War in Real Time
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television War in Real Time By Reuven Frank Almost 2500 years ago, the young soldier Pheidippides ran the 40 kilometers from Marathon to tell the citizens of Athens their army had...
...Beside him, slightly forward, a Marine was firing his rifle up a ridge...
...Other real-time sequences viewed in American homes included a reporter coaxing a mother and four children into his foxhole during a f iref ight...
...They showed flashes on the horizon...
...U. S. troops feeling their way forward in sandstorms...
...taxpayers—were being exposed as never before to the actual feel of warfare, and that was good...
...You drip...
...These didn't show human victims...
...and Iraqi soldiers fleeing in their underwear...
...But war is about dead people...
...They as much as the generals have made it top secret that war means killing people...
...Government officials now saw a need to co-opt the press, even by accommodating it...
...It almost seems of a piece with that other belief that martyred fighters will be greeted into an afterlife by 72 virgins...
...Yes, the Chicago Tribune wrote about complaints it received for printing pictures of wounded...
...This feeling was reinforced when attempts to keep reporters off the battlefields in Afghanistan—because they would be a distraction and add to the troops' risks—were foiled by some hardy journalists who rented their own vehicles and drivers and accompanied the Northern Alliance forces at will, reporting back by videophone...
...In Robert Browning's ballad, "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," the news was carried by three horsemen...
...For one thing, there was next to no analysis or even mention of the casualties caused by the war's most important weapon, the coalition forces' supersmart, laser-directed, satellite-guided missiles and bombs, big enough to penetrate bank vaults and clever enough to thread needles...
...victory) and fell dead...
...The Iraqis gave the Arab services a videotape of the incident, including footage of those killed...
...No rule had been broken...
...Robert Lichter of the conservative Center for Media and Public Affairs said, "War is too messy to package into sound bites and two-minute stories...
...But surveys showed about three-quarters of the public relied on TV for their war news...
...it confused the audience...
...When questioned, its spokespersons and executives cited good taste and the like...
...Specifically, it coincided with the development of lightweight, inexpensive satellite dishes and the growing use of the videophone and related machines that are smaller than a suitcase, can get power from an automobile's cigarette lighter socket, and are able to withstand the rough handling of clumsy operators...
...Talk of "collateral damage" (dead and wounded civilians), so prevalent during the 1991 Gulf War, was almost totally absent—from field reports, from the retired brass in New York TV studios, from the briefings in the Pentagon or in the state-of-the-art media center in Qatar...
...Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, came word that the Pentagon's entire governing junta for Iraq had been fired...
...Nor can newspapers...
...On Television War in Real Time By Reuven Frank Almost 2500 years ago, the young soldier Pheidippides ran the 40 kilometers from Marathon to tell the citizens of Athens their army had defeated the forces of the Persian Emperor, Darius II, and the city was out of danger...
...That was December 1942...
...In 1814 the London Rothschilds, heavily invested in the fortunes of the British Crown, organized a system of carrier pigeons to bring them first word of the battle at Waterloo, and learned of Napoleon's defeat before anyone else...
...CNN's Walter Rodgers hitting the ground just as an enemy artillery shell is about to explode...
...Both were hugging Mother Earth the way the sergeant instructed Lew Ayres to do in All Quiet on the Western Front...
...Some reporters and cameramen made sorties ofthat kind on their own, but they received little attention here...
...Showing or discussing casualties is a perpetual problem for journalists...
...Due to the intervention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, the censors approved the photo...
...helmet and a flak jacket over his civilian clothes, Sanders was splayed face down in the desert sand outside al-Nasiriya...
...So while technical advances have speeded news transmission to its limit, the result has not universally pleased the nation's families...
...The euphemistic phrase of the moment is "getting in harm's way") As for the military, which reaped a large dollop of good feeling from the embedding experiment, they will still judge the press only by how it serves their ends...
...What they produced, especially the TV crews, changed forever how war is to be reported...
...Any retreat from real-time battle reporting in any future war by any government will be universally seen as a deliberate obstruction of information...
...Live combat television has been unleashed worldwide...
...Life published it as a full page with the simple caption, "Three dead Americans lie on the beach at Buna...
...others died in the firefight...
...As we watched, Sanders told his cameraman to pan up and show the Iraqi soldiers at the top of the ridge, but not to stand up, because too many shots were being fired...
...Casualties were high...
...The field generals, by contrast, received virtually no public recognition of their victory...
...This was only partly true...
...FROM THE RUMORS and blind attributions that leaked out, it appears the Pentagon was often of two minds about its embedding experiment...
...Technology is great," she told him, "but there are moms, there are dads, there are wives out there who are suffering because of this...
...Like salted nuts," said Alex Jones of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, "delicious but not much nourishment...
...A general in Riyadh, or worse, Washington, was shown live giving a press conference about what happened the previous day...
...Some of its members became prisoners...
...All true...
...Only the theater commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, emerged a certified hero...
...There were no Iraqi propagandists shepherding American and other foreign journalists to see wounded people in hospitals, or destroyed powdered milk factories...
...Months later there were attempts to make documentaries using the battle footage—some of it quite good— but by that time viewers were seduced by other topics and not interested in oldstuff...
...it lacked context...
...For the others, subverting the press had the unintended consequence of denying them a good press...
...The Fox News channel was the most egregious, CNN the least, with the broadcast networks trying to appear objective to avoid alienating any significant segment of viewers...
...Television did not show the whole picture...
...For although that conflict also featured instantaneous television coverage, it was of a different sort...
...Some were technological, some political, some historical...
...two others carefully vetted them before displaying sanitized stills from the tape...
...What we saw of the bombing came from fixed, unmanned cameras on the roofs of one or two hotels and the Information Ministry in Baghdad...
...When it comes to presenting emotionally loaded material, the complicating factor, the one critics usually ignore or fail to understand, is that television is the most intimate medium of all...
...There has not been one since World War II, when the public was not allowed to see a dead U.S...
...What they criticize, almost without exception, is the superficiality of the TV reports...
...Reporters and cameramen seeking to cover the fighting were ordered into pools, their dispatches and videotapes delayed, so that scenes of actual combat were not available to the public until after the war ended...
...Although one hardly doubts that the Pentagon preferred this, it seems to have been purely the result of self-censorship by American television...
...When George W Bush's twin daughters, as co-Presidents, declare the third war on Iraq, the public will demand open television coverage, or at least the appearance of it...
...General Douglas MacArthur had sent a division of untried infantry to take the beach and stop a Japanese advance on his base at Port Moresby...
...You criticize...
...In the Arab world, Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV concentrated on such stories, and they were widely circulated in Europe and elsewhere...
...Many consider it antiwar, unpatriotic...
...So for the war against Saddam reporters were embedded—a clumsy term that drew criticism and ridicule, but apparently no one suggested a better one...
...This unspoken, perhaps subliminal, belief animates the letters newspapers receive when they show photos of the wounded...
...The casualty rate among journalists covering the fighting in Iraq was higher than among US...
...The young people who fight the wars are heroic and by implication immortal...
...Washington's misgivings notwithstanding, it is unimaginable that the public will ever accept a return to the older modes of coverage...
...There was also David Bloom bumping around in his "Bloomobile," an Army vehicle he had fitted out with an adapted transmitting antenna...
...He uttered one word, Niki...
...The sole instance of American dead being shown brought controversy: An ordnance maintenance unit took a wrong turn and was captured...
...In war all sides use the weapon of myth distortion...
...and (2) the postwar disappearance of all police authority that made possible the shocking spectacle of widespread looting and vandalism...
...And being killed...
...That famous picture itself was nine months old before it was published...
...Not after live battlefield scenes like this one involving NBC reporter Kerry Sanders, normally not a star name but a competent journeyman in the Miami bureau: Wearing a G.I...
...Rumsfeld insisted we were seeing mere "slices" of the conflict...
...With the division was Life magazine photographer George Strock, not embedded but an accredited correspondent by the rules of the day...
...To begin with, the battle against Saddam Hussein came during a spurt in television's technical competence...
...He exploded one day to a reporter: "You stand for nothing...
...Numerous media commentators described the move as ending the hostile relationship between the press and the military that dated back to the Vietnam years...
