From the sidelines of war

By GREG DIXON

I'm not sure, but I could have sworn I heard it.

Sometime on Friday afternoon, as CNN finished yet another update on Gulf War II, a presenter said, "The television forces are now pushing deep into southern Iraq".

Now in all likelihood this was misheard, it was a misquote of the imagination. But from a couch in a living room thankfully a galaxy far, far away from America, Britain and Australia's horrifying, mortifying war it didn't half sound like the truth.

I have no reason to believe that it is propaganda when we are told that the coverage of the invasion of Iraq is unlike any seen before. This clearly is the most television camera-saturated of wars.

With reporters "embedded" - or, you wonder, is it actually "in bed with" - numerous American and British units as they push north, we have been able to witness snippets of what is happening on the ground, sometimes as it is happening.

There are said to be around 800 journalists in the field with British and American troops, though none, you will have gathered, are from New Zealand.

Although TVNZ and TV3 have reporters in the region, there has been, thus far, a sense that they are as reliant as we viewers on others to find out what's going on.

The two closest to the action, TV3's Mike McRoberts and TV One's Ian Sinclair, have made a fair fist of telling New Zealanders what they have seen and heard. But from their position in Kuwait City what they can actually see and hear has added very little to the reports from American and British (and, to a much lesser extent, al-Jazeera) networks that have filled local TV reports.

On Friday both Sinclair (hilariously, in a flak jacket marked "Press") and McRoberts were seen running about like mad things with gas masks on during an apparent Scud missile attack on the city - though it was undoubtedly a disturbing and visceral moment for them. And both have done their best since then to find someone, anyone, to talk to with variable results.

But mostly they (and TV One's Cameron Bennett in Turkey) have provided only New Zealand accents to the overseas reporting on our networks.

TV One has certainly had the wood on TV3 in terms of the quantity of cover so far. From Breakfast to Midday to One News to Holmes to One Late Edition, the state-owned network has provided great wads of it.

It has employed talking heads (locally, Alex Van Wel with his maps and University of Auckland lecturer Paul Buchanan, who has pointed out both sides are "playing loose with the truth") to analyse what's happened during the day, and they have done reasonably well to make some sense of the bigger picture at given moments.

However, and this is undoubtedly due to the time difference between here and the sharp end, many of the reports that appear on TV One at 6pm or later are the exact same as those seen on Breakfast and/or Midday many hours earlier. With only two regular daily news programmes, TV3 has escaped this trap.

But the state broadcaster, unlike TV3, has shown a greater enthusiasm for changing programming (the interesting but propaganda-ish Warship on Thursday and After Saddam on Monday) to suit the times, though whether viewers actually want more war remains moot.

The networks' major attempts, so far, to do their own reporting on Bush and Blair's Iraqi adventure has been their Sunday night current affairs flagships, TV One's Sunday and TV3's 20/20.

Neither was particularly satisfying.

20/20 featured what was little more than McRoberts summarising events since Thursday.

Sunday, extended to an hour and a-half, featured a series of thin or pointless reports.

Janet McIntyre gave a hopelessly cliched "mood of the city" piece from New York. Cameron Bennett discovered - what a shock - that Saddam Hussein's biographer believed the dictator was "cunning" and "a thug", and that, in a report from Turkey, that relations between the US and Turkey were at "a very low ebb".

But then neither of Sunday's programmes got close to the low point of local coverage so far: Kim Hill's Face To Face with Australian journalist John Pilger.

In a spiteful, embarrassing encounter on Thursday night, the pair added nothing but personal antipathy to our understanding of events, though I'm inclined to mostly blame the sainted (by the left) Pilger for the debacle because of his immediately inflexible approach to not unreasonable questions.

As of last night, the US and British forces of television certainly have pushed very deep into southern Iraq. Whether they're winning the war they're fighting - to report with accuracy, balance and scepticism of and on both sides - remains, for now, undecided.

For New Zealand's networks, standing pretty much on the sidelines as they are, it has so far been a case of them achieving little more than watching US and British reportage with the rest of us.

Herald Feature: Iraq