Something disturbes me about the way the media is covering this war. Well, I suppose a few things disturb me, but I’ll center on one.
We get to see Baghdad exploding. We get to see troops, tanks, missles, shooting off into the night. But what they’ve presented so far has been some sort of strange, bloodless war. No one wants to see corpses and horrible injuries, but by taking out the casualties, the whole thing seems reduced to an action movie or reality TV show. Thoughts?
The first Gulf War was often referred to as the "Video Game"War, because waht we saw on television showed that the military had actually developed the kind of weapons that had been featured in futuristic video games for the previous 10 years.
This sort of coverage this time, I think, is having a slightly unexpected effect. Shots of buildings in Baghdad going down in a cloud of smoke reminds us that, yeah, we now know firsthand what it’s like to have familiar landmarks suddenly disappear in a cloud of violence, and it is really horrible to be in that situation.
I think if the media continue to show that sort of imagery, viewers will find themsleves demanding true justification for bringing to the Iraqi people the kind of experience we thought was the province only of terrorists