There’s a war on — don’t we just know it here in Jeddah. Endless repeats of exploding buildings, mangled bodies, some still alive, lovingly photographed in glorious technicolor and broadcast on several dozen satellite TV networks. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
As with cigarette smoke, expansion often means dilution. By the time it travels as far as Jeddah, the scent of war has been lost and life goes on with every appearance of normality. Well, somebody say something!
In amongst the expanding floss of TV coverage, the kernel of hard news is frequently lost. In its place are acres of opinion, interpretation and eyewitness accounts, twice-removed from reality.
Hollywood, it’s not – but give it time. Someone will make a film about an American hero.
Remember the pilot shot down over – I think it was Bosnia? Hit by a SAM while flying too low and had to walk back out of the woods he ejected into. Horror of horrors – he had to survive on emergency rations and rain water for three whole days! Tom Cruise wanted to play him in a film of this heroic effort. Mercifully, it never came to pass. Caused a moment of jocularity in the Lines at Hereford, though.
This is probably the best-covered, most reported war in history. A good deal of it is in “real time”. No detail escapes the camera. Well, only those that are censored out in “the interests of security,” a catchall phrase meaning that you get told what the authorities want you to hear.
After correspondents produce the feast of information, what do we get? In depth studies on the effects of a sandstorm, panoramic pictures of a city exploding in colorful blossoms of flame, all endlessly repeated.
This isn’t 24-hour news coverage; it’s 24 hours of television expanding and diluting 10 minutes of news. What the viewer actually learns from the coverage is as remote and insubstantial as shadow theater. It’s not information overload; it’s simply sensory overload. Frankly, I have had enough.
There was a time when reports from the front were eagerly looked forward to – nuggets of information sent in terse telegram messages and re-written by copy-writers who checked the facts, colored and added character where it enhanced the story and presented it in crackling broadsheets to an eager public.
News coverage was enlivened with long stretches of silence. That added something to it. The public wanted to know to the extent that they queued at newsstands for the daily paper. Not now, though.
Ronald Robson, whose career as a war correspondent is still whispered about with respect in the hallowed halls of Broadcasting House, home of the BBC, is said to have been the originator of a classic set of communications about the troubles in Cyprus many years ago.
He was a great believer in accuracy and brevity, encouraged no doubt by the notorious parsimony with which the BBC at that time expected him to exercise when telegramming in his reports. At threepence per word, he could not send lengthy “realtime” reports, but had to compress and run words together.
There were weeks when nothing very much happened. As a good correspondent, he reported that fact.
“Threeshot sixdead bombwise today” or “Unnews interesting.”
Frustration at the lack of regular hard news and people dying for the camera caused a fluttering in the editorial hencoop. Broadcast time had to be filled, news programs made. The following telegram went out to Robson.
“Why unnews?”
From a clearly bored but honest and financially cautious reporter the reply came: “Unnews, goodnews.”
“Unnews, unjob,” was the response.
“Upstick job rearwise,” was his reply.
He would never have made the cut at Al-Jazeera or CNN.
Arab News Features 5 April 2003