ON THE PERILS OF LIVE WAR FOOTAGE

Read Adam Felber's characteristically amusing (and haunting) description of his television viewing experiences last night. Felber was watching live feeds of American tanks on Abu Dhabi televsion, picked up by CNN and MSNBC. Americans apparently opened fire on the journalists. Throughout Baghdad, several journalists were killed and wounded by Americans in attacks on Al-Jazeera's building, the Palestine Hotel, and the offices of Abu Dhabi television. It's a little hard to get a clear picture of what happened, so I'll just link some of the stories here: CBS's story, Yahoo news, a report from Utusan online (Malaysia), VOA, and a press release from Reporters Sans Frontiers.

Felber argues that the incident shows that CNN and MSNBC "suck": they should have figured out what was going on and commented on it earlier; they apparently ran the footage for a long time without recognizing that a journalist seemed to have just been killed. From the news reports I can't quite figure out what happened, so I'm willing to give the networks the benefit of the doubt here even though I agree with Felber's general assessment. The incident also shows something more fundamental about war coverage and about the hazards of live footage, something I've noted several times here: access to what Chris Hedges calls the "sensory data of war" will tend to create doubts about official versions of events because this sensory data shows how unheroic, confusing, and brutalizing war actually is.

The U.S. army is taking some real heat in the international press for these incidents. In addition to RSF's press release, see the BBC story here, the Guardian's article here,the Tagesspiegel's aricle ("Journalists Under Fire")here, Le Monde's article here, the Times of India article here, and El Mundo's most recent article here (reporting the Spanish government's recommendation that Spanish journalists leave Baghdad).