On Television

...It was not part of the station's news coverage...

...The day the Ne w York Daily New's ran an opinion column advocating bombing its studios and transmitters, Charlotte Beers, the United States Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, told Advertising Age that she might buy time on the channel to get America's message to the Arab world...

...The device itself is about the size of a laptop computer but twice as thick...

...Schechter, a former field producer for the ABC News magazine 20/20, wrote, "Missing from much of the news was why these killers did what they did—and what they hoped to gain...

...On Television TV in a Time of War By Reuven Frank On October 15 the head of BBC News agreed to send some chaps round to Downing Street to discuss war coverage and the use of video clips of Osama bin Laden...

...From anywhere and everywhere the Afghan battle is joined, or other operations are under way, the world's television services have their reporters speaking directly to the audience...

...Audiences flocked to old familiar comedies and dramas, and turned away from new entertainment offerings...

...Nevertheless, on the whole the media have fared pretty well in public regard since September 11...

...Especially television...

...Connect the camera to the videophone and you can feed raw news tape to be edited or live pictures of an event to a broadcast point that has been reached by dialing a telephone number in New Jersey...

...In the endless duel between press and government—thrust, parry, riposte—the videophone counts as another thrust...

...Still, we are watching the war as it is being fought...

...A newspaper reporter looking for a feature story in Dearborn, Michigan, the most concentrated Arab enclave in the United States, found everyone tuned in to Al Jazeera directly, without any need for ABC or CNN...

...Space Images supplies the best commercially available satellite photos of Earth...

...Rice not only feared that the statement was propaganda, but that it might have included coded messages to terrorist cells around the world...

...The all-news cable channels doubled their usual audience sizes, but this added up to a mere fraction of the networks...

...He was one of many, all reminiscent of those well-meaning people, including some of England's big name Fabians, who "understood" the rise of Nazism by citing the evils of the Versailles treaty...

...The videophone's bandwidth is not yet sufficient for live pictures and the sound to come through cleanly...

...The BBC was the first of many Western networks to document Al Jazeera's activities...

...A 24hour news service with bureaus around the globe, it is the Arab world's principal source of images of Palestinians being shot or hospitalized or buried...

...Many Arab governments, including Egypt and Kuwait, have complained officially about Al Jazeera's broadcasts...

...Action in Korea was captured on black and white film— some of it by news organizations, much of it by Defense Department cameramen who often did a terrific job...

...Via Videophone," says the BBC as its foreign editor, dressed in aflakjacket, shows and tells of accompanying a food relief shipment into places he ought not be...

...I was less concerned about editorial interference than having my color film developed in some jerry-built Signal Corps laboratory in Saigon...

...CNN broke the news networks' informal sharing agreement— hatched three weeks earlier during the heady public spiritedness following the attack on the World Trade Center—to show what it now claimed were exclusive pictures of nighttime bombing of Kabul...

...There was talk of reducing violence in some police dramas, and episodes involving terrorism were withheld until a later date...

...The other networks protested, and filched the images anyway...

...Not even Barbara Walters gets top name guests so easily...

...In wartime governments tend to be uncomfortable with reporting from the other side, but Al Jazeera and satellite technology have made this hard to control...

...The anthrax incidents and the attendant public muddle have been handled competently too...

...As a result, newspapers the world over sent reporters to Qatar to do feature stories on a vital news link in an unusual war...

...The hour all but said that we had suffered because there was something we had done, or not done...

...So Vietnambecame "the living room war," as has been every war since...

...Whether Al Jazeera is a propaganda tool as the Administration and others contend, oris an outpost of objective journalism in a region where that is a rarity, as it insists, it is at the very least an Arab channel speaking to Arabs...

...A picture of something happening is unique, irreplaceable...

...It can plug into an automobile cigarette lighter...

...Coverage, at least at first, was responsible and reasonably sober, and the public responded...

...In the Gulf War, pictures were satellited from Riyadh, Tel Aviv and even Baghdad...

...The head of ITN, which supplies newscasts to Britain's commercial TV networks, had received the same invitation from the Prime Minister's office and was considering it...

...Since newsreels were more important than TV in 1950, Defense released its film on Mondays and Thursdays, when the newsreels "made up" for theater distribution...

