The New versus the Old? No, it's the Old Self-Destructing
Dan Rosenbaum characterizes the response to the reported shutting down of Kevin Sites' weblog by CNN as "gnashing of teeth" and points to specific comments I made:
"The worst in journalism"? There is unprecedented access to troops and battle, combined with 21st century communications and imaging technology that puts us squarely in the world of Max Headroom. If pixelated views of jeeps moving through the desert at night don't turn his crank, it might be worth remembering that he's seeing live pictures at night from a featureless landscape half a world away. Just now, I saw high-quality nighttime pictures of Bagdhad (San Francisco on the Tigris) being blown to hell. Ten years ago, these were light green dots against a slightly darker-green background.
Wow. High-quality images of San Francisco on the Tigris being blown to smithereens where it looked like Space Invaders ten years ago. What a win for the human race.
In fact, this is only partly true. We saw pictures at night using night cameras in 1990 and we saw them again today. But, really, we don't understand anything more about what is actually happening, because the news crews in Baghdad are being censored by the Iraqis and if the commander of a U.S. jeep brigade decides to do shut off the CNN feed, he can. It's all very dirty while claiming to be a clean feed and, instead of making clear that what we're seeing is a battle of filtered views, the journalists (and, remember, I have been a journalist, so I know of what I speak) are JUST GOING ALONG WITH IT, PURRING ALL THE WHILE ABOUT THE TECH AND THE REAL-TIME ACCESS without mentioning the censorship or their agendas.
Agenda: Am I treading into the liberal/conservative bias issue? No. When I am watching a war on TV, I don't want agendas, just facts, like "That was a military building" (when it is) and "That was close to civilians" (based on informed understanding of the geography and not from the fresh-from-the-plane journo who doesn't know Baghdad). Facts good, uninformed speculation bad.
But, really, it comes down to this: The access is no better than in World War II, when Ernie Pyle (who was killed by a Japanese sniper) chronicled the important elements of the war instead, including the boredom and the intense drama, but did it reflectively, humanizing the story which is too big for anyone to sit and absorb through a bunch of soda-straw views offered by CNN. Today's coverage is just faster to land in our retinas. Read about Guadalcanal through Pyle's eyes and you get a real picture of the sweep of the battle; listen to Murrow flying over Berlin, providing in an 18-minute edited piece the nut of the experience of being in the belly of a bomber. Were they censored? Yes. Were they self-censoring? Yes. Did they have an agenda? Yes. But they acknowledged that and did not spend 20 minutes an hour rhapsodizing about technology. That gushing is just plain shitty reporting. Pyle and Murrow gave us facts: The pilot was called "Jock." The atmosphere in the flight briefing room was that of a school and a church.... Listen. It's real. Compare that to the CNN anchor saying "I see you're moving again, what's going on?" urgently as the pixellated desert starts to refresh poorly, only to learn that the tank the reporter is riding is moving up for fuel after sitting in line; then, the rapture about the tech starts again to fill time. In the meantime, there is no coverage of the budget debate raging on Capitol Hill. Ridiculous. Remember that if a fire fight starts CNN's Aaron Brown said "We're not in that business" and suggested the network would cut away to avoid the real horrors of war.
Did the delay in delivering the news, which involved more than cutting, reduce the shocking images of Vietnam to pabalum? No. It was telling stories and you often saw the important parts much more clearly than if they were repeated over and over to fill time until the next Bradley vehicle fueling stop.
Dan seems to intentionally ignore my statement that the technology should not be the center of the reporting when he suggests I think the war should be blogged. I don't think that. I think it should be captured and delivered in a variety of ways. Maybe the most powerful thing CNN could do is make its footage available for people to use to make their own points about the war. What if every time a bomb exploded a blogger could overlay the phrase "50 people died in that explosion" over the video? That would change the way we see this war, just as it would if every explosion said "50 U.S. soldiers' lives were spared by using that bomb, just as Hiroshima was necessary to prevent 150,000+ American casualties invading the Japanese home islands."
Dan goes on:
Is there a lot we're not seeing? Of course. But fer chrissakes -- it's a war! It's going on right now. Stories will be coming out for decades to come. That's the way journalism and history work. Howard Kurtz writes about this in Saturday's WAPost:
NBC's Dana Lewis, who is with the 101st Airborne, said from northern Kuwait that "we know unbelievable amounts of information" but that "you can't use a lot of it." Still, he said, "we'll go back to this two or three months from now and say, 'This was the original battle plan and this is what really happened to these guys.' We'll do a reality check, which I think is valuable."
The worst in journalism? I'd nominate not the war coverage, but rather the White House press corps, which rolled over the other week and let its belly get scratched by an automaton President.
That's bullshit, too. Unless we are engaged in another war, which we probably will be, there is little likelihood the media will ever do a reality check on the plan vs. the actual way the battle played out. And if we're in that war, we're much more likely be be shown night camera shots of Pyongyang than to get a dissection of military strategy in Gulf War II.
Yes, the White House press corp has been awful -- I've covered the president in the traveling press corp and it is a waste of time, unless you live to file meaningless daily footage, since the president lives in a bubble. It's all pretty bad, because the journalists who are supposed to help us understand events have ceded that responsibility to the technology, a kind of panopticon function that lends absolutely no clarity for the audience. Then, the only expert voices we get are former generals, maybe a former secretary of defense who agrees the war is going well (because if they disagree with the war itself, that becomes the subject of the interview and their analysis of how the war is going is ignored).
But a new media that collected these records of events and presented them in ways that can be navigated and explored so that, in addition to hearing and seeing the stories of a war or an election, we can participate and share our own ideas and get the ideas of others in a truly plural view of events, then that would be new. As it is, the broadcast press has become just one more cog in a machine that captures footage. It isn't even journalism, it's so bad.
Dan also brings up the getting paid problem, saying he wrote about it last year -- we all wrote about it last year -- and the question of credentials, the press passes used to limit access to events. Fact is, that's precisely the problem. We need to break that entire cycle of access and the way to gain access to events (I say as a long-time veteran of publishing and broadcasting) is to start a company that gets that credibility and forces new witnesses onto the scene. No one gave CNN a press pass when it first asked and I've gone from not being able to get ON24 cameras into a trade show to being invited to cover President Clinton in 18 months. It can be done.
No blog naivete in these tired eyes, just a large measure of rage at the idiocy in the world, which is what makes many people want to be a reporter in the first place. That, or they want to be a "star" and will do nothing valuable and anything necessary to win an anchor job: Geraldo Rivera told an ABC studio that he'd hold up the phone outside the Gary Gilmore execution so they could get the shots on tape if they put him on live ("I promise you you'll hear the shots!") -- he was a mile away from a closed firing house, no chance of getting the sound, so he has always been just a whore. Too many other "journalists" have taken that path and used "professionalism" to shut out honest witnesses.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at March 22, 2003 12:17 AM | TrackBack