Saturday, May 10, 2003

I like this Iraq War anecdote, from Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books:

A correspondent for the Los Angeles Times told me of a gung-ho colleague who, embedded with a Marine unit that was racing toward Baghdad, excitedly declared over the phone, "We're about to cross the Ganges!" When he was told that he must mean the Tigris, he said, "Yeah, one of those biblical rivers or other."

Massing also points out this, which I didn't know but should have guessed:

Six months before the [Iraq] war began, I was told, executives at CNN headquarters in Atlanta met regularly to plan separate broadcasts for America and the world. Those executives knew that [Paula] Zahn's girl-next-door manner and [Aaron] Brown's spacey monologues would not go down well with the British, French, or Germans, much less the Egyptians or Turks, and so the network, at huge expense, fielded two parallel but separate teams to cover the war. And while there was plenty of overlap, especially in the reports from the field, and in the use of such knowledgeable journalists as Christiane Amanpour, the international edition was refreshingly free of the self-congratulatory talk of its domestic one. In one telling moment, Becky Anderson, listening to one of Walter Rodgers's excited reports about US advances in the field, admonished him: "Let's not give the impression that there's been no resistance." Rodgers conceded that she was right.

CNN International bore more resemblance to the BBC than to its domestic edition—a difference that showed just how market-driven were the tone and content of the broadcasts. For the most part, US news organizations gave Americans the war they thought Americans wanted to see.


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