WAR COVERAGE
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James Joyner | Friday, March 28, 2003 |
Charles Krauthammer, as usual, has some pithy analysis of the way this war has been reported, especially on television:
he media could use some lithium. Not since I studied bipolar disease 25 years ago have I seen such dramatic mood swings as in the coverage of the first week of the war.It began with ‘’shock and awe” euphoria, the hailing of a campaign of immaculate destruction. It was going to be Kosovo II, Afghanistan with embeds, another war of nearly bloodless (for us) success.
And then on Sunday, bloody Sunday, the media discovered that war is hell and descended into a mood as dark as any of Churchill’s ”black dogs.” But the blackness came from confusing two phenomena: war and battle. The narrow focus of the camera sees not war, but individual battles, which, broadcast live, gave the home front the immediate, vicarious experience of the confusion and terror of combat. Among the chattering classes, a mini-panic set in.
By Monday, the media were in full quagmire mode. Good grief. If there had been TV cameras not just at Normandy, but after Normandy, giving live coverage of firefights at every French village on the Allies’ march to Berlin, the operation would have been judged a strategic miscalculation, if not a disaster. The fact is that after a single week we find ourselves at the gates of Baghdad, servicing the longest supply lines in American history, with combat losses astonishingly low by any standard.
Indeed. He goes on to offer a few choice words about erstwhile allies and other war critics:
In the current campaign, we have suffered from two major impediments: Turkey’s betrayal and our own high moral standards. Turkey’s refusal to let us send the 4th Infantry Division to attack Baghdad from the north has cost us heavily. It has allowed Saddam to concentrate his defenses to the south and essentially cut in half the size of the heavily mechanized enemy he has to deal with. (The president’s supplemental budget request has $1 billion in aid for Turkey. Congress should strike every penny.)Even more important, we’ve been held back by our own scrupulousness. It is safe to say there has never been a conflict in which one belligerent has taken more care not to harm the civilians of the other. And it has already cost us. We know that the ”irregulars” — the thugs whose profession heretofore had been the most barbaric internal repression in the service of Saddam’s psychopathic son, Uday — use human shields, fight in civilian disguise and attack under a fake flag of surrender. Our restraint in choice of targets and in the treatment of those who appear to be civilians and those who appear to have surrendered has cost us not just time and territory, but lives.
There’s more. Go read it.
Glenn Reynolds also has a collection of links to blogger comments on the subject of TV reportage.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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