Watching Warfare Through a Keyhole

Never has modern warfare seemed more remote than when the United States and Britain launched airstrikes on Afghanistan on Sunday; exposure to them on TV was much like seeing distant violence through the wrong end of a telescope.

Flashes in the night that only a retired general can identify as missiles? Green blurs with rare fissures of light? Explosions reduced to occasional fireflies in the inky darkness without sound?

This war front may be ugly on the ground, but it didn’t seem real.

In one of those “Twilight Zone” moments when individuals thousands of miles apart were doing the same thing, MSNBC reported from Northern Afghanistan that anti-Taliban rebel leaders there were “huddled in front of TV trying to figure out what’s going on.”

As were many viewers on this side of the globe, their keyhole all but clogged.

Americans who watched TV with horror Sept. 11 as two hijacked airliners slammed into the twin towers at New York’s World Trade Center got barely a glimpse of the initial counterattack against Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network. And few early details from a U.S. government being careful not to compromise lives and military strategy by saying too much. Secrecy and censorship are essential in war, as is public knowledge, ultimately.

With Western media barred by the Taliban from all but a rebel-held sliver of Afghanistan, Qatar’s Al Jazeera television was the only source of video from the Afghan capital, Kabul, early Sunday. And its pictures of the air assault were nearly worthless. As was Defense Department video made available to TV late in the day.

So when NBC’s Tom Aspell reported seeing “two huge orange explosions” in the distance, and later “five huge explosions coming from the south of us here,” his words had to stand alone. As for those “large explosions literally lighting up the skies” reported by CNN’s Mathew Chance, there were no such skies on the screen. Collateral damage? Civilian casualties? Stay tuned.

What a difference a decade makes.

When Operation Desert Storm began in 1991, a three-man CNN contingent was in Baghdad to witness it, providing live audio from their hotel room to accompany TV pictures of the city’s night skies lit by Iraqi tracer fire. This real-time, on-the-scene reporting of airstrikes was no less than amazing, providing an instant channel of communication with Americans from the territory of an enemy under attack.

Even though the Gulf War would turn out to be combat mostly without media witnesses, thanks to severe Pentagon control, contrast that early reporting by CNN’s Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett and John Holliman with the eerie distance of Sunday when war, at least for the moment, seemed an abstraction.

With the major networks and 24-hour news channels providing live coverage, viewers did get lots of talking heads. One of them was the Saudi-born Bin Laden in a statement on Al Jazeera he apparently had taped prior to the air strikes. It was no wild harangue, but threats with quiet venom that he delivered while exhorting Muslims everywhere to rise up against the American “infidels.” His Arabic was translated into English by U.S. newscasts.

Think of it. Somewhere in Afghanistan, the universe’s most notorious terrorist was adroitly exploiting TV, ironically the very medium over which this nation has long exhibited mastery. Why give this man a media stage in the United States? Simple. Know thine enemy.

Mutual manipulation--a tit for tat exchange between newsmakers and news media--has always been endemic to journalism. And in the case of the reclusive, elusive Bin Laden, studying his demagoguery for the benefit of Muslim extremists can be useful. Just as Arnett reporting from inside Baghdad during the Gulf War was worth the price of giving Sadam Hussein a propaganda channel to the West.

Although CNN was criticized in some quarters for that in 1991, its patriotism isn’t now being questioned. In fact, ABC is the only major network not incorporating the American flag into its war coverage logos. CNN, the Fox News Channel, MSNBC and NBC now have Old Glory bannering the bottom of the screen, and even the NBC peacock, now re-tinted a flag-waving red, white and blue, has been enlisted in the war effort. How strange were Sunday’s juxtapositions, meanwhile, for even as Bin Laden was attaining his close-up on TV, scheduled participants in the previously postponed Emmy telecast on CBS were preparing to relinquish theirs. Already planning a somber telecast in keeping with the tone of last month’s terrorism in the United States, CBS was persuaded by Sunday’s air attack to cancel the telecast and instead include a brief explanation about its decision in “60 Minutes.”

It was delivered appropriately by Walter Cronkite, who long before becoming the five-star general of CBS News in an earlier era covered D-day, dropped with the 101st Airborne into Holland and covered the Battle of the Bulge for United Press in World War II.

CBS was clearly in a tough spot, and made the right decision about the Emmys. Yet its war footing did not extend to Sunday afternoon, when it went forward with its scheduled NFL telecast, opting for conflict between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos. Just as Fox interrupted its own war coverage for a previously planned NFL telecast, and NBC airs its “Gravity Games.”

War is hell, missing games worse.