Bigger picture the first loss of real-time war

By WARREN GAMBLE

Vietnam was famously supposed to have brought war into America's living rooms.

But 30 years ago the grainy television reports from the jungles were aired long after the battles. The eerie green images from the first Gulf War 12 years ago were transmitted much more quickly, but restricted access to the action hindered reporting.

This time in Iraq, improved digital technology and an apparent increased openness from the American and British military to journalists at the frontline has taken the world another step closer to a live living-room war.

But media commentators fear this unprecedented coverage has opened another front, a thinning line between a valid insight into war and vicarious entertainment. Some have likened the war coverage to "war porno" or the Mother of All Reality Television, with elements of Hollywood thrown in. They suggest echoes of Top Gun, Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan.

In New Zealand, Sky digital subscribers can sit down at breakfast, after dinner and anytime in between to watch a continuous war feed on BBC World and CNN, and extensive coverage on two other channels, the British-based Sky network, and the American based MSNBC.

You can flick between tanks passing burning oil wells in southern Iraq, soldiers hunkered down as the sky turns brown with sand, residents crowding to get aid from troops in a muddy street.

You can watch as cruise missiles launch from a warship behind a reporter lit by the green wash of a satellite video-phone, and as missiles slam into downtown Baghdad.

Last Sunday in the port town of Umm Qasr you could even see a live battle of sorts - including troops firing missiles and cheering when one struck its target - although most of the three-hour coverage showed an empty wasteland.

War TV often gets repetitive and has similar content across the channels, partly because reports from more than 500 "embedded" journalists in the field are pooled between networks.

There are differences in tone. The BBC, for example, appears to seek a broader view of the conflict rather than the military analysts and retired generals who are a staple of American channels.

One regular BBC segment features views from the Arab world, including the Qatar-based cable channel al-Jazeera, dubbed the Arab CNN, which has shown controversial images of dead and captured Western prisoners and Iraqi civilian victims.

Some of the reporting has been too breathless, perhaps understandable in the adrenalin-charge of travelling into danger. Some has been overtly patriotic: MSNBC punctuates its coverage with montages of American soldiers overlaid with messages like "May God Bless America" and "Far From Home, Close to Our Hearts".

Others at the frontline decked out in combat gear have used "we" to describe the troops they are with.

These and other problems on the real-time road to Baghdad have raised again fundamental questions about the role of the media to provide an objective and accurate view of war.

One of the central debates is whether the media, in particular television, and specifically the "embeds", are serving the Pentagon's propaganda war, their own ratings, or the greater public good.

Or perhaps a mixture of all three.

New York media columnist Michael Wolff laments that the media have switched into 24-hour war mode, leaving behind the real and continuing debate about whether it is justified.

"The story is about the war as a fighting-man event, not a political event," he writes in New York Magazine.

"It's 90 per cent a Pentagon story. No context, just blow-by-blow. The excitement is about going along, about having access, wearing war clothes, eating war food - a desire, finally, to be part of the scene, to be an embed, to hang out in Doha (central command headquarters) at the $225,000 briefing stage.

"It's all spectacle. War is a media thing. Not just a ratings gift but a personal professional plum. Take advantage of it."

Most cable channels have brief segments on antiwar protest marches, and little coverage of the ongoing political opposition.

On the war coverage itself there are questions over bias, problems caused by the round-the-clock immediacy including running with unproven stories, and the pros and cons of the restricted reporting from the field.

Some have claimed the television networks are in the Pentagon's propaganda pocket. But after the initial hype surrounding the forces' smooth advance in the first days, there has been a distinct change in the tone and content of the coverage.

As the American advance has stalled because of stiff Iraqi resistance and the weather, there has been widely reported questioning of military tactics and the failed expectations of an easier fight. (Before the war the media helped to create such expectations.)

Those same embedded journalists who provided the images of columns speeding through the desert have also shown the fear of men under fire, the ferocity of a desert sandstorm, and reported other problems including a friendly-fire incident that wounded 30 marines.

In a sign that the reporters are not toeing the military line, American and British officers have begun chiding journalists for making too much of the problems encountered.

And in a sign that journalists can disagree even with their own organisation's approach, a leaked email from BBC defence correspondent Paul Adams accused his own colleagues of overstating the significance of Western casualties and having an unrealistic view of war.

But the real test of the frontline reporters is still to come, when the troops they are with engage in larger battles.

The head of mass communication and journalism at Canterbury University, Jim Tully, says those on the ground may then show their worth.

