Life > April 3, 2003

By Ryan Eanes

Old Gold and Black Reviewer

With the war completely underway, it’s nearly impossible to watch television without bumping in to continuing news coverage on the conflict with Iraq.

This is literally the first war in which reporters are “embedded” with troops as they make their advance, and the pictures that they send back to us are often live and sometimes disturbing, but are we treating coverage of the war the way that such news should be treated?

There are a number of different sides to the issue. Entertainment Weekly reports that “armed conflict seems to be playing out as just another entertainment option.”

Because of the plethora of channels available on cable (and the hundreds more if you’re a digital cable or satellite subscriber), there are also just as many opinions on the war to be found on television.

Due to the growth of cable television, broadcast networks — referring to NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox, as well as the locally-based broadcast stations — no longer feel that it’s necessary to broadcast news around the clock as they did during the first Gulf War.

Nearly 75 percent of all television viewers in this country have cable (or more), and we’ve reached a point where people turn automatically to MSNBC or Fox News or CNN for ongoing coverage rather than waiting patiently for Tom Brokaw to appear on NBC.

But what about the packaging of the war? It almost seems as if this conflict with Iraq came ready-made for television crews.

With our tastes in television rooted deeply in “reality” shows, what better reality TV can one find than an actual war taking place so far away that it’s hard to feel repercussions on this side of the world?

This is not meant to belittle any family members or loved ones who have been sent to the Gulf to fight, because assuredly their lives are extraordinarily valuable.

However the Idiot Box — also known as a television — seems to have belittled the whole conflict to the level of Fear Factor or Survivor, reducing the U.S. military troops to the level of contestants out for a cool million instead of protecting American interests.

Sadly the spectacle of war has led to an even bigger, sometimes overshadowing, spectacle of another kind — the internal politics of news networks themselves.

In recent days, Peter Arnett was fired from NBC, MSNBC and National Geographic for providing Iraqi state television with an unauthorized interview.

In the footage, he gave what NBC characterized as “false hope” to the Iraqi people by stating that the U.S’s military tactic has failed and that regrouping is in order.

There have been rumors that Geraldo Rivera was also fired from Fox News, although there seem to be indications otherwise, and for a while the two networks (MSNBC and Fox News, that is) seemed to be more interested in reporting on the demise of their competitors’ reporters than on reporting news about progress in Iraq.

“Reality TV” strikes again.

Even with networks sometimes taking the wrong viewpoints and occasionally even reporting on entirely inappropriate subjects given the current state of affairs in the Middle East, this does not mean that the networks have given up on trying to enhance the quality of their reports.

In the past several days, NBC News reported that it, along with Maritime Communications Network, has developed a mobile satellite truck that can move along with advancing troops and provide direct, real-time, live footage of the front lines as the truck moves with the advancing troops.

This unit is one-of-a-kind and exclusive to NBC, and has resulted in better footage of the front lines directly to New York.

Additionally, NBC also indicates that it has partnered with a number of companies to develop a superior quality videophone, and has dispatched five of these new units to its correspondents in the Gulf region.

Regardless of the sensationalized aspects of this ongoing news event and what will become of it in the future, television remains our strongest link to what’s happening in the Gulf.

For better or worse, like it or not, broadcast news seems to be following the trends of “reality TV.”