutely don’t want is to look less than invincible — to ourselves, to our neighborhoods and cities, and to the world. This war, one in which we’re practically guaranteed not to suffer the agony of defeat, fits the bill. Sure, there are already way more American deaths than was predicted, and there’s some “collateral damage,” but do armchair soldiers even care, as long as the war stays thousands of miles away, and the armed forces remain comprised of those who joined of their own free will? Most of us feel bad about the more tragic aspects of the war, but we’re willing to overlook them as long as we’re not shown picture after picture of bloodied children.
Sure, we’re inundated with images: here’s an Iraqi tank, overturned and on fire. Over here are the smoldering remains of the Ministry of Information. However — to borrow a government phrase — this is “shock and awe” footage, snippets that say nothing about context; it’s kind of like reality, but it’s kind of like a video game, too. It’s footage that says nothing of foreign policy, and very little about the dangers our servicemen might have endured to bring you the images. It’s all shot up close, but somehow from a voyeuristic distance. But we don’t mind; hey, a Peeping Tom doesn’t care about the personal life of the person he’s watching from the wings; he just wants to see some action.
“The constraints the media operate under once a war starts are quite understandable,” says Joshua Meyrowitz, a media professor at the University of New Hampshire. “To me, the real failure. . .is in the lack of context and history, and lack of attention to the pattern of lies we’ve been told in the long march to war.”
Ironically, the toughest fight our government is facing in regards to war coverage is coming from an assortment of retired generals and other ex-military types. In fact, it might want to keep more of a handle on its current soldiers. Recently, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, the ground commander in Iraq, alluded to civilian commanders’ ideas of how the war would be fought when he told the press, “The enemy we are fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed.” Other generals have questioned whether Washington gave them enough troops and armor to protect the lengthy supply line, the effectiveness of Allied bombings, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s military strategy as a whole. Even Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander in the first Gulf War, has chimed in, relentlessly questioning Rumsfeld.
“I would hope that we have in place the adequate resources to become an army of occupation,” Schwarzkopf said before the war, “because you’re going to walk into chaos.” According to Schwarzkopf, Washington’s biggest mistake was that they forgot there are no rules — just as there weren’t any on September 11. In real life, particularly in combat, it often seems the entertainers just won’t follow the script.
“The media coverage in Iraq this year has been kind of dramatic for myself personally,” says UNCC’s Jennifer Sochacki. “. . .Viewing the horrifying images of what our American troops are being put through brings many people discomfort. Since we have never had this kind of coverage in wartime before, it’s kind of interesting to be a part of it. The only thing that worries me is the fact that we’re putting more innocent people in danger — reporters, journalists, etc.”
With the addition of “ride along” journalists with videophones, are viewers getting any new information they wouldn’t have received before? Not if you ask University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, who recently told Kari Lydersen, reporting for AlterNet, “[Besides] human interest stories — what are they eating, what are they doing for fun? — [US reporters] are just narrating the movement of troops — we’re going down the road, we’re going down the road some more, there are people shooting at us. Those are reports that are very dramatic, but what do they tell us about the war, about the politics of war?”Ann Simonton, the director of Media Watch, an organization formed to “help create more informed consumers of the mass media,” agrees.
“They are embedded and unable to tell the truth, and their stories are censored, and you call that “new information’?” she asks. Simonton thinks, in fact, that we have yet to see the depths that media coverage of this war will reach.
“See Studs Terkel’s video Fear and Favor in the Newsroom,” says Simonton. “He documents how reporters during the Gulf War were unable to show footage they got and how some lost their jobs if they pushed to get their reports out. They documented how we used chemical weapons, and the footage included the wounded in hospitals. . .The US government learned [from Vietnam War coverage] not to show napalmed children running from bombs. These images might stop war.”
Simonton and Thomas McPhail, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of the book Global Communication: Theories, Stakeholders, and Trends, both contend that in order for television news to regain a semi-objective hold, to get past mere surface images, it must stop suckling from commercial TV coffers.
