As bombs started falling in Baghdad last Wednesday night, millions of Americans turned on their televisions and have kept them on as the first week of the war has unfolded. Vietnam may have been the first "living room" war -- television sets made it possible for Americans to follow war news in their living rooms -- but the Iraq conflict is proving to be the first "live" war.
We are watching an invasion unfold on live television, mostly due to huge advances in technology. Crystal-clear satellite feeds make it seem as though Wolf Blitzer, reporting from Kuwait City, could be filming from the street neighboring ours. Videophones perched atop tanks as they cross the Iraqi deserts take viewers along for the invasion. Cameras placed around Baghdad allow us to see the city's deserted streets, hear the air raid sirens and watch the luminous green flashes of nighttime air strikes, courtesy of night-scope photography.
The media now have the capability to show Americans what war is really like, to an extent that has never before been possible. However, just because the media have the technology necessary to show viewing audiences almost every aspect of this war, it doesn't mean that they should. In Iraq, they definitely shouldn't.
When ground troops and the reporters and cameramen embedded among them do make it to Baghdad, American news producers will have to make a call. The urban warfare in Baghdad may yield significant casualties. Will the videophones stay on, with journalists making reports amidsthe fighting? An unfiltered view from the front lines would likely allow television to convey, more than it ever has before, the reality of the chaos and brutality of war. But such unfiltered footage would be unacceptable because of the implications it would have for soldiers' families.
For the television media, there is a conflict here between reflecting reality and practicing decency. For example, The New York Times reported that Fox News has an "exclusive" of the helicopter crash that killed four American and eight British soldiers. Lt. Col. Oliver North, a "military contributor" for Fox, was in a helicopter flying nearby and caught the whole thing on videotape ("Show of Awe," March 23). It would be incredibly disrespectful for Fox to air the accident and subject the soldiers' relatives to the ordeal of seeing the crash that killed their loved ones shown on television over and over again. The same is true of leaving the cameras on when the troops cross into Baghdad. It might make the horror of war evident to everyone watching, but for the troops' families, the possibility that they will see their son or daughter killed would be horror times a hundred.
Displaying the manner of someone's death for the entire nation to see is a little too much like the public executions of times past to make anyone's skin crawl, because empathy for the person killed becomes overshadowed by fascination in the mechanism of death.
That problem speaks to another danger the new technology poses: The danger that presenting war on live television will dehumanize it and make it seem less real -- more like the latest Ben Affleck summer blockbuster than something that is really happening. Showing war on live television, giving viewers a front-row seat for the invasion, will make the war seem less like war and more like entertainment -- a videogame come to life or the reality TV hit of the season. While watching exciting images of tanks racing across the desert or the unreal alien-green glow of video of nighttime air strikes, it will be easy to forget that there are real frightened troops inside those tanks and real people being wounded and killed because of those ethereal flashes of light.
Technology is a wonderful thing, but there are instances in which its capabilities should not be used to their limit. Televising war is one such instance. When the ground troops reach Baghdad, the videophones and the live satellite feeds should be, for the most part, turned off. Ironically, showing less and not more of the war will likely be the best way to prevent dehumanizing the war and diminishing the reality of its horrors. It is crucial that the media live up to its responsibility here, as a nation desensitized to war is one more likely to resort to it in the future.
(Laura Sahramaa's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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