"If there are scenes that concern brutality by either side, they will be there on the spot, and will hopefully be able to reveal the true nature of the damage, although the military still have the ultimate ability to close things down."

Tully says it is important that the frontline reports are only part of the mix, and they should be placed in a wider context.

One of the criticisms of CNN coverage so far has been its tendency to focus on breaking news rather than stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.

The head of the New Zealand Broadcasting School at Christchurch Polytechnic, Paul Norris, believes on balance the embedded journalists add to the coverage.

"It's a trade-off. They are getting protection and access in return for coming under the military control and losing an element of independence.

"But what the viewer is getting out of this is some very fine frontline reporting which we have not seen in previous wars."

The deputy head of political studies at Auckland University, Dr Joe Atkinson, disagrees, saying the desire for frontline reporters is dictated by ratings and advertisers and "has nothing to do with journalism".

"It gives you a voyeuristic feeling about being there, but it doesn't tell you anything about anything."

How much battle carnage frontline reporters will be allowed to show by the military and their own editors is part of another charge levelled at the networks - that they have so far shown a tidy, sanitised war.


It's an impression America and Britain want to convey to a world deeply divided about their campaign, stressing the precision of their strikes aimed at ousting Saddam Hussein while not harming civilians.


On the other side, the state-run Iraqi television has used graphic pictures of dead American and British soldiers and Iraqi civilians to convey its own message to its people.


The Western media have a continuing dilemma about the sensibility of their audiences to showing such pictures, particularly if an audience includes relatives of a dead soldier.


Al-Jazeera has no such restraint and has caused Western outrage by showing the Iraqi footage of dead American and British soldiers and dead civilians, including a boy in Basra with his head blown off. The channel says it is simply showing the reality of war.


Al-Jazeera also showed the Iraqi tape of five captured Americans. The Pentagon asked American networks not to show the captives, saying the tape breached the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners. Some, however, did broadcast parts of the tape or still images after the prisoners' relatives spoke out.


Other commentators, particularly in Europe, pointed out the double standards of American footage of prisoners held in Cuba without trial after the war on terror in Afghanistan.


Broadcasting school head Paul Norris, a former Television New Zealand director of news during the Gulf War, says the Geneva Convention does not apply to media, only to states. He did not believe there was a problem showing pictures of captured soldiers. Coverage of victims killed in the war would depend on the broadcasters' own standards of decency.


"You need to show enough of the reality, the horror, the carnage, but there is a line beyond which it is unwise to go.


"The audience will be alienated if you show them too much graphic gore. But it may well be different countries have different tolerances for that material."


Wall-to-wall instant coverage has flushed out another significant problem for television - running with unproven rumours which later turn out to be false. Some have suggested these rumours, usually from military sources, are part of the psychological operations - "psyops" in the war jargon - being played out in a bid to get Iraqi soldiers to give up. They are fed to a competitive media needing to feed a round-the-clock machine.


The skirmishes over the southern port of Umm Qasr has been one of the worst examples. The Guardian newspaper counted nine separate reported claims that it had been taken, each followed by more skirmishes with irregular forces loyal to Saddam.


Another was the widely reported surrendering of the 51st Iraqi infantry division on the second day of the war involving up to 8000 men, including its commanders.


Iraqi officials denied the claim, and the following day United States officials discovered the "commander" was a junior officer masquerading as a superior officer to win better treatment. Other elements of the division were later reported back at war in Basra, although it is still not known if some of the troops just returned home rather than surrendering.


Early reports of banned Scud missile attacks on Kuwait have since been overturned by the US military which said no Scuds have been found. This week early reports of a huge chemical weapons factory and a popular uprising in Basra have not been substantiated.


The head of BBC news, Richard Sambrook, publicly admitted the difficulty of reporting in the war zone, particularly with rolling television news.


"Nobody including the media has the full picture of what's going on," he says.


"Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information. We're all trying to work out the jigsaw and what the overall picture is.


"The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't."


Political studies lecturer Dr Atkinson says the emphasis on 24-hour breaking news creates a sameness, often straight repetition, that numbs the viewer. "It's not necessarily the case that more is better."


Martin Bell, the veteran former BBC war correspondent who is now an independent British MP, blames the confusion on the "excitability" of editors of rolling television news station.


He says the best way of penetrating the fog of war is to return to the basic journalistic attitude of scepticism and that applies to the television audience as much as to the reporters.

Herald Feature: Iraq