“News organizations need to be independent from commercial TV,” says Simonton. “Ads and the corporations they represent want happy shoppers. . .People are distracted from what they need with so called “entertainment.’ And commercial entertainment is forced to go “real’ and “bizarre’ to attempt to distract the bewildered herd that is. . .addicted beyond hope to “entertainment’ TV.”
McPhail, who ranks the BBC as providing the best war coverage and Fox News as providing the worst, says that if we forget the “entertainment goal and go with the documentary format, viewers will follow — but not the (Fox) set; they’re unique and don’t want to think too much.”
Such an undertaking would, of course, entail changing the very structure of how news is done in this new century — as well as propaganda. Years of study by government strategists have yielded us the “hand-picked” press conference with a docile White House press corps, so our President doesn’t have to answer any more questions about nasty things like death tolls, a la Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam. These days, the quickest way to ascend through the White House press corps is to be like most other popular media — give the impression of delivering some actual meaning, but be sure to dilute it enough for mass consumption. Mass consumption, we all know, creates media stars. And media stars sell TV commercials, as well as newspapers.
As McPhail says, “The US press has been less than critical — they treasure those front row seats at press conferences in Qatar and Washington. Ask a tough question and you’ll find yourself, and your network, in the back row with the French press corps.”
“I feel that the war is just and should’ve been completed 10 years ago during the Gulf War,” says Matt Reames, another UNCC student. “I think the TV coverage is excellent, and puts the civilian right in the middle of the war. This way there is no misconception by the viewers at home about what exactly is really going on over there.”
If someone really wants to know what’s going on in Iraq, he or she might get a better sense of reality — i.e., reports showing actual blood, both Iraqi and American — by also tuning in stations like the BBC or even Al-Jazeera. No one’s saying those particular news organizations are without bias, but it’s likely you’ll find the truth lying somewhere between the US media’s coverage and the rest of the world’s. Al-Jazeera, staffed and funded for the most part by Arab moderates from Qatar, was portrayed in the US as sympathetic to terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 coverage which brought them to public notice here. Soon enough, however, the US government realized their mistake and attempted to put their own speakers — namely Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice — on the network. Al-Jazeera actually drew the ire of the Iraqi government for reporting on Hussein’s lavish birthday celebration. This may be irrelevant for the foreseeable future, though: at press time, hackers were preventing either the network’s Arab or English-language sites from being accessible in the US.”The (public relations) world changed on 9/11,” says Tom McPhail. “Since then, a full court press has been applied on Bush by the hawks in his administration and, with less success, on the public. (However), some of the war support is soft, believing in a short war with much flag waving. Each week/month that goes by, this group will shift to “anti-war’ quicker than the Pentagon realizes.”
Another thing that may shift faster than our government realizes is the anti-American sentiment that’s on the rise in other, neighboring Arabic countries. As television news programs show repeated images of American invaders and Iraqi civilian deaths, night after night, to folks who perhaps have little else to latch onto, our “enemies” are going to multiply. In fact, they have already, with Iraqi expatriates returning in droves to their homeland to join the fight against the United States. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein isn’t all that hard — at press time, most analysts were split on whether or not the Iraqi despot was even still alive. But this may be missing the point. The longer Operation Iraqi Freedom goes on, and particularly if Saddam and his rag-ass troops fight on to the bitter end, we may find ourselves transforming Hussein, a megalomaniacal monster, into some kind of new heroic martyr for the Muslim world. Talk about shifting realities!
Take the martyr-making machinery of popular lore, multiply it with the star-making machinery of television and the short-sightedness of religious fundamentalism, and you’re looking at more potential fires than there are oil fields in the Middle East. And many are just beginning to burn.
If the war is turning into Reality TV for many Americans, think about another reality: as Thomas McPhail points out, many people are just starting to realize that “. . .winning the war will be the easier part — winning the peace is going to be tougher by far.”
Stay tuned.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2003.
