Shock and awe, now that it has arrived, is giving the Western satellite networks what they have been waiting for — a boost to their ratings, and images that occupy their viewers for sustained periods of time. For an hour on Thursday, CNN showed a fuzzy, static night vision image of what looked like an intersection anywhere in the world, and returned periodically to that image as the night progressed. Occasionally, something flashed left of center. Later, an unsteady camera tried to make the most of a slowly progressing evening inside an American airport as a lone reporter attempted to fill dead airtime with redundancies.
The delay in the “shock and awe” campaign caught not only the Iraqis off guard. Worst hit were the Western satellite networks. They went over to 24-hour coverage way ahead of time, it quickly transpired, and then realized after it was too late that there was nothing to fill the long hours with. No amount of animated graphics, no amount of self-proclaimed experts and retired generals, no amount of anchors here and anchors there, no amount of correspondents against interchangeable night skies with a lone minaret in the background — no amount of anything could mask the fact that, if anything was happening, we would not learn about it by watching all of this.
There was ignorance to contend with everywhere. It came in the form of journalists who were simply out of their depth, as when one BBC presenter confused Friday with “Ramadan”. He then went on to confuse rain in northern Iraq with a sandstorm in the south. Of course, the cultivation of comprehensive ignorance is part of the United States’ campaign to limit access to information to the absolute minimum. In the name of security, “embeds” may know what is going on, but they are forbidden from reporting it. And those reporters working independently of the US military are kept far away from events — their passes revoked, their movements limited, at the whim of a commander. The Committee for the Protection of Journalists yesterday announced that the Al-Rashid Hotel is Baghdad — a makeshift base for Western journalists — was being evacuated after news filtered through that the US was likely to bomb it.
While we were solemnly informed, every time a reporter spoke from Baghdad, that the dispatch was monitored by authorities there, no such warning was attached to the more stringently supervised dispatches from embeds — some 60 of whom have reportedly been expelled for “compromising the security” of their unit. Even when journalists can do their job, they are largely not bothering to do it. Nowhere in the endless flood of repetitive verbiage passed off as commentary and analysis were the motives of the US administration questioned, or even discussed. Nor did any of the legion of talking heads on the screens attempt to conceptualize events. One marine has died: That is a breaking news story. That thousands of Iraqi men — many just adolescent boys — who have been pushed onto the front lines against their will are to be slaughtered en masse in the coming days is not worth a second thought.
Iraq has now thrown CNN out of Baghdad for acting as a crude propaganda tool of the Bush administration. It is difficult to have any sympathy for that particular news outlet, so repulsively gung-ho has it been, so preposterously shallow its coverage of anything that actually matters.
