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The war as seen on US TV
26/03/2003 08:15 - (SA)
Washington - The US-led invasion of Iraq, as seen on US television, appears to entail a lot of sand and sweat, but very little blood and tears.
Scenes of tanks charging through desert sand storms, and spectacular, night-vision footage of bombardments have become common fare for American television viewers in recent days.
"It is a breathtaking sight to see it," defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the US television coverage.
But in contrast with other parts of the world, media oulets in the United States have largely avoided the gruesome pictures of civilian and military casualties that made front pages in Europe.
Instead, US television networks broadcast footage showing soldiers sweating in the desert heat, but calm and determined as they fire at enemy positions, storm an Iraqi building, or advance across the sands toward Baghdad.
Using videophones and other state-of-the-art equipment, some 500 journalists are traveling with the US troops deployed in Iraq. A 12-page booklet issued by the military outlines what they may and may not do, and allows for live broadcasting of images, as long as they are deemed acceptable by the unit's commander.
US networks did show controversial footage of US prisoners of war, but only after television stations around the globe already had done so.
Rumsfeld said the pictures, initially transmitted by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera station, were obviously part of Iraqi propaganda.
"Needless to say, television networks that carry such pictures, I would say are doing something that's unfortunate," Rumsfeld said on Sunday.
"There has been some coverage of casualties, but it's been minimal," said Rachel Coen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watchdog.
"The gist of what you get from watching the networks, or cable news, is of a very tidy war, with precision weapons. There's a lot of pictures and graphics that give the illusion of something very informative but tell you nothing about, say, the political or humanitarian impact," she said.
Rumsfeld himself said US television coverage failed to provide the full picture.
"It tends to be all accurate, but not in an overall context," he said at a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday.
In some countries, broadcasters have decided to use pictures from Arab networks to supplement coverage they get from US networks.
"We need an alternative to the largely pro-US view of CNN," said Gilberto Hume, news editor of Peru's Frecuencia Latina, which has started using footage from Al-Jazeera and from Iraq's official al-Manar channel.
And several European papers, which ran gruesome pictures of Iraqi casualties, criticised US media for censoring out such disturbing images.
"Americans don't have the right to see horrible images of dead children with their heads exploded on television," Sweden's Expressen said on Sunday.
- AFX
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