...There was extensive and good coverage of the Korean War...

...From Sweden to Australia, they all did...

...Trying to restrict American networks' use of its material, as Rice did, is futile...

...Soon a question seeped into editorial pages: Was Al Jazeera giving us news or enemy propaganda during wartime...

...Hundreds of miscreants have been apprehended after exposure on that program, so this may help...

...BY VIDEOPHONE," proclaims NBC, while Tom Aspell peers out of the nighttime to identify those flashes as bombs over Kabul, 40 miles away...

...There will be irritation about this...

...They were identified as coming from Al Jazeera, which had the only TV crew inside the Afghan capital and with whom CNN had made a deal...

...It is interesting that more than 80 per cent of Americans turned to television that first horrible day, most of them to the three old, established networks...

...Many of its staff came from the Arabic language services of the BBC and others had held media jobs in the United States...

...military is paying Space Images, Inc., of Thornton, Colorado, $ 1.9 million a month for exclusive rights to its satellite pictures of Afghanistan and the surrounding region...

...With each transmission improvement it became harder for the government to insert itself into the news process...

...Madame de Staël is alleged to have said, "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" explaining everything can mean excusing everything...

...It was the attitude Noël Coward so deftly satirized in the song he wrote early in World War II, "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans...

...The Financial Times called the invitations "intervention" and expressed concern for the independence and evenhandedness of the British media...

...The only Americans who had previously heard of Al Jazeera were those who spoke Arabic at home and have satellite dishes...

...The bin Laden videotape was provided by a television station called Al Jazeera, located in the tiny Arabian Gulf sheikdom of Qatar...

...The first such offering from the Afghan-based AI Qaeda leader after the September 11 atrocities had been aired as soon as it was received...

...The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time was General Colin L. Powell, and the Secretary of Defense was Richard Cheney...

...It boasts of having broadcast interviews with dissidents from every Arab country except Qatar, which...

...It needs neither those bulky uplink trucks one encounters outside courthouses or public buildings where news is breaking, nor fixed transmission facilities (run in most countries by the state...

...Libya, Tunisia and Morocco have each, at one time or another, recalled envoys from Qatar because of its programs...

...As the days went on, and no one dared cover anything else but there was less and less new information to report, Fox' relative position improved...

...Not surprisingly, a new breed of journalist is evolving to fit the new technology...

...It leapfrogs the instinctive official efforts to shape news coverage...

...By evening, though, it was being fed to any television service that wanted it...

...No one who saw it easily forgot the picture of Marines retreating from the Changjin reservoir, up and down mountains in snow and bitter cold...

...Working alone in remote, violent, important places, he is emerging as part cowboy, part electronics engineer, part police reporter, part foreign correspondent—with the last likely to be weakest...

...Good Video Gets in the Way of Real News...

...The next day Rice herself taped an interview for Al Jazeera, to tell the Arabs they were not the enemy, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld did the same the day after...

...Some pictures look like the bottom of an aquarium, or dirt spots on film...

...That may or may not prove objectivity, yet would seem to bespeak a certain independence...

...The FBI got the Fox program, America's Most Wanted, to do a special edition listing the 22 most wanted international terrorists...

...The war in Afghanistan has seen that progression take a giant step forward with what is called the videophone...

...You can "count cars in a parking lot, tell which are pickups and sedans and tell what color they are...

...It is the only place most Arabs in the region can see Palestinians firing mortars at Israeli settlements or the casualties from suicide bombings...

...The West Wing, NBC's highly successful series—a sweet, romantic fantasy of what somebody's nice wife wishes the White House were—delayed its season opener for a special episode that had the universally recognized cast eschewing plot and drama in favor of what amounted to chalk talks to some high school students about tolerance and evil...

...rather, it was dropped, fully produced and edited, on the doorstep of Al Jazeera's Kabul bureau, whence it was satellited to Qatar...

...says its managing director, has none...

...Until the Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency bought its Afghan exclusive, Space Images was in the business of selling any picture at $200 a square kilometer...

...Typical was a Leftish "media critic" named Danny Schechter, whose Newsday piece, written within days of the terrorist attack, was titled...

