Monday, March 31, 2003
BY MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
Star-Ledger Staff
Acouple of days after the “shock & awe” bombing, I saw David Bloom, war correspondent for NBC and MSNBC, introduce a report live from atop a tank retrieval vehicle racing with a caravan through the Iraqi desert at 40 miles an hour, shouting out his summary while a cameraman taped from a distance, possibly from a vehicle immediately behind the one carrying Bloom.
Steven Spielberg would have been proud to stage a shot like that.
The image stayed with me, and it was only this weekend that I figured out why: something about this war is making TV newspeople think like movie directors. When that happens, it’s worth asking why.
Which brings me to my Grand Media Flip-Out Theory. It goes like this:
If you’re driving on the highway and the brakes make a horrible grinding noise you’ve never heard before, your first instinct isn’t to calmly make a mental list of possible mechanical problems. Unless you’re Mr. Spock, your first impulse is to pull over, turn off the engine and then freak out — hopefully in that order.
America is flipping out right now. It’s flipping out on a scale not seen since the first week after 9/11. Our TV news people, being Americans, are flipping out, too.
You remember the immediate post-9/11 period. Cable channels ran slow-motion music videos of carnage and sorrow, backed by bits of sad movie music. TV’s control rooms could not stop re-running footage of the burning towers, even during interviews asking psychologists how to responsibly discuss violence with children.
On cable talk shows, left-wingers blamed American foreign policy for bringing on the terrorist attacks, right-wingers blamed left-wingers for “blaming the victims,” and intellectually lazy pundits across the political grid invoked 2,800 slain countrymen to short-circuit debate and shame their opponents into agreement.
A similar raw-nerve quality seems to have engulfed the country during the opening days of Gulf War II — a reflexive embrace of core emotions and received political wisdom.
Bloom is an acclaimed, often thoughtful TV journalist, and under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t dream of treating such an important and dangerous environment as a set. That he’s doing so in Iraq suggests he’s so overwhelmed by his circumstances that he has, in some very basic sense, flipped out.
Bloom’s live shot from atop the vehicle “was amazing eye candy,” said Kevin Johnson, editor and host of b-roll.net, an online clearinghouse for video camera operators. “But I’m not sure it gave me any useful information.”
In fairness to Bloom, he’s not the only TV pro who has flipped out. A large number of battlefield correspondents seem to be at risk of becoming Doonesbury characters. In fact, since this war began, entire TV news organizations have flipped out to varying degrees, delivering coverage that advances the medium’s logistical and technical reach while reinforcing persistent stereotypes of TV news as impatient, simplistic and slanted.
Anchors and correspondents at ABC News, long assailed by conservatives for being too liberal (and too pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab), have given fresh meat to ravenous foes by looking for the cloud in every silver lining, throwing around phrases like “quagmire” or “bogging down,” and seeming surprised by civilian casualties. They should call themselves the Glass Half Empty Channel. (News flash, guys: This war is precise compared to past ones, but it’s still a war.)
Fox News Channel is ABC’s flipped-out counterweight — the Glass Half Full Channel, where every potentially negative piece of war news is instantly suspected as enemy propaganda, where suicide bombers are called “homicide bombers,” and where everybody, from anchors to correspondents to guests, goes the extra mile to reflect the White House’s message, even feeding ideologically loaded softball questions to military pundits. (Early yesterday morning, an anchor interviewing ex-Green Beret Maj. Bob Bevelacqua about Iraqi suicide attacks asked, “Is that something we can adjust to quite well, and quickly?”)
“In this type of situation, we are going to revert back to our base instincts,” says Jack Myers, editor of the TV industry newsletter The Myers Report. He says he’s been impressed with the coverage overall. “And in some cases, there are political biases. I think Peter Jennings has always been biased. I remember 15 years ago being critical of him for being too biased toward the Palestinians.
“Fox is biased, too. What do you expect? If they weren’t biased right now, their fans would be all over them.”
CNN wavers between these two extremes. Sometimes it sounds like it’s delivering Pentagon press releases. (Embracing the stereotype of Middle Easterners as technological primitives, Martin Savidge said that for rural Iraqis, “to see military units rolling through might be confusing to them.”)
Other times, the channel seems to be counting down the days until it can openly compare this war to Vietnam. (In the same report, Savidge said coalition troops going house-to-house to convince civilians to give up feyadeen guerrilla fighters would “try the hearts and minds technique.”)
There are too many sentimental montages with soldiers silhouetted against golden orange sunsets, backed by heart-pounding synth music better suited to “The Rock, Part II.”
There are too many generals, too many slick 3-D maps and too much abstract talk of tactics, with digital tanks and planes being moved around as if the whole thing was a fabulous game of Stratego.
In last week’s New York Observer, military historian and novelist Caleb Carr argued that any gory footage captured by the embeds could be taken by Arab propagandists and used against us.
The same could be said of those chilling images of retired military experts on Tom Clancy-looking war room sets, playing God with war gadgets. (The Emmy for Cluelessness in Set Design goes to MSNBC, which has its military experts standing over a smallish floor map of Iraq and literally walking across it while good-naturedly pointing out targets that the coalition might attack. Iraqi propagandists hoping to smear us as imperialists could print this image on T-shirts.)
All in all, TV has delivered a confused (and confusing) morass of coverage — technically and logistically breathtaking, but undermined by what seems like an institution-wide case of tunnel vision.
We can’t think about the future, because that means pondering Armageddon, or at the very least, more war and more terrorism. All we can do, and all our TV representatives can do, is check Mideast weather reports, examine chaotic footage of individual skirmishes and ask ex-generals if we should be surprised that the enemy is fighting dirty.
At this point, I’m thinking we should all stop expecting TV news to take its cues from print, and its reporters to act like Mr. Spock under fire.
Perhaps, instead, we should accept the fact that TV news does some things well (chronicle public feelings, capture historic moments, provide striking pictures and sounds) and other things poorly (pretty much everything else), then savor the things it does well and filter out the things it does poorly.
When I read snide, condescending critiques of TV news coverage that bring out the newspaperman’s boilerplate gripe — “Hey, fellas, where’s the depth and context?” — I have to laugh.
After six years on this beat, I know one thing for sure: expecting TV to be coolheaded, complex and forward-looking during times of global panic is expecting it to act against its nature. It’s like asking a shark to eat salad.
“What’s strange about being in the media is that sometimes, being right there, you have less information,” says Johnson. He recalls shooting TV news footage on an aircraft carrier back when the Clinton administration was bombing Iraq. “The crew on the ship was getting more information from CNN about what was going on in the war than from their own bosses. The soldiers and sailors know their own job — this one loads bombs, this one sends the planes off — but they don’t know what’s really going on.”
TV journalists are the same way. To invoke a specific type of Vietnam grunt, if TV is a tunnel vision medium, news crews are its tunnel rats. It’s a dark, dirty job, and the average reporter is lucky to see his hand in front of his face.
That’s why even the English-speaking world’s most sober, unemotional, big-picture TV reportage on the Iraq war — BBC, Sky News, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and CBS’ “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II” — seems hysterical compared to the typical issue of Newsweek, Time or U.S. News and World Report. Print reflects; TV reacts.
If you don’t believe me, go to the Museum of TV and Radio in Manhattan and look at archival footage of the days following JFK’s assassination, the commencement of Gulf War I or coverage of Clinton’s impeachment. Some of it so raw that you can barely stand to watch it.
These times are those times.