...And yet somehow steps were taken to address (1) the stretched supply lines that for a while restricted some Marine units to one prepared meal per man per day...
...Then there was the Pentagon's decision, announced during the war's buildup, to have reporters "embedded" in combat units...
...soldier until 21 months after Pearl Harbor...
...He died from an embolism his friends think was aggravated by the cramped quarters he occupied in his special vehicle...
...On NBC Tom Brokaw interviewed the mother of a helicopter pilot who died in a crash she had seen on television...
...Thus, even though the Gulf War generals had not shaken off the antimedia sentiment they imbibed as majors and colonels in Vietnam, it seemed time to reassess those attitudes...
...Leaving them out makes TV coverage resemble a video game...
...Many factors combined to make the way American journalism covered the conflict possible...
...eerily green night-vision shots of coalition raids on Saddam's homes and palaces...
...And the Army Times (despite its name a private publication) was threatened with expulsion from Iraq for running a photo of a badly hurt, recognizable American soldier...
...Of perhaps 600 who were living intimately with the troops, fewer than 80 accompanied units that saw combat...
...There can be no going back...
...You support nothing...
...Pundits, analysts and retired generals fell back on the Indian folk tale about the blind beggars and the elephant...
...That is not to imply the embedding system had no weak spots...
...Was there ever another war where the looters were the vanquished...
...Both Secretary Rumsfeld and British Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced them as callous and doing a disservice to the families of the fallen...
...CNN's images and much of its other material were carried simultaneously by networks in China, for example...
...It cannot get faster than that...
...On the one hand, American civilians— i.e...
...Regardless of whether this is seen as good or bad, or some combination, the genie is out of the bottle...
...But television is different, because it moves and therefore seems alive, and comes unmediated into the home...
...It was television, too, that laid bare how the military may have had a wonderful plan for speedy victory, but virtually no plan for the weeks or days or even moments afterward...
...Rodgers also did the first real-time battle scenes when he captured on camera "the Seventh Cavalry racing across the desert in southern Iraq...
...The Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, brushed off and ridiculed every negative report...
...In September 1943, the Administration feared Americans were getting complacent and sought to prepare them for the great, costly battles sure to come...
...Two U.S...
...The flag-waving did not interfere with following the events, at least not for those who have learned how to watch: Try to convince yourself that the journalists involved, on and offcamera, are interested only in the news (which is not entirely true), and that it is the people they work for who are interested in nothing more than their share price (which is not false...
...On the other hand, everything that went wrong, or seemed to go wrong, was out there for the public to see before the military could do anything about it...
...Technology had leapfrogged the chain of command...
...Vietnam's legacy of hostility had already meant no reporters in Grenada in 1983, journalists waiting at distant airfields in planes that never flew during the 1989 invasion of Panama, and what in effect was a news blackout during the 1991 Gulf War launched by the President's father...
...There have been the usual complaints about jingoism on the part of American networks and cable services, most of them justified...
...networks refused to use the pictures...
...Accompanying the picture, though, was a full-page editorial justifying its use...
...I galloped, he galloped, we galloped all three") The poem does not say what the news was, but in the era of warring city-states so cherished by Browning it was likely about military triumph...
...It contradicts yellow ribbons on trees...
...troops...
...Yet the American networks and cable services, which had full access to that coverage as well, by and large ignored it...
...The military cannot stop it...
...Critics of embedding, however, remain thick on the ground...
...But again, get used to it...
...He captured the scene: three soldiers sprawled in what seemed a graceful, peaceful arc on the sand of New Guinea's Buna Beach...
...The Royal Air Force air marshal who commanded the British forces in the south of Iraq was more direct...
...Some of the descriptive and analytical writing by print journalists on the front lines was little short of brilliant...
...The history of news has always been a story of increasing speed of transmission—until the Several Weeks' War that subdued Iraq this spring, when news was instantaneous...
...American officials have remained publicly tactful in expressing their disapproval...
...The general who delivered most of the Washington briefings became such a TV celebrity that he soon retired to hit the lecture circuit expatiating on patriotism and American values at $25,000 an appearance...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
