Thread: Live War Coverage Both A Blessing, Blight

Posted on Mon, Mar. 31, 2003

LEONARD PITTS: LIVE WAR COVERAGE BOTH A BLESSING, BLIGHT

So apparently, we're losing the war. At least, that's what you'd think to judge from the questions asked in news briefings last week. In the face of setbacks and casualties, more than one reporter suggested that American war planners somehow botched the job.

And though support for the war is holding steady, the public also seems a little dubious. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 71 percent of us thought the war was going "very well" after the first two days. By the fifth day, that number had plunged to 38 percent.

Indeed, a bartender in Ohio told The New York Times that she has become dispirited at the way the war seems to grind on endlessly. "I thought we would get in there -- boom, boom, boom -- and get out. But it's feeling as though things are a little out of our government's control right now."

One businessman used the word "quagmire."

It seems necessary to point out at this juncture that the war has been under way for less than two weeks.

Of course, it feels a lot longer. That is, I suspect, an unavoidable side effect of the wall-to-wall television coverage the fighting has received.

It's instructive to remember that American involvement in World War II dragged on for four bloody, miserable years and that the only information most folks at home received about the fighting came in censored newsreels and newspaper reports. Perhaps they were luckier in some respects.

We are, by contrast, immersed in the war. Sometimes, it seems there may be more reporters on the battlefield than Iraqis.

Technological innovations have made it possible for the media to bring the war closer, to give it an immediacy that was never previously possible. To judge from the early results, this is both a blessing and a blight.

The good news is that we see more than we ever did before.

The bad news is that we see more than we ever did before.

Consider the words of Nancy Chamberlain, who lost her son in a helicopter crash early in the war. She told NBC News, "I truly admire what all of the network news and all the new technology is doing today to bring it into our homes, but for the mothers and the wives who are out there watching, it is murder. It's... it's heartbreak. We can't leave the television. Every tank, every helicopter, 'Is that my son?' And I just need you to be aware that technology is -- it's great, but there are moms, there are dads, there are wives out there that are suffering because of this."

This is not, in other words, a television show. It is war.

And the fact is, many of us have no idea what that means. Our perceptions were shaped by the first Gulf War, which was, in effect, a video game, a whizbang display of American technological prowess that was quick and -- with all due acknowledgment of the 148 Americans who died in the fighting -- seemed relatively painless.

That experience apparently has encouraged some of us to forget what war is. But there's a reason William Tecumseh Sherman said "War is all hell."

Even taking Chamberlain's concerns into account, it's probably a good thing that the media are showing us what Sherman meant. Making us tired of it already, sick at heart already.

Maybe that will encourage us to henceforth treat this ugly business with the soberness it deserves. Because what's amazing is not that this war is messy, awful and terrifying, but that any of us ever thought it could be anything but.