March 15, 2005 , 2005
Kamloops Daily News



The invasion of Iraq started two years ago on March 20.  It
was all over three weeks later - - at least that was message
delivered from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham
Lincoln. 

On the deck of the ship, a sign read "Mission Accomplished." 
The sun shone brightly on the water as the U.S. president
descended from the blue sky in a Lockheed S-3 Viking.  The
sailors stood at smartly at attention in their white
uniforms, awaiting the message from the president.  Dressed
military fatigues, President Bush told the sailors that the
invasion was complete and major combat was over.  It was a
wonderful scene but it was not the truth.

The invasion of Iraq was not over.  Far from it.  Since that
day more U.S. soldiers and Iraqis have died than before the
so-called end of the invasion.

The spectacle aboard the ship was an example of the
disconnection between perception and reality that often
