War Coverage
While I’m not Heather Havrilesky, at least I caught a bit of PBS’s and the BBC’s war coverage while switching between the broadcast channels. This isn’t to diss Heather — I remember the old days of Filler — but it’s easy to mock the snazzy graphics of the bigger news organizations. This is a Salon article after all, and sometimes they verge on the trivial.
Aside from Fox’s really silly Humvee Cam — apparently hours of poor quality video of sand being kicked up the tank just ahead of the Humvee in the convoy, but it’s LIVE! — the graphics and the anchors were typically homogenous. CBS cleverly skipped the uniform war coverage and showed basketball until midnight; it’s March Madness after all. They did switch to typical war coverage afterwards. But by then I’d discovered the coverage on PBS.
Charlie Rose scored with Kenneth Pollack, and I only caught the tail end of his interview, and wish I had caught the beginning. The former CIA Iraq specialist was far more insightful than the standard retired military officer trotted out by {NBC|CNN|ABC|FOX}, and discussed possible end games plotted by Saddam Hussein, his possible miscalculations, the way his mind apparently works. I skipped Biden and Hart while flipping through the networks’ coverage, and found the BBC on other, poorer PBS channels. They were interesting, in looking so old school — just a talking head with the occassional outside expert, no weird news tickers that I recall, no crappy live video feeds. Beyond that, the BBC’s coverage was a bit broader, but not significantly different from the American networks.
I got back to PBS after midnight and found that they were showing a Frontline special on the background of the conflict. This was wonderful, with Frontline starting decades ago with Saddam’s origins, and looking at the reasons the war was halted in 1991 — the miscalculations of the Bush Administration, the terrible negotiations conducted by Schwarzkopf where the Iraqis got everything they wanted, the betrayal of the Shia and Kurdish uprisings by the United States, the unexpectedly complex, costly and difficlt policy of containment, the roots of current US national security policy in 1992. With the availability of instant news available on the web and the droning coverage on the main networks, it’s good to see something totally different, something with some depth.
Oh, just a note on the web meta-news services provided by Google News: for those interested in breaking news, keeping the browser pointed to CNN or MSNBC or the NY Times is probably better. The robots of Google just can’t keep up with pace of events: the crawlers will always be at least fifteen minutes behind, and won’t appear on the top of the page until the story propagates enough to affect scoring. Better meta coverage can be found on something like Slate’s Today’s Papers and International Papers, which webifies the old trick of giving a slightly snarky summary of everyone else’s print coverage.