catapult magazine

has anyone else been keeping up with news coverage of the war in iraq? it’s really strange to have cameras in baghdad as it’s being bombed. last night, you could hear dogs barking and birds chirping as the bombs fell.

and then there are all of these reporters who are “embedded” in military units who are giving constant live reports. heck, saddam hussein could just watch CNN to see where everyone is coming from and when they’ll be arriving on his doorstep.

weird.

don’t forget the US news slanted towards the conservative side, as evidenced by Fox News’ branding of their coverage: “War on Terror”.

I don’t know if we can talk about biases only in terms of conservative or liberal. That’s all completely relative. There is no such thing as pure information, or pure conservative or liberal. But I think it’s a matter of what story we’re telling. The U.S. news organizations are more susceptible to thinking of yesterday’s images in terms of U.S. liberation, because it resonates with/affirms the U.S.’s own experiences of liberation (the Revolution, our involvement in World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall).

It was interesting that the images yesterday of statues toppling and people hitting images of Saddam with the bottoms of their shoes were interpreted differently around the world. Two different Mid-East networks presented the images, one saying that the U.S. had a major propaganda victory, the other saying it was a sad day for the Middle East because Arabs were shown as dependent on the U.S. Friedman was interviewed on NBC saying that the images threatened other Arab leaders because, if the Iraqi people are shown as more free with totally free elections, other Mid-East peoples will wonder why their governments don’t allow them such freedoms (I’m using the term “freedom” in it’s narrow sense, in terms of free elections and representative government).

Back to what kind of story people are trying to tell about war with their pictures: There was an article in Rolling Stone a few weeks ago featuring grotesque photographs from the First Gulf War of charred bodies and bulldozers burying piles of dead Iraqi soldiers. The photographers were saying that these images are not shown because of post-Vietnam fears that people will lose their morale at home. The photographers suggested their role is to show “the real war” that no one gets to see. And I was thinking, what makes destruction the ONLY reality of war. Last week, there was a picture of a U.S. soldier carrying an Iraqi newborn in his arms instead of a gun. The caption said something like: U.S. Dagger Pointed at the Heart of Saddam’s Regime. It was a great, if unintentional, implication that the U.S.‘s greatest “weapon” against the regime is to take good care of the Iraqi people now that they’re there. And what an adorably cute, soft-headed little weapon! It was the closest thing to an image of God’s grace in the midst of war that I’ve seen yet.

If you want to see some amazing photography from Iraq, check out nyt.com. Click on the multimedia/slideshows.

Try this experiment. Turn off your tv (TV Turnoff Week is the week of April 20 — but you can try it any time) and try just getting the news from the radio for a week. It gives you a different perspective when you can’t see the cool explosions.

Anybody out there just get their news from the web? I’d be interested to hear what that does to one’s media perspective.

Grant – I saw that picture, too, and thought the same thing about God’s grace – basically because you had posted somewhere else about how Christian journalists should look for God’s grace amidst all this. Thanks for mentioning it!

I guess I probably get most of my news from the web.

I have a little folder in my bookmarks called “news” and then when I’m reading about some new development, I can just click through and see how the different takes on the events come through from various countries (and within the US).

layrn,

When you compare the way you get the news now with some point in your life (if there was such) when you got it mostly through tv, how is it different? Do you sense that the persepective you have because of the way you get your news is different from how other people get theirs? In what ways?

I’ve been trying to wean myself off of tv news. i’ve really been noticing how sensationalized it gets when it’s got to entertain and frighten us as well. not that the written word is necessarily any better, but i think it has a chance to get a little more in depth than the average tv news story. i do enjoy longer segments on tv if they explore the issues a little more.

and i have to admit, many days i read headlines and not much more, so maybe i’m worse off on those days.

I posted a link to something about this study the other day, but can’t always find these old threads back when I want to—this is the one I meant to post it on. The article below is an interesting study done on television/media news coverage of the war and goes into more depth than the earlier link.

I wonder if they’ll cover this study on the news.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/kaymcfadden/2001757992_kay06.html

Frightening that the American public is so easily misguided. Also interesting that PBS ranks the highest of well informed listeners/viewers…maybe it is the lack of those deafening automobile commercials…