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If you were in the position of Saddam Hussein during
the first tow weeks of the war, then you probably would have watched
television. Not that you would have experienced much new there: how
it stands in the Iraq war, you would know probably better, than CNN
and NBC are ready or able to say to the world. You would have seen
each minute your opponent moving closer on the fur. Life pictures,
full travel shots: Saddam we are coming
Where exactly the troops were, what they did, what they reached, you
did not experience from television. The pentagon controled the information:
the correspondent reported, what one told him, or what he experienced
from local television channels and over the press agencies filtered
by the military. The medium machine scorched in its own juice feeded
by the military. The world-wide TV public sits before the eternally
same endless loops of vague pictures, impacts in the distance, green
flashes in the dark. When groups of Iraqis approached to surrender,
in order to arise, the camera team participated fortunately life.
They shooted the arrests in close-ups. We were 'witnesses'.
There was never before a war, in which with more expenditure was reported
so few, but however Life and Nonstop.
The world-wide public was not the primary address of these pictures:
armored infantry vehicles, jeeps and heavy equipment, blowing dust
flags behind themselfs, in an endless desert race. We are
coming, was the message, Saddam we are coming fast - and nothing and
nobody stops us.
The Pentagon did not repeat the errors
of Vietnam, in the first Gulf war 1991 against Saddam. The military
adopted only the submited media and filled it with cleared pictures
and information. Others had to remain outside of the battle.
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This did'nt do any abort to the quality of the
pictures. Oil-smeared birds, found in Canada, experienced their virtual
resettlement few years later. They were dead for years, when the pictures
of their suffering - as proof for one of the Hussein regime caused
oil pollution - flickered world-wide over the screens. CNN reporters
confirmed it.
All that was good, but not perfect. In the following years the media
representatives protested world-wide. The Pentagon praised improvement:
Today perfection flickers over the screens.-
Now there were five sorts of pictures:
1 - Experts, who interpreted in front of the camera, what they really
did not know. 2 - Correspondents in front of the skylines of cities
or areas, where nothing happened. 3 - Fixed images, from a safe distance
showing something somewhere happened- even so if nobody knew exactly,
what. 4 - Pictures of the army: Starting rockets and airplanes. Flashs
in the dark.
The fifth kind of pictures was staged by the regime in Bagdad: wounded
children in beds. The correspondent was in the hospital. Thanks, No
uniforms.
Who did inform better?
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The mediated reality of this electronic
Punch and Judy show was deceitful. Did the jeeps really race
over the Iraqi plain? Perhaps the tanks fired sharply, or the pictures
were taken weeks ago during an exercise in Kuweit? Did the soldiers
with gas masks really duck themselves into the ditches, because Scuds
approached, or for the cameras? Was it luck that the rockets missed
all targets and felt in the sand faraway, or was there nothing at
all?
Everything seems possible, everything conceivablly. Fact, the message
situation was correct: Saddam, we are coming, and nobody stops
us.
The internet offers the final life kick:
Reuters installed a Webcam in Bagdad, "streamt" nonstop.
We saw the panorama of the city, the weather was nice. Smoke was in
the air.
CNN prepared the dramatic pictures to "audio slideshows".
One hears the voice of the correspondent, who comments the dark-green
picture of the night camera, and from time to time we saw the silhouette
of men with helmets.
The military based suppliers for the hungry TV networks are called
Joint Tactical Information Cells and are US joint Forces COMMAND subordinated
to that. "Military activities are always an important message.
We want to help the press to place pictures and interviews to combat
operations as they happen", explained lieutenant-colonel David
Lamp, project manager in Virginia.
The troops were equiped with cameras and satellite-based mobile video
transmission units. Lamp describes the order of its troop clearly
enough: "Storys, which are important for the success
of an operation, are prepared accordingly by us. The teams are active
in the appropriate region, before somebody is informed about it. Secondly
the duty of 'counter propaganda' and 'disinformation' of the opponents."
Again and again we saw the action pictures on the television screen:
works noticeably in low quality, handycam look a like. Similar qualities
we know from the robbery-copies, highly compressed motion picture
films. Small files worsen the image quality, but then they fit better
the thin data pipelines.
Here begins Avi MPEG TV from Army Incorporated.- |
updated
March 2004
