Nothing is what it seems to be in the great media love-in

ONE of the odd facts of life, which for obvious reasons gets left out of management courses, is that when a number of women work closely together, over a period of time their menstrual cycles tend to coincide.

The company involved gets through its corporate PMS in one collective go. Now, it may well be that some might prefer corporate PMS in instalments. After all, one piccolo, pipsqueaking away, is easier to take than a full orchestra, fortissimo.

But the women all go together, when they go.

A version of this syndrome affects media, particularly political media in Ireland, who live in each other's ear, take in each other's washing, chop each other's cabbage, appear on each other's radio programmes and play ring-a-rosie with each other to decide what's the big story of the day. Except they do editorial, rather than hormonal unanimity.

This weekend, for instance, even if Saddam Hussein had come out of Baghdad on a recycled Tomahawk, running his snowy Y-fronts up a flagpole in abject surrender, it wouldn't have competed for the attention of Irish journalists with Emily O'Reilly's appointment.

The public weren't that pushed, but, for media, the new ombudsperson was the proverbial elephant in the drawing room; everybody tried to gloss over it, while simultaneously dying to discuss it, trunk to tail.

Red-raw envy, unconcealed, focused on the money. Nobody lusted after the job. Just the pay cheque. Startling, to realise so many media professionals would abandon profession, pals, scoops and bylines at the drop of a salary hike.

You got the feeling that if the pay for kerb-laying or skunk-breeding was as high as the pay for ombudsing, journalists would be fighting for those jobs. The appointment crystallised something that's been dimly evident for a while.

Journalism used to be a born-again profession. People escaped out of teaching into it. People snuck into it via secretarial work. Once in, they stayed in. In the short term, there were by-lines, little pictures your mother could point to, occasional mentions on It Says in the Papers.

Longer-term you might become an editor or a deputy editor. You were at the centre of the universe, privy to secrets, catching leaks. It was glamorous, edged with danger, fraught with tension. The adrenalin rush was mighty.

And then a funny thing happened. Media started to breed like a rabbit. Local radio was suddenly everywhere and there were dozens of TV kiddie reporters egging for the chance to stick it to a minister or doorstep a bishop.

Fame lost its capital letter and journalists started to look elsewhere. All of which contributes to how boring TV coverage of the war has quickly become.

In the past, American generals took one of two approaches to media. The first was straightforward loathing. During the US Civil War, a New York Tribune war correspondent wrote: "A cat in hell without claws is nothing compared to a reporter in General Sherman's army."

By contrast, a century later, General Eisenhower flattered newsmen, turning them into quasi-members of his staff and instructing his censors never to cut "personal criticism of me or of my actions" from press reports.

His consequent popularity meant that when General Patton slapped the face of a shellshocked soldier in a hospital, calling him a goddamn coward, Eisenhower could persuade journalists not to report the incident in the interests of army morale. But that was because there was a handful of them, and they had at worst a daily deadline.

Now, each TV station needs rolling news. Even if there isn't any.

Each needs to get its reporter into a tank to prove they're on the battlefield. It's like the old graffito: Kilroy was Here. Except, in some cases, it should read Kilroy was Nearly Here, since dozens of reporters are on aircraft carriers where all they see is the tail-end of planes taking off and a few are in cities so far outside Iraq, it's roughly equivalent to putting someone in Ballincollig to report on conflict in Belfast.

Hundreds of TV stations have cameras out there, but the pictures are dully similar: smoke, sand and distant explosions. So the reporters burst their gizzards trying to convince themselves and their viewers that this is exciting, when it clearly isn't.

(It's sure as hell exciting on the receiving end of the missiles, but you have to watch al-Jazeera to see that.)

The Anglo American armies are fighting a twenty-first century war with a twentieth-century approach. This, we keep being told, is a war against terrorism. Remember the most shocking achievement of the other side in that war?

A handful of men with box cutters, in one hour, destroyed two sky-scrapers, killed two thousand people and grounded every civilian aircraft in the United States. At a cost of less than $5,000.

Compare that with getting 250,000 soldiers into Iraq, complete with food, medicine, chemical protection suits, gas masks, embedded journalists, helicopters, tanks and bazookas.

It is a triumph of logistics. A perfect delivery on the old principle that you should, on the battlefield, be first with the most.

But the payoff: a TV station destroyed (but still functioning) and perhaps two hundred dead, most of them civilians, seems oddly tangential to the issue. The issue is how to meet emerging and innovative terrorist threats.

The headlines about the suicide bomber who killed four soldiers are a foretaste. We will soon read headlines about suicide germ bombers who deliberately contract smallpox or some other lethal disease in order to kill hundreds of people in some crowded location.

Germ warfare, with or without suicide of the disease-carrier, is cheap and easy. It worked a treat with the Native Americans. All the European settlers had to do was present them with gifts of blankets laden with the measles virus and watch the natives' immune systems fail to cope with a disease never previously encountered.

It was not always deliberate, either. Typhoid Mary, a post-famine emigrant from Ireland killed hundreds of people in whose homes she worked as a domestic servant. A carrier, but not a sufferer of typhoid, she cut and ran whenever people started to die and, as an unthreatening middle-aged woman, proved difficult to trace.

Today, a smallpox carrier could move with equal impunity, walking through airport metal detectors to spend half a day on a plane in the air, infecting row after row of passengers.

The Anglo American forces are fighting a new war in an old way, although their technology makes it look new. It will provoke innovative variations on the part of terrorists. They are using a huge, hi-tech mallet to crush a relatively small nut and what comes out of that nut will terrify the western world for the next decade.

All the while, too many TV reporters are enthusing about how pleasant the military guys are, and parroting the words they've been given. Never have so many achieved so little.