Television: Complicit with the Warmongers

by Laura Snedeker

Is it information, entertainment, or commentary?

TV news crossed the line into farce in the run-up to the Iraq War as broadcasters and journalists unquestioningly accepted the tripe spouted by White House and Pentagon officials about Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.

The few TV journalists left embedded with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan speak frequently of the camaraderie of the soldiers and the pain they feel when one of their own goes missing or is killed. The footage is realistic, but very rarely does it capture the cost of the war: bullets fly from armored Humvees, but hardly ever do we see a target. If the purpose of TV news is entertainment and suspense, then the sight and sound of targetless bullets makes for compelling drama, but poor information.

The synopsis of the day’s American and Iraqi casualties, cast in the context of the progress of the so-called “surge,” is often shown alongside footage of U.S. military operations. Distracting split screens and an emphasis on visual information leaves the viewer with the impression that war is a videogame narrated by a blonde woman in a suit.

Indeed, politicians get very worked up over videogame violence and the supposed effects on young people. We’ve all heard the argument before: In a videogame, your opponent always has more “lives” and even when it ends, you can always play the game over again. No one really dies, and so children don’t learn to grasp the permanence of death.

They have little to say about news coverage that makes the wars in Southwest and Central Asia distant at the same time that it brings them into American homes. Only other people die, and when they do, they die in foreign lands, so there’s no real harm in raiding Sadr City again. The flippant talk about launching missiles into Iran shows not only the callousness of some news execs – I’m looking at you, Rupert Murdoch – but also what we as a nation find acceptable.

That anchors can talk without irony about starting another war with a country over its alleged “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” stands as a testament to whether we can fathom the idea of civilian death and right and wrong. Too often, politicians speak of sending in a few missiles or bombing facilities as if only a ground invasion constitutes an act of war.

There is a disparity between the presentation of the news and the news itself that leads to a feeling of distance from reality. The ubiquitous flashing lights and graphics that zoom into center screen – like a PowerPoint run amok – look like they belong on a TV game show or purposely over-the-top reality show. There’s nothing wrong with adding a little color, but it’s hard to take news anchors seriously when their voices are drowned out by the sound of a flying picture of President George Bush.

And then take The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. These are not real news shows, neither do they pretend to be real news, and yet cable news stations frequently show clips of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert parodying the “real” news. It is quite fitting in this era of managed reality that the “fake” news should prove to be more real than the real news.

(The editorial graphic is from David Dees who maintains the copyright; the graphic is used with permission.)

Iraq War
Afghan War
politics
television
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