I just hope CNN doesn’t come up with an Iraqi reality show where the ousted member of the squadron is killed each week.
I think this is an appropriate juncture to give y’all a link to an article yojimbo found the other day. It’s written by Robert Fisk, whose opinions many conservative dopers find unpalatable. However, he’s never been known to lie.
After the first gulf war, someone put together a video mix off all the theme music and graphics introducing the war from various news channels. Seeing them all mixed together, going on and on with ceasing, was… well it was both hilarious and… kinda of scary.
Clip No. 2 here appears to have something like that. It’s a clip from a satrical film called The Iraq Campaign 1991 which looks hilarious.
I wish y’all could just step outside yourselves for one moment and see how fucking funny you sound!
[Chicken Little]
The sky is falling!
[/Chicken Little]
It’s freakin’ hilarious!
I was watching the TV Guide channel the other day (don’t get me started on the TV Guide channel…the entire purpose of the channel is to sell breakfast cereals and incontinence products. I seriously think the ad agency’s entire philosophy and company policy is “Let’s see how far we can shove our ads up the viewers’ asses before they stop watching.”) Well, anyway, I was watching that channel, and I actually saw a caption inside one of the boxes that said “Showdown: Iraq.” So, not only is “Showdown: Iraq” the only phrase anybody uses to describe the pre-war halftime show, it’s gotten so marketable that they actually have time to dedicate a whole show to it and get TV Guide to acknowlege it as such. Man. I thought it couldn’t get any worse than that. I guess I was wrong. Iraqi news bundled with ESPN. Just what we need.
My vote for most creative title goes to The Daily Show, with “Slowdown: Iraq.” The funny thing is, I’ve gotten so used to ignoring those flashy new intros that I didn’t even realize that it said “slowdown” instead of “showdown” until the 4th or 5th time I saw the little intro on The Daily Show. Ahh, desensitization.
At least this may just be mercenary, not stupid.
I saw a new promo for Newsnight w/ Aaron Brown. They’ve got a new ‘feature’ called The Whip. From what I could tell it refers to getting reports from their correspondants all over the world… Wow!
The operative phrase is “whip around the world.”
I think there’s a joke that could be made.
You are aware that the Journalists that are going to be reporting when/if the war starts could very well give away information, by accident, that could lead to the deaht of US servicemen and women or our allies?
I have no problem whatsoever with a editing outgoing news.
The “Right to Know” is a myth anyway.
Clearly there has to be military control of some information, for the reason Tristan stated. However, I feel that voluntary censorship would also be extremely handy if the war started going badly. Or indeed, if there were allied criminal activities and/or atrocities. Even Dan Rather complained about the restricted freedoms of the press during the Afghanistan campaign. I’m glad there are independent news organizations out there.
Y’know, if the news bothers you all that much, why watch? 
um, not sure what you mean. We are poking fun at TV and how it is responding to the Iraq war.
‘The sky is falling’ is another thread, I think you want ‘the US customs’ thread, where there is a great deal of squacking going on. I can see your condensinding post fitting in there, rather well.
Connie Chung is on CNN.
Let me echo the chorus. A Clear Channel radio station in Atlanta refers to the war as the “Showdown with Saddam”. Makes me want to dump gasoline on my head and set myself ablaze everytime I hear it.
Another petpeeve of mine: why is it seemingly common practice for the media to call Hussein by his first name all the time? They don’t call Tony Blair by his first name, nor Bush, nor anyone else. For them to treat Hussein differently strikes me as unprofessional and inappropriately informal. It is as if they are implicitly saying its okay to be on a first name basis with this man because he’s The Bad Guy.
Well, Y.W.T.F It might also have to do with the fact that there are a whole lot of Husseins running arabic countries. Narrows it down a bit.
Remember, CNN was pretty much created because of Gulf War I. This gives them a sense of how high the stakes are. Once the war starts, Americans will be tuned to the news continuously. The cable networks’ ratings will skyrocket.
And the network that does the best job of covering the war is going to do very well in the ratings not just during the war, but it will become the ‘network of record’ for political topics afterwards, just as CNN did after the first Gulf war.
Be thankful that we’ve got multiple sources competing to provide the best coverage. It’s called capitalism, and it works.
If all we had was the broadcast networks, their coverage would no doubt be a lot more somber and ‘appropriate’, but it also wouldn’t be nearly as good.