From the very beginning the war reporting has failed the
viewer. It is easy to blame censorship for impeding reporters'
progress, but censorship does not explain the lack of
seriousness - I do not mean in describing technical aspects of
the war - and the lack of morality that has characterized most
of what we have seen.
The reporting of the war is often very abstract, as if
describing a spectacle in which people do not take part. The
role of technology increases from war to war, and in this war
we are treated to the technology of advanced camera techniques
applied to advanced weapon systems. It is easy to spend hours
watching smart bombs spotting the target, locking in and
finally striking and blowing up the building, bridge or tank.
But we learn little about the people under fire, about the
soldiers and civilians bombed, wounded, killed, miraculously
saved.
Never do the correspondents relate to reasons for the
war. This makes the war an abstraction instead of a purposeful
effort on the part of some countries to control what they see
as unprovoked aggression on the part of another country. This
plucking their reports from the conceptual anchor in which the
war takes place adds to the sense of spectacle.
Is it because they do not know the reasons for the war
that the reporters do not relate to them? ...
- and, for comic relief -
[A war] anecdote: following a kidney transplant operation, the
patient awoke in the recovery room to find the nurses and doctors
all wearing gas masks. He apparently was convinced by this strange
sight that he had died, not aware that an air raid siren had been
sounded and he began to cry bitterly. The staff attempted to
reassure him by telling him that his mother was waiting for him.
Since his mother had died 4 years earlier, this was the final proof
he needed to know with certainty that he was dead. The staff had
mistaken the patient's father's second wife for his mother. The
ending was, I am reassured, a happy one - once the confusion was
cleared up.
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