TV Takes Viewers to Iraq--and Back--Without Bridging Gulf

First a thundering boom, then a thundering “Whoa!”

It was CNN’s ace war reporter, Christiane Amanpour, off camera and sounding blown off her feet Thursday by an epic blast in Baghdad that shook the roof of Iraq’s Ministry of Information building, where she and other journalists were posted in the open.

“There was a very large explosion,” said Amanpour, the globe’s most famous war correspondent and one of the coolest under fire. So if she appeared shaken, you knew the jolt was genuine.

“Whoa!” she said again after a second huge, stereophonic bang. “You can feel it here now.”

But not here.

Is it possible to eat lunch and watch war at the same time?

Sadly, yes. I did it Thursday. You can do it too.

Especially when the box that brings you war also delivers fun. And when much of TV continues, often habitually, to frame seminal, even horrific events as entertainment, adding to the disorientation a viewer may have felt Wednesday when watching and hearing reporters describe incoming cruise missiles against a tranquil background whose twinkly green essence was more in keeping with Christmas than combat.

Even before Wednesday’s missiles had slammed into their Iraqi targets, CBS News had titled this operation “Showdown in the Gulf” and CNN had bannered “Strike Against Iraq” across its coverage. ABC News later advertised “Crisis in Iraq.”

Using graphics to equate harrowing mayhem with a Hollywood thriller is nothing new for TV news. Yet the efforts of these networks were almost quaint compared with what the Fox News Channel cooked up in shamefully claiming Desert Fox--the name given this week’s operation by the U.S. and Britain--as a corporate logo by displaying it during its coverage with “FOX” in vivid orange and twice the size of “Desert.”

In addition, there were those repeated mentions this week of the movie “Wag the Dog,” both by media and by skeptics speaking to the media, giving the impression that Hollywood had originated the concept of government leaders hatching foreign incidents to divert attention from domestic troubles. In fact, history is littered with such cases.

Yet even without these bows to theatrical values, the separation of “here” from “there” is almost too vast to bridge.

It’s true that television creates and nourishes shared experiences that span cultures, oceans and thousands of miles, as when CNN viewers and Amanpour learned simultaneously Wednesday that Iraqis thought that the military strikes against them had begun.

Amanpour was facing the camera during a live broadcast from the Information Ministry in advance of the expected attack when sirens began screaming in the darkness, causing her to flinch. And if you were watching, you too probably flinched when hearing these jolting shrill sounds so hauntingly reminiscent of those that trumpeted the start of the Persian Gulf War nearly eight years ago.

Later Wednesday, CNN showed footage of Nizar Hamdoun, Iraqi ambassador to the U.N., walking in a busy hallway when he noticed at his left a wall-mounted TV monitor with green night-scope footage of his country coming under missile attack. He watched with others for a few seconds, then strode off briskly.

All of this brought to mind the night in 1991 when my friend, Steve Futterman, a radio reporter covering the Gulf War, called to chat about the CNN pictures we were watching at the same time, he from his post in Saudi Arabia, me cozily from my home in Los Angeles. Our coupling as TV viewers from different spots on the planet was boggling.

Yet there is much about such TV experiences that distances you from reality even while joining you, on a separate level, to events on another continent.

Death can be seen and heard on television, but “you can’t smell it,” says a war correspondent in “Dying to Tell the Story,” an extraordinary documentary scheduled to air on CNN in two parts, at 5 p.m. Sunday and the following Sunday, after earlier running on TBS. It explores the minds of media members who cover global hot spots at great risk, while memorializing Dan Eldon, a 22-year-old photojournalist who was one of four in a Reuters party stoned to death by an angry mob in Somalia in 1993.

Not only are the smells of death absent from footage beamed from Iraq but so are the sights and sounds of it. They were missing from Wednesday’s and early Thursday’s pictures of antiaircraft bursts that appeared to float as harmlessly as fireflies in the black skies. And in the distant rumbling that had no immediate human connection, even though the mind could compose its own scenarios.

And when the action intensified Thursday? However ably presented, missile-strike reports from Iraq had a muffled resonance as ABC, CBS, NBC joined CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel in going live for that evening’s wave launched from B-52 bombers. An attack that U.S. authorities had vowed would be “more graphic” than Wednesday’s, as if they too were mindful how some of this might be playing to viewers.

“When death and destruction rain down, we try to show you exactly what it looks like,” CBS anchor Dan Rather said Thursday as death and destruction rained down.

“That smoke in the left-hand corner of your screen,” he reported from New York, “is where a cruise missile hit.” And there it was, a beige column rising from rubble. But even Rather added later, almost apologetically, about the action and devastation CBS was hoping to convey: “On television it can look flat, it can look antiseptic.”

How true, and how weird to watch a war from home and have it sink in no deeper than a sports event. But probably not surprising given how the metaphors for war and sports are interchangeable.

A hard-fought game is routinely called a war. And in the reverse, here was Rather on Thursday about a missile that he said “lit up the entire city like a night football game at the Meadowlands.” Which is where the New York Giants play.

There was also talk on TV of racking “up the videotape” to replay dramatic moments of the likes of NBC’s Bill Baer getting knocked down by the impact of an explosion that also took out a satellite dish.

And just as networks employ former star jocks for sports events, NBC News had Gulf War commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter providing “color” commentary beside Tom Brokaw about this week’s attack, with both at one point expressing admiration for the undermanned underdog’s refusal to give up.

“If you don’t take these people seriously, they will defeat you,” Ritter said.

“They are tough,” Schwarzkopf said, “and they demonstrate that by hanging in there.”

And the second half has yet to be played.