By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
New York Times
4 April 2003
Either victory was at hand, or television had rewound news coverage back to the first, optimistic days of the war.
A confident George Bush, hand in hand with the first lady, paid tribute to cheering marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., while on the road to Baghdad, soldiers from the advancing Third Infantry Division tossed Frisbees at eager Iraqi children.
Good news got even better: Pfc. Jessica Lynch shifted overnight from victim to teenage Rambo: all the cable news shows ran with a report from The Washington Post that the 19-year-old P.O.W. had been shot and stabbed yet still kept firing at enemy soldiers. In the hands of television, the story had instantly gelled into a heroic made-for-TV war movie, "Saving Meg Ryan." Later yesterday, her father said she had not been shot or stabbed.
Despite all the sobering lessons learned over the past week, there were few images of civilian casualties or dead American soldiers during yesterday's high. Viewers instead saw a quick-thinking officer head off a confrontation between Iraqis in Najaf who feared American troops were heading for their mosque by ordering his men to kneel. Excitement kept building: ABC News interrupted "All My Children," to break the news that coalition forces had taken Saddam International Airport at the edge of Baghdad; the report later proved to be only partly true, with the coalition taking over the runways, but Iraqis still holding the terminals.
The unexpectedly fierce resistance of Iraqi soldiers, which had framed coverage of the war until yesterday suddenly turned into unanticipated passivity: John McWethy, the ABC Pentagon reporter, told Peter Jennings that the defense of Baghdad's outskirts "was much weaker than many anticipated."
It was not a day to dredge up the risk of suicide bombings or American soldiers accidentally opening fire on a bus filled with women and children. Nor was television in any mood to dwell on the possibility of dangerous urban warfare still ahead. Government officials and reporters noted that there could be more fighting soon, but images on television suggested the war was already won. Mike Cerre of ABC, reported on 2,500 Iraqi men surrendering to the First Marine Division, and on CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the medical correspondent, joined military doctors in an unsuccessful effort to save the life of a wounded Iraqi child. Ted Koppel, the diffident anchor of ABC's "Nightline," resisted the temptation to gush. He reported seeing "modestly enthusiastic onlookers" as he traveled toward Baghdad with the Third Infantry Division.
But it was not just television raising the national blood sugar. Perhaps to counter criticism and doleful field reports, the Bush administration also pumped up the volume.
President Bush has given several speeches around the country since ordering troops into battle. Yesterday, in stark contrast with his solemn, rather stiff presentation in Philadelphia on Monday, Mr. Bush felt loose enough to try out a Jay Leno-like punch line. "There's no finer sight, no finer sight, than to see 12,000 United States marines and corpsmen," the president said, "unless you happen to be a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard."
As television screens filled once again with stirring battle images, Washington did little to dampen soaring expectations. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has complained rather bitterly about armchair generals second-guessing the war plan and "media mood swings" that inflate small glimpses of combat into full-scale war — Agincourt one day, Guernica the next. Yesterday, Mr. Rumsfeld warned of "difficult days ahead," but even he could not suppress a little swagger. Coalition troops, he said, were "closer to the center of the Iraqi capital than most American commuters are to their downtown offices."
Commentators were careful, however, to warn viewers that fiercer fighting and more casualties could still lie ahead. Even Fox News, which has been the most steadfast cheerleader for the invasion, was wary of overconfidence. But those small doses of realism could not compete with the heady images of victory that poured out on every news channel.
And like in the first days of the war, television reporters traveling with the troops got their groove back. Bob Arnot of MSNBC narrated a noisy firefight, telling viewers, "bullets are literally whizzing over our heads." As television competed to deliver viewers the most riveting shots of action, and headlines like "Postwar Iraq" introduced reports about Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's trip to Brussels, viewers could be excused for thinking that peace had already broken out.
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Citation: Alessandra Stanley, "Images of Victory Overshadow Doses of Realism," New York Times, 4 April 2003.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/international/worldspecial/04WATC.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
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