The battle of the box

The first casualty of this particular war is not truth, but good taste. “So...” said the BBC anchor to the military expert sitting beside him at around 3.30 on Thursday afternoon, “Shock and Awe coming up?”

And when it did come up, it was worth the wait – if you’re into that sort of thing, which many of us most certainly aren’t. If the defining image of the last Gulf War was CNN’s Peter Arnett standing on the roof of the Al-Rashidi Hotel, the visual leitmotiv of this one was a hundred times more vivid and a thousand times more sickening: the camera panning slowly across the city, explosions illuminating the shattered buildings and deserted roads, surreal
alf-light everywhere like a solar eclipse, and loud bang after loud bang after loud bang.

And then, mercifully, a respite: the familiar old night-vision footage of green-lit minarets, looking like alien installations in (yep) a PlayStation game. But the way most of the TV channels covered Shock and Awe, all that was missing was a quick blast (no pun intended) of Blur’s ‘Song 2’. Wooo-hooo!!!!

Indeed, the general tone of the TV war coverage has been reliably idiotic, leavened only occasionally by bursts of lucid reporting and common sense. The Geraldo Rivera prize for woollyheaded dumbness, thus far, goes to the Sky News reporter who was “embedded” with a British regiment. “This isn’t a scientific analysis,” she says, “but they [the soldiers] believe that Saddam is a bad man.”

Sky News’ coverage is the closest in style to that of the US networks (which we’ll get to later) – more graphics, more rolling “tickers” across the bottom of the screen (“WHITE HOUSE SAYS INNOCENT VICTIMS INEVITABLE”), slightly shorter reports than those on the other channels, and that ridiculous video wall looming at the back of the studio. It has also been by far the most offensive, leading off its bulletins with headlines like “America brought Shock and Awe to Baghdad tonight!”, and allowing reporters like its Washington correspondent Ian Woods to faithfully regurgitate the US party line.

At one point on Friday night, the anchor tells Woods of a news update in which 20 Iraqis have been killed near Basra and the rest of the division has surrendered. “This will be music to the US’s ears,” replies Woods in a cheerful tone.

The pundits on Sky tend to be a little – okay, a lot – less guarded in what they come out with on air. Weapons expert Francis Tusa, the bespectacled little grey man who gets wheeled out every few months for precisely these occasions, spends what seems like hours lovingly describing the various sizes and capabilities of different bombs, in a manner disconcertingly
reminiscent of Jeremy Clarkson telling us all about the horsepower of the new Audi saloon.

Later, a man named Will talks about the US treatment of Iraqi POWs (this is two days before five American soldiers are captured near Nassiriya and put before a camera). “The problem is the Geneva Convention…” he begins. RTE is little better. Anthony Murnane breaks away from the jerky videophone footage of Mark Little in northern Iraq to go to a live interview with John Kirke of the Irish Air Corps which, though it was hardly their intention, plumbs the depths of bad taste. The two men sit there for around 15 minutes, cataloguing the US firepower in detail, as if they were World Cup pundits telling us which of the South Korean players to watch out for.

Around 2.30am on Friday night, more explosions are heard in Baghdad. All the channels (except RTE1, which is now showing a western) go back to live pictures. Though the bombing is over as quickly as it began, BBC1 and ITN stay with the live feed from Baghdad, which essentially consists of a shot of a motorway with a bridge running overhead. Every few minutes, the headlights of a speeding car are visible coming down the road (plus, unbelievably, on one occasion, a cyclist).

The best that can be said of the US channels, which are available to some viewers in this country on digital, is that they haven’t been quite as bellicose as one might have expected. It’s refreshing to see ABC’s Peter Jennings (a definite member of the peacenik camp, even though it would be career suicide for him to admit it) continually referring to anti-war protesters during his broadcasts.

Throughout, Jennings (a Canadian who last year personally intervened to block a mooted ABC appearance by a gung-ho country ’n’ western singer plugging an anti-Afghanistan song) looks as if he finds the whole thing immensely distasteful. “Richard,” he tells ABC’s Baghdad reporter at the beginning of Shock and Awe, “the moment you feel you want to go downstairs, please go. If you’re happy, you sound extremely valuable, but the moment you
want to go down...”

At the same moment on CBS, meanwhile, Dan Rather tells his viewers that he’s “thanking our lucky stars that we live in the United States of America”.

By contrast, Sky’s American counterpart Fox News, an aggressively right-wing network (the CEO’s a former member of the Reagan administration, the director of news is a cousin of Bush), is treating its audience to the sort of nationalistic gibberish that would be a scream were the context not so serious. The screen is plastered in logos and graphics which say things like “Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ Officially Underway”.

One anchor, Jeff Michael, is quite unable to contain himself as the first pictures of Shock and Awe come in: “This looks like that first big explosion that happened ... of course it could be a building burning, I don’t know what it is, but it’s nice looking, isn’t it? This is another explosion, believed to be another one of those enormous bombs, those 2,000-pound
bombs... quite an impressive sight.”

Another Fox presenter, Brit Hume, refers to Iraq as al-Qaeda before swiftly correcting himself.

Of course, we’re not getting half the story from television. We’re not even getting a quarter of it. On Sunday, I spent a few hours perusing what was coming in on the Reuters and Press Association photo-wires, which update every few seconds with new images.

Predictably, the majority of the pictures over the weekend were war-related. (Incongruously, most of the others were of sporting events taking place, interspersed randomly with the war shots.) And of the pics coming in from Iraq, about five per cent were unpublishable in all except the most fringe of left-wing journals. They were utterly horrific.

One showed two dead Iraqi soldiers who had been riddled with so many bullets that the sand dune on which they lay was stained brown with their blood. Another depicted a burned-out truck, pulverised into a blackened skeleton of its original form. Something that looked like an oversized pork chop, wrapped in rags, was lying beside the driver’s compartment. The caption informed us that the pork chop was in fact an Iraqi civilian.

Yet another, which will stay with me to my dying day, was a shot of an old man carrying an unconscious and presumably soon-to-be-dead small girl out of a pile of rubble. The girl, no more than four or five, was covered in blood from head to toe. Except she didn’t have any toes. Both of her feet were gone. The mind idly wonders what the pictures that the photographers decided not to send back to their newsrooms must have
looked like.

“I keep reminding myself that war is cruel,” Dan Rather told a journalist off-camera last week. “There’s no way to dress that up. Often what we have on the screen is rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air, very sophisticated weapons. Particularly in the early going, we’re not likely to see what’s going on on the ground: real sand, real blood, real death, real
screams of the wounded and dying.”