Explaining spin, not reality, is what interests television in this war

BEFORE setting off for Belfast, President George Bush met a group of Iraqi-Americans who wanted to talk to him about who should be installed in Baghdad after Saddam got his come-uppance. One of the points they made was that not speaking good English shouldn’t be a barrier to power in the new Iraq.

The president warmly agreed with them, affably acknowledging that some have said his own spoken English isn't so hot. Light laughs all around. The network's White House correspondent, one James Rosen, then laid out the really significant thing about the meeting which was that George Bush, "without any prompting, had said one word to his visitors: 'Soon.'"

Now, either we were being invited to wonder at the fact that the president could utter a one-syllable word all by his little self, or the president was hinting at something. The complexity of the whole thing pushed the presenter of the programme into complete incoherence.

"There's not a lot of pictures in that picture there," he burbled, indicating a bright green night-vision shot of six lamp posts.

Unprompted, the man hit a great truth: There's not a lot of pictures in any of the pictures the networks are showing. What is on offer is an infinite variety of meaninglessness. The much-repeated highlights in yesterday's footage included trucks passing palm trees in a sandstorm with one of them suddenly going into reverse and rear-ending a fence that had done nothing to provoke it. No explanation. Then there were shots of a soldier whose bazooka got away from him so he had to chase it under a table. No explanation for that, either.

Explaining reality is not what interests TV in this war. Explaining spin is much more fun. The emphasis is on examining the packaging of propaganda, rather than analysis of truth. Consequently, hours of commentary were expended, yesterday, on Saddam Hussein's ears. Ears are your only man in forensic identification, according to one of the many former generals currently holding forth on the airwaves. Ears are nearly as good as fingerprints. Ears are fantastically distinctive and like a bad habit difficult to change. So we got close-ups of Saddam's putative ears with little red arrows pointing out where these ears didn't match the genuine article.

The bottom line of the ear analysis was that the Saddam appearing in recent film clips with his sons and apparatchiks in recent days may be an imposter. However, even if it is Saddam, the ear-general pointed out, the footage could have been taken weeks ago. Which rather begs the question of why Saddam's sons would have been having tea and sangers with an ear-defective imposter in front of a camera before the war even started. We know they're weird, but that goes beyond weird. The key thing to remember, though, according to the ear general, is that the footage is propaganda. Definitely.

Meanwhile, on Al Jazeera, Saddam's guy was going berserk over the Arab network showing footage that was SO propaganda. He knew, did Saddam's guy, that this footage had been shot way in advance. He could identify the locations in the background. Now, any normal person would ask the obvious questions: Why the hell would anybody, before a war, take footage of American trucks passing palm trees? And, assuming they did, why didn't your guys stop them at the time? And assuming you let them at it, what precisely is the propaganda 'win' derived by showing said footage at this point?

Nobody's asking the obvious questions of the warblers on both sides who posit subtle sophisticated spin where there is none. It's like a hi-tech update of parents convincing children that if they hold one of those big curly seashells to their ear, they'll hear the ocean. War leads to a suspension of normal critical faculties.

Take the feminist reaction to rescued POW Jessica Lynch. The sisterhood are gung-ho about Jessica as proof the decision to let women into the forces alongside men was a good one. They argue (and this is where you get to suspend your normal critical faculties) that she put up as good a fight as any man: look at her broken limbs.

In fact, there's no objective evidence that she was fragmented through fortitude. Broken limbs can be the result of bravery, but they're more frequently the outcome of stumbles, collisions and failure to get out of the way of falling objects. As proof of gender equality under fire, shattered limbs are of limited value, but Jessica's are being flailed for feminism.

The more serious example of critical faculties in serious suspension relates to graphics. Animated graphics are right up there with Saddam's ear as visual motifs of this war. And according to the graphic artists themselves you ain't seen nuthin', yet. They're working overtime, right now, building up bigger and better visual flashbangs, because, says one of the Fox artists, "when it gets really nasty on the streets of Baghdad, they (the TV networks) are not going to show it."

TV crews from all over the world, embedded and un-embedded, have spent the last three weeks sending back pictures of smoke and helmets and now they're going to put their hands protectively over their lenses lest viewers get to see a corpse or two? It doesn't seem to strike them that journalism is supposed to tell people the truth, and that airbrushing the corpses out of war-coverage is a crude avoidance of truth-telling. Take the suffering and death out of televised war and you're left with a bad Bruce Willis movie. The only things that are real are the soldiers (on our side) the technology (on our side) and the suspicion that Saddam's ears are not all they're cracked up to be.

Protecting ourselves against the real pictures of real people crushed by a war machine is to collude with an untruth while searching for some kind of political correctness. It is to de-sensitise ourselves and open the mythical possibility of conflict without consequences. It is to construct a Neverland more fictive than anything Michael Jackson owns: a Neverland where degradation is voluntary and provides a passport to fame, through what are crazily called 'reality TV programmes,' and where spectacularly gruesome deaths with entrails sloppily exiting their owners bodies are allowed only if simulated by Steven Spielberg.

In the bad old days before live TV links from the battlefront, those waging war wanted to do what's now being attempted. The attempt to keep real victims out of the frame was undoubtedly behind Harry Truman's famous flat-and-factual announcement of the dropping of the atomic bomb.

"Sixteen hours ago," he stated, "an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base."

Fortunately, back then, journalists like John Hersey sent back devastating word pictures of civilians blinded and blistered in the blast, running sightlessly, trailing shards of peeled-off skin, screaming for succour. Those word pictures made a generation aware of the horror behind Truman's single sentence.

Today, when we have the cameras to send back real pictures, the networks and the Geneva Convention would prefer if nobody saw them, and would prefer to offer brilliantly animated graphics instead.

It must be progress.