Nina Burleigh in Paris, 26 March 2003, TomPaine.com
CNN, our lifeline in peacetime to Wolf Blitzer and John King in Washington, offers a decidedly American perspective, even if it does employ British anchors in London and Kuwait to anchor most of its coverage. CNN's round-the-clock video is accompanied by mind-boggling layers of commentary - anchors, reporters, retired generals, spokespeople - on screen - and below them, a never-ending scroll of written news. The running commentary is informative and somehow soothing. The images are disturbing, but someone is in control. On CNN, we know we're at home, with our kind, even though they call the warriors "coalition forces" instead of Americans.
CNN has been ad-free for some days, but even when bombing is being shown, or soldiers dodging gunfire, the running scroll at the bottom of the picture never stops giving updates on other news that isn't making the screen. We know commerce is the last thing to go, because we see business news scrolling below the scenes of violence. Last night, while the retired general at "CNN central" (Atlanta?) was going over the ever-changing game plan, the scroll below him had vital news for market-minded expats somewhere, such as "Carphone Warehouse to Pay First Dividend" and Walmart's Q1 report.
The BBC, mighty godfather of English-language news outside the United States, takes a slightly different tack. For one thing, the BBC is not quite so enamored of military speak. They're doing the talking cure too, not with retired American generals and Tory Clarke in her white-bordered red Washington power suit, but with British analysts - men and women with properly impressive titles, experts in strategic studies in the Arab world or in American weapons systems. They're still talking to diplomats too, as if we still existed in the kind of world in which they mattered. On March 24, at midnight Baghdad time, the BBC segued from a view of a B-52 taking off from Fairford, England ("We don't know the precise destination but it's safe to assume it's heading to Iraq," the anchor offered helpfully as the plane blinked off into the dark), into a long discussion with a stiff-upper-lipped expert on how the "uncomfortable images" of American POWs might affect American war support.
The most mesmerizing coverage, and the most frightening of all, has been on Euronews. Starting on March 23, when the war turned "ugly" - for our coalition forces anyway, it had been ugly for the enemy already - we noticed Euronews had stopped talking and started broadcasting long swaths of unedited war footage, under the words, "No Comment." Euronews is receiving the same video imagery as the other two networks. The difference is, viewers can get it straight, in media res. Nothing is explained. It's unclear why they've chosen this C-SPAN method. Perhaps the French don't have access to the retired generals. Perhaps they think the whole enterprise is beneath comment. Probably their anchors won't work overtime.
When Euronews goes to "No Comment" war coverage - at least once an hour for 15 minutes, sometimes longer - the Iraq war becomes a wordless event. There is no sound but the wind, the bombs, the pock of gunfire, the unintelligible crowds shouting in Arabic, the muffled shouting of soldiers into their earpieces and the occasional American "fuck!" Without an anchor to provide an overlay of sense, the chaos is much more potent. Guideless, we search the eyes of the soldiers for clues and the empty horizon for landmarks. We don't know where they are. But then, we realize, neither do they. We don't know what they're supposed to do. The fact is, neither do they. They are waiting for orders or trying to figure out how to find cover. They are waiting for the order to fire or take cover, or bring out their dead or search a building, or get back in their tanks and drive farther out in the middle of nowhere, on a crust of inhospitable brown earth thinly laid over millions of barrels of oil...
On "No Comment" Euronews, we realize that for the participants, war really is unspeakable. Order is an illusion conjured up by the generals and then knitted together for us by the running yak of our anchormen and women. On "No Comment" Euronews, the fact that we are witnessing insane random violence is clear. On CNN and BBC, we are somewhat shielded from that awful knowledge by speech, the skill that so thinly separates man from beast.
