if it's not on tv, it isn't real

“‘There's a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news, at a time when, in my view, it couldn't be more serious.’—Christiane Amanpour”

While We Were Sleeping
Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha? Networks Gave Vietnam War Twice the Minutes Iraq Gets; Baghdad Bureaus Cut Back; Amanpour: ‘Patronizing’

By Rebecca Dana, Lizzy Ratner


On the morning of Aug. 3, 1965, a 33-year-old CBS correspondent named Morley Safer, in fatigues and with a bulky recording contraption on his hip, stood in Cam Ne, Vietnam, before a backdrop of burning thatch-roof huts. He clutched a battered metal microphone. Moments earlier, a unit of baby-faced American soldiers had set the huts on fire. Young women ran wailing, cradling babies; an elderly man hobbled toward Mr. Safer, pleading in Vietnamese.

“This is what the war in Vietnam is all about, the old and the very young,” Mr. Safer said, turning to face the camera.

Forty years later, the United States is in a desert war, transmitted instantly by satellite and broadband. There are no boundaries on our technical capabilities to cover events.

But there are other limits—commercial, political, editorial. And they have kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media, from soon after the initial invasion in the spring of 2003 till last week, when Representative John Murtha hurled it back into the spotlight.

While Vietnam is remembered as the television war, Iraq has been the television-crawl war: a scrolling feed of bad-news bits, pushed to the margins by Brad and Jen, Robert Blake, Jacko and two and a half years of other anesthetizing fare. Americans could go days on end without engaging with the war, on TV or in print.

“There’s a dearth of seriousness in the coverage of news,” said veteran war correspondent Christiane Amanpour, “at a time when, in my view, it couldn’t be more serious.”

• Dead troops are invisible. The Bush administration’s ban on capturing flag-draped coffins is echoed in the press’ overall treatment of American war dead. A May 2005 survey by the Los Angeles Times found that over a six-month span, a set of leading United States newspapers and magazines ran “almost no pictures” of Americans killed in action, and they ran only 44 photos of wounded Westerners...........