“I have seen enough to know I have seen too much.” That was a line from the movie A League of Their Own, after the dramatic final game of a women’s baseball championship. It perfectly describes how I (and, I suspect, many of you) have been feeling in the days since March 19 when the everyday was replaced with “shock and awe.”So where are we in the days since, inside this ultimate reality television, a Playstation come to bloody life, 24/7? I wish I knew. After absorbing way too much television coverage at the beginning of the war, I’m cutting back and cutting away more often. I’m sampling newspapers and websites here and in other parts of the world, thanks to the Internet. There’s no excuse for not knowing what’s going on in Iraq, but the sheer, staggering volume of what you can read, see and hear can be confusing and contradictory.
From flag-waving coverage to the career-ending Peter Arnett interview on Iraqi television, it’s a schizophrenic world out there if you’re watching the war unfold. There’s the gee-whiz video of NBC’s David Bloom live on a rolling tank, and night-vision video as Baghdad is bombed. Surreal, movie-like, sanitary and, yes, kind of cool.
But days later, when it starts to sink in that lives are being lost and slaughtered US POWs are telecast on Al-Jazeera, all the coverage is hard to sift through. The reality’s emerged that troops won’t be coming home anytime soon, and it’s a complicated, ever-changing and polarizing story to tell.
The voices of dissent are being heard, but not necessarily embraced. Witness the silly banning of Dixie Chicks music at radio stations, as though country music fans can’t decide for themselves. Filmmaker Michael Moore was mostly booed at the Oscars for his “shame on you, Mr. Bush” speech. Truth is, editors and news managers read polls, too, and those indicate that a solid majority of Americans support the troops and the military action.
Here’s what I see so far through the sandstorm.
Balance vs. the bottom line: Since media is a for-profit enterprise, outlets want to please the “customer.” Do you downplay anti-war protest stories to make readers and viewers happy? Or do you cater to them with red, white and blue colored journalism? Patriotism pays, according to a Washington Post article that looked at how several media consultants are advising radio and TV clients how to avoid “customer complaints” about coverage. Frank N. Magid Associates released a survey for its television clients that stated that covering war protests may be harmful to a station’s bottom line. The topic was the lowest-tested among 6,400 viewers across the nation.
The article went on to say that McVay Media, one of the largest radio consultant firms, is advising client stations to “get patriotic music that makes you cry, salute, and get cold chills.” It also counsels stations that “polarizing discussions are shaky ground.”
And if you want your TV war draped in jingoism and cheerleading, Fox News is the place to go on cable. Only on Fox can an anchor call Newt Gingrich “an estimable scholar of the military” and say “it’s hard to believe things could go much better.”
CNN is using its wealth of worldwide experience, but is saddled with the ponderous Aaron Brown anchoring in primetime. MSNBC and NBC are working well together, ABC has been behind the coverage curve more than once, and CBS subjected us to war updates during NCAA hoops simply because they could.
Embedding is a tactical hit for now: My uncle, James Johnson, wrote a book last year, Combat Chaplain, about his unique experience in Vietnam. It was a tale of war I’d never heard from him. It was up close and personal, complete with death and mud and misery. Yet there was humor and observation and the sense of trying to make the best of war.
The “up close and personal” reporters and camera crews reporting from among the troops has been the spectacle of this war so far, and a brilliant PR move by the Pentagon. They’re reporting live from various fronts and divisions, providing small slices of the big pie. This is the same Pentagon that hired a former Disney set designer to build a $250,000 high-tech backdrop in Qatar camera-ready for briefings.
Critics charge that embedded reporters are being used by the military and that, as human beings, they can’t help but report sympathetically alongside the soldiers they are coming to know and ducking mortar shells with. Time will tell whether the strategy of openness could backfire and journalists close enough to the realities of battle observe discrepancies between what is really happening and what the government is telling us.
For me, I’d rather see these slices of life than not, and it’s a good thing these members of the free press are in the field.
Stay tuned. . .
Shannon’s media column runs every other week in CL. She’s an independent television producer and former news manager at WBTV. What do you think of the media’s war coverage? E-mail at Shannon.Reichley@cln.com.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2003.
