That's Entertainment!
News Coverage and the War in
By Tatiana Serafin
Pan in to David
Bloom on an M88 Armored Recovery Vehicle “leaning back from the camera
like a sailboat skipper readying for a turn,” as Alessandra Stanley
described him in the New York Times.
You can almost feel the sun burning your eyes and taste the sand in your
mouth. But wait – you are actually on your scruffy living room couch
lost somewhere in suburbia…
Before his
unexpected death, Bloom and other embedded correspondents brought us the
intoxicating sexiness of “Operation Iraqi Freedom--raw and unedited.”
For three weeks, we lived the war, courtesy of the broadcast, Internet and
print media. It was the ultimate in reality TV and it reflects the new
wave in news coverage.
Over the past two
decades, and especially since the birth of CNN (and its stunning coverage
of the 1991 Gulf War), news and entertainment have been converging. The
hybrid--often termed “newtainment”--focuses
on presenting facts quickly and in a "flashy" style. Though
cable channels and Internet streaming video have perfected this modus
operandi, print outlets have happily jumped on the bandwagon. Why?
Ratings, ratings, ratings. To get audience numbers up, you have to give
them a
Gulf War II was an
ideal opportunity to perfect the “newtainment” genre – and to
acknowledge what we want from news has changed. The current, heated
debates over conservative or liberal news bias, whether we saw too much or
too little, and the value of technology and embeds in the field misses
this bigger picture.
News as
entertainment has been a long time in the making.
Its roots can be traced to a cross-pollination of celebrity news
shows and reality TV. ABC’s
long-running popular culture coverage on Entertainment
Tonight and NBC’s celebrity-studded Extra
news magazine laid the groundwork for the cult of the celebrity.
Cable picked up on this fixation and developed niche promotional
channels. Then MTV hit the jackpot with 1992’s The
Real World, where seven strangers were filmed struggling to live in
one house. The
Real World’s popularity and cost-effectiveness enticed broadcasters
to jump into the fray and the reality filmmaking genre became a staple of
primetime line-ups.
How did Gulf War II
up the ante?
First,
by its love affair with celebrity. The White House and Pentagon were the
primary purveyors of this myth-making. From footage of POW Private
Lynch’s rescue to daily Central Command press briefings, the Bush
Administration is credited with a successful spin operation. News networks
followed the party line to varying degrees, from Fox’s overt flag-waving
to MSNBC’s slightly more subtle wall of heroes called “
As a result,
inadvertently or sometimes overtly (I am thinking of Geraldo Rivera
drawing us maps in the sand), embeds got caught up in the story.
With their helmets and gas masks, they made war look exciting.
Broadcasters played up the appeal by creating website links to
correspondents in the field, and by having embeds read news that was fed
from network headquarters. After all, wasn’t it more interesting to have
Ted Koppel give you the latest in his battle fatigues, than Peter Jennings
in his staid studio attire?
Technological
advances in communications equipment made this possible, and Gulf War II
used only the best. Reality filmmaking reached its zenith with more
satellites and advanced Internet connectivity, enabling reporters to file
stories literally on the run: handheld video cameras captured on the
ground firefights and live videophone reports conveyed life in the desert.
The images were not always perfect – videophone images were grainy and
jerky – and they only offered a slice of the playing field, but they
connected the audience to the battleground like never before.
That’s
the “flashy, fast” part of “newtainment”, but
what about the facts? You could argue that flashy and fast are not all
that bad, that in fact, the media effectively utilized embeds and upgrades
in technology to get information to the public creatively and quickly.
But,
again, what about the facts? Understanding audience desire for celebrity
and real-time images does not mean that media outlets did a good job with
the facts. In fact, if the
media can be faulted for one thing, it is how much producers, editors and
reporters got caught up in the bells and whistles of communications
gadgets and forgot about news basics.
As a result, the
quantity of information flowing in far outpaced the quality of context
applied in dissecting data. The primary culprits on this front were the
cable networks who spent more time replaying the same footage of
Saddam’s falling statue and debating moot points than broadcast
networks. The Chicago
Tribune’s Steve Johnson points out:
“It was the [cable] channels where you had to constantly reorient
yourself, slowly realizing that this morning’s report of a downed Apache
helicopter, presented as “news” (i.e., new), was in fact referring to
the same downed Apache you had heard about last night.”
But broadcasters
and print organizations also had their “newtainment” moments when they
ventured into forecasting where the war effort was headed. A sense of
omniscience continued over the course of an intense three weeks of war
coverage. Why? NBC’s Tom Brokaw calls it the "fog of
journalism" – when, caught up in the moment, perspective is lost.
But if journalism is the first draft of history, it is precisely "in
the moment" when perspective is most needed. The "false
proximity" to battle may deliver fabulous ratings but it is not a
substitute for facts and perspective.
Then again, how
often do you get to see a soldier standing on top of a tank teaching Iraqi
children how to rap? And how often do you see a network use this image in
tandem with the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring?” If you haven’t
experienced it yet, turn on the latest in “Hollywood-ized news”.
Tatiana Serafin
is a freelance journalist based in