On the front page of last Sunday’s Salt Lake Tribune, a photograph showed a British commando with his weapon trained on an Iraqi woman wearing a long black veil and robe as she walked along a street in Umm Qasr.
On Tuesday’s front page, a photo showed several U.S. soldiers approaching an injured woman caught in the crossfire with Iraqi forces when the Americans seized a bridge over the Euphrates River. The woman was rescued and taken away in an ambulance.
On Wednesday’s front page was a photograph of one American soldier covering another member of the 82nd Airborne as the second soldier searched a Bedouin who was on the ground face down.
Apparently these pictures offended some Tribune readers who called and told me words to this effect: “These pictures make our troops look terrible.”
Others protested it looks like our troops are mistreating these civilians.
Au contraire.
I am not sure what planet these callers have been on for the last two weeks, but here on Earth came the news that Coalition soldiers died in Iraq after suicide bombers dressed in civilian clothes blew up themselves.
This, I believe, would make soldiers and commanders much more careful about how they treated people who appeared to be civilians.
Certainly, the wall-to-wall coverage of this war by cable TV news channels and the presence of battles on the front page of newspapers across the country has made news consumers aware of much more war detail on a daily basis than they have ever had before. But the immediacy of the coverage can become a kind of propaganda also.
Constant debate among talking heads on TV and live feeds from cameras in Baghdad and video satellite phone transmissions from embedded journalists in the field have brought live coverage a new definition.
Whereas film and video from previous wars often had time to cool in the can while war reporters got close enough to a town to allow transmission or transportation of the images, in Iraq viewers almost felt as though they bounced across the desert in U.S. Army tanks and fighting vehicles.s
One night during the first days of the war, Fox Cable News (think Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North as correspondents) showed on the left side of the screen a talking head ex-general saying “what animals these Iraqis are …” and on the right side of the screen B-roll video shot through night-vision lenses (green) of paratroopers going out the back of an American aircraft over northern Iraq.
I don’t know how many of you remember the World War II movies that proved (through the performances of stars like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant and John Wayne) how brave and vigorous and crafty the Allies were, but this surreal bit of television (among dozens of such moments) had the same flavor of propaganda.
Lest you believe that other cable TV news channels are doing better, let me point out that CNN and MSNBC have shown their surreal sides also. Aaron Brown of CNN remarked one night, “I don’t know how I will get along” when his retired general was not at his side. MSNBC has a “war room” where its retired officers can walk across a map of Iraq painted on the floor to explain troop movements.
C’mon, folks, this is a war, not a Hollywood production. It’s going to be messy. It will not please those who want the media to show only “hero” images of Americans. It’s hell.
That’s why the country will be so elated when it is over. That’s why that sailor kissed the nurse in New York’s Time Square when the crowd found out World War II was over.
