Still, even if the reporters were docile, there was a general expectation that with journalists in the field, beaming back reports while events were occurring, this war would look like no other. The Gulf War was the video-game war because it was viewed largely through the pilots' bombsights as if the public were sitting at a video-game console. Then Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf would appear with his pointer to tell viewers what they were seeing. The Iraq war was to be the Webcam war because every reporter was equipped with a camera or videophone to transmit the action. We were told we would see things we had never seen before, that we would experience battle as we never had before. This time we would taste the sand.
In some respects, this has been true, though once again the administration seems to have anticipated the effect and orchestrated it. Most wars are reported in what movie critics call "mise-en-scène." You get a sense of the whole thing, generally because the military command provides press briefings, like Schwarzkopf's, that provide the larger picture of what's happening: troop movements, campaigns, strategies, victories and defeats. The job of the reporters in the field is to provide texture and fill in the gaps. This war is being reported as montage. You get a series of quick cuts from one area to another but because there is virtually no larger picture being provided -- Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of command, faced the press only once in the first week of battle -- all the public gets are disparate pieces, and even those pieces cannot be assembled in any meaningful way. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, "What we are seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we are seeing are slices of the war in Iraq."
To prove Rumsfeld's point, while CBS ran a snippet of the Al-Jazeera POW tape and other networks posted stills from it, the American media are not showing the images that have grabbed the attention of the Arab world: The corpses of Iraqi soldiers, the wounded civilians in the hospital, the general destruction.
With slices instead of the whole, the administration has provided action without context, lots of trees without any forest as one anchorman put it, which is exactly what the president wants. The White House knows that so long as viewers are focusing on the troops, there will be public support for the war, though the one thing the administration might not have bargained for is that when things go badly, a war in montage can look an awful lot like chaos.
No doubt the White House also knows that while the battlefield images have the look and feel of reality, of being taken right in the middle of the maelstrom, reality isn't what it used to be. Most Americans nowadays process it differently. So-called reality programming has made the public more receptive to documentary images, but it has also taken out most of the bite and converted those images into another style of entertainment. That may be why the embed coverage of the Iraq war, which should be terrifying, instead seems like just another reality show. (At a press briefing last Saturday, Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, bristled when a reporter referred to the bombardment of Baghdad as a "show" and a brief argument ensued, but the reporters, mostly foreigners it seemed, were clearly on to something.) Anyone watching cable news very early Sunday morning could see a tank battle outside Umm Qasr in southern Iraq and the effect was not very different from watching an extended episode of "Cops." One felt surprisingly disengaged.
Writing in the New York Times on Sunday, Alessandra Stanley observed that "Television cameras' usual route to battle is the trail left by its victims," and she cited the familiar images of refugees, hospital wards and open graves from recent wars. Her point was that the embeds were providing "an entirely new prism" through which to view war. Perhaps so, but the images on Al-Jazeera were an awful reminder that bodies and POWs still matter and that this war is not just a spectacular limited-run reality show that will end inevitably with Saddam's demise. They also reminded us that while we are seeing more of war via those embedded reporters, we may actually wind up knowing less -- which is probably just how the administration intended it to be.
About the writer
Neal Gabler is the author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality"
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