Oh, What A Lovely War
As I write this on the other side of the world, a war is happening. NATO has launched military strikes against Yugoslavia in an effort to persuade President Slobodan Milosevic to sign a peace accord with the Ethnic Albanians of Kosovo. It's hard, from this distance (about 10 thousand miles at a conservative estimate) to really judge who's right, and who's wrong. As one commentator said on a New Zealand radio programme this week, it's hard to believe that 600 years of bloodshed, fighting and disruption in the Balkans is going to be ended by a few days of air attacks.
Journalists out
Of course, it's going to be even HARDER for us to work out what's going on now that the Yugoslavian authorities have kicked all the journalists - and their camera crews - out of their country. CNN and BBC World (the two 24-hour news channels available here in New Zealand) were thrown back to using talking heads to analyse the goings-on, interspersed with phoned-in reports from journalists who were now, to all intents and purposes, not much closer to the action than if they'd stayed at home at Television Centre in West London. CNN showed us the same eerie green shots of night-sight visuals of incoming missiles over Belgrade again and again... while the BBC launched the same cruise missile every hour on the hour.
Bereft of live satellite feeds of the war, as it happened, suddenly TV was put on a level footing with radio and newspapers - and frankly, the analysis from both those media were streets ahead.
Gulf War memories,
There's nothing journalists like more than a good war (fellow hacks, please don't throw things at me - I'm only stating an obvious truth, aren't I?). And TV journalists probably love it more than the rest - all those great images paraded across our nightly news bulletins are terribly seductive.
TV coverage of the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein was a remarkable first in that it was conducted in the full glare of the TV camera's basilisk stare. Unlike Vietnam and the Falklands War, here were battles that benefited (if that's the word) from TV satellite uplinks at both ends of the Cruise missiles' paths. You could see the missile launched... and a short while later, see the bang in Baghdad.
Journalists like New Zealander Peter Arnett (for CNN) and Britain's Kate Adie (BBC) became famous for their courage under fire. They of course also fulfilled a valuable service for the rest of us, in that they told it to us as they saw it. There was less chance
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