[Media-watch] European TV Shows Different War

[david Miller]

http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/7494

European TV Shows Different War 
Unlike CNN And The BBC, Euronews Shows Raw Video From The Front
Nina Burleigh is researching a book on the scientists who accompanied
Napoleon into Egypt. Her book about James Smithson will be published in
September by William Morrow.

Here in Paris there are many ways we can take our war.

We can walk outside in the unusually spring-like weather and join a peace
march -- there's usually one somewhere around. We can ignore it and sip
coffee at a sidewalk cafe. Or we can sit in the apartment and zap-zap-zap
between international CNN, BBC and Euronews, the French-based network
broadcast across Europe in English, French, Russian, Italian and Spanish.
All three of these big networks have taken advantage of Pentagon "embedded"
reporters to reap streams of video.

What they do with their pictures is different.

Zap. CNN, our lifeline in peacetime to Wolf Blitzer and John King in
Washington, offers a decidedly American perspective, even if it does employ
British anchors in London and Kuwait to anchor most of its coverage. CNN's
round-the-clock video is accompanied by mind-boggling layers of commentary
-- anchors, reporters, retired generals, spokespeople -- on screen -- and
below them, a never-ending scroll of written news.

"What you're seeing..." the correspondents say on split screen next to
explosions or firefights. "What you can expect to see...." The running
commentary is informative and somehow soothing. The images are disturbing,
but someone is in control.

On CNN, we know we're at home, with our kind, even though they call the
warriors "coalition forces" instead of Americans. Correspondents are more
likely to lapse into alphabet soup military jargon.

When the Iraqis faked surrender and ambushed the Americans the other day, it
was time to revise the "R.O.E." (rules of engagement for the unembedded
reporters). Pentagon briefings come out of "CENTCOM" where spokesmen all
seem to speak in a southern military-school drawl and can't reply to female
reporters without dropping in a respectful "Ma'am."

On CNN, we get primers about all the amazing equipment, factoids about how
much fuel it takes to get a bomb over to Baghdad, or how those night-vision
goggles and global positioning satellite-guided bombs really work -- the
sports stats of war. Presumably this unclassified info isn't giving away any
recipes to our terrorist friends watching from basements in Pakistan, the
guys with the cat-ate-the-canary smiles.

CNN has been ad-free for some days, but even when bombing is being shown, or
soldiers dodging gunfire, the running scroll at the bottom of the picture
never stops giving updates on other news that isn't making the screen. We
know commerce is the last thing to go, because we see business news
scrolling below the scenes of violence. Last night, while the retired
general at "CNN central" (Atlanta?) was going over the ever-changing game
plan, the scroll below him had vital news for market-minded expats
somewhere, such as "Carphone Warehouse to Pay First Dividend" and Walmart's
Q1 report. 

Zap. The BBC, mighty godfather of English-language news outside the United
States, takes a slightly different tack. For one thing, the BBC is not quite
so enamored of military speak. They're doing the talking cure too, not with
retired American generals and Tory Clarke in her white-bordered red
Washington power suit, but with British analysts -- men and women with
properly impressive titles, experts in strategic studies in the Arab world
or in American weapons systems. They're still talking to diplomats too, as
if we still existed in the kind of world in which they mattered.

On March 24, at midnight Baghdad time, the BBC segued from a view of a B-52
taking off from Fairford, England ("We don't know the precise destination
but it's safe to assume it's heading to Iraq," the anchor offered helpfully
as the plane blinked off into the dark), into a long discussion with a
stiff-upper-lipped expert on how the "uncomfortable images" of American POWs
might affect American war support.

Zap. The most mesmerizing coverage, and the most frightening of all, has
been on Euronews. Starting on March 23, when the war turned "ugly" -- for
our coalition forces anyway, it had been ugly for the enemy already -- we
noticed Euronews had stopped talking and started broadcasting long swaths of
unedited war footage, under the words, "No Comment."

Euronews is receiving the same video imagery as the other two networks. The
difference is, viewers can get it straight, in media res. Nothing is
explained. It's unclear why they've chosen this C-SPAN method. Perhaps the
French don't have access to the retired generals. Perhaps they think the
whole enterprise is beneath comment. Probably their anchors won't work
overtime. 

When Euronews goes to "No Comment" war coverage -- at least once an hour for
15 minutes, sometimes longer -- the Iraq war becomes a wordless event. There
is no sound but the wind, the bombs, the pock of gunfire, the unintelligible
crowds shouting in Arabic, the muffled shouting of soldiers into their
earpieces and the occasional American "fuck!"

Without an anchor to provide an overlay of sense, the chaos is much more
potent. Guideless, we search the eyes of the soldiers for clues and the
empty horizon for landmarks. We don't know where they are. But then, we
realize, neither do they. We don't know what they're supposed to do. The
fact is, neither do they. They are waiting for orders or trying to figure
out how to find cover. They are waiting for the order to fire or take cover,
or bring out their dead or search a building, or get back in their tanks and
drive farther out in the middle of nowhere, on a crust of inhospitable brown
earth thinly laid over millions of barrels of oil...

On "No Comment" Euronews, we realize that for the participants, war really
is unspeakable. Order is an illusion conjured up by the generals and then
knitted together for us by the running yak of our anchormen and women. On
"No Comment" Euronews, the fact that we are witnessing insane random
violence is clear. On CNN and BBC, we are somewhat shielded from that awful
knowledge by speech, the skill that so thinly separates man from beast. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.stir.ac.uk/pipermail/media-watch/attachments/20030401/1f71d25e/attachment.htm