...The networks gave over their full schedules to news, wiping out all entertainment shows and all commercials for more than four days—longer than at the time of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and funeral...

...BEYOND covering the events and the consequences, television tried to provide an anchor by adhering to its traditional patterns...

...It is also interesting that among the cable channels CNN, which had been losing ground to Fox News, attracted the most viewers on the day of the atrocity...

...From then on pictures with Al Jazeera's Arabic logo have been a staple of everybody's coverage...

...Vietnam is popularly considered the first television war, but it wasn't...

...But if the camera is feeding tape of a bombing, say, slowing down the feed will result in moving in exact time...

...spy plane clipped by aChinese fighter that then plunged into the sea...

...As for the real news, it would be some time before the public would learn that the smart bombs were not so smart, that Iraq's Republican Guard had escaped intact, and that Saddam Hussein's capacity for mischief was hardly diminished...

...In Washington the heads of NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN had earlier assured National Security Adviser Condaleezza Rice they would not again use bin Laden tapes before verting them carefully and perhaps editing them when it seemed advisable...

...By the mid-'70s film had given way to videotape, and from that point on both cameras and transmission equipment became smaller and smaller...

...In World War II no still picture of a dead American soldier could be published until late in 1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the order to let Life magazine use the picture of a dead Marine sprawled on a Pacific island beach...

...Television coverage has reflected the march of technology...

...What is lost or damaged in a lab will never be seen...

...To cover the troops themselves, reporters were subjected to pooling arrangements, and the videotapes thus produced often arrived late or were lost altogether...

...Her aim in approaching the TV executives was not to censor, she said, but to "sensitize" them...

...But no explanation can encompass the enormity of September 11...

...Less than half the country was reached by television signals back then, however, and even in those areas fewer than half the families owned sets...

...It was the most televised war ever, but it was televised from Riyadh and the Pentagon, through live coverage of briefings about action that had ended, spiced with gun camera footage of bombings and the like...

...Videophone pictures first reached our home screens in April when CNN, reporting from Hainan Island, showed the U.S...

...It was set up in 1996, a year after the young emir of Qatar overthrew his father in a bloodless coup...

...The estimated total regional advertising revenue for all these is $500 million...

...So—riposte!—the U.S...

...We are only 10 years from the Gulf War, covered by more American reporters than any war in history, but they were given, and were allowed to get, less news than in any war in history...

...The Undersecretary had been a top ad agency executive and knows to put the message where the people are...

...In addition to the costs of coverage, they forwent almost $400 million in revenue...

...One of his first acts was the abolition of Qatar's Ministry of Information...

...It competes for the Arab audience with the BBC, CNN, a French channel, and at least four Arabowned channels...

...A report in the New York Times commented, "Imagine how much more terrible the nightmare would have been if broadcasting had been destroyed...

...It also shows action from the Israeli side and has carried interviews with Israeli leaders...

...It cannot be done over...

...Al Jazeera is a private corporation, although it has several members of the ruling family on its board and is partly subsidized by the government...

...Before our next undeclared war, Vietnam, we had advanced to color film...

...It fits into four suitcases and can be assembled or broken down in minutes...

...But pictures from the military's own satellites have a resolution 10 times higher, so the clear purpose of the deal is to keep all others from access—meaning, primarily, the news media...

...One would have thought the smarting intelligence agencies might welcome a way of learning who besides journalists is interested in such pictures, but that is apparently not to be...

...The initial exposure the rest of us had to its own reporting came in early October, when the air attacks on Afghanistan began...

...In March of this year the Palestinian Authority, angered by something objectionable in a documentary, closed its Ramallah bureau...

...It was as popular as those that made sense...

...The National Geographic can still buy pictures of the Mato Grosso or the Greenland icecap, but Afghan images are proscribed...

...Even from the beginning, though, there was some criticism that too much news was being shown and not enough explanation...

...Soon all-news cable was back to showing "guests" who can keep talking until they think of something to say...

...I was in a management position at NBC News then, and one of my chief worries was that if war were formally declared it would bring censorship with it...

...CNN, claiming some exclusive arrangement, ran it on the afternoon of September 15...

...During the fighting in Vietnam, film had to be flown to a city that not only had professional laboratories but satellite transmission to the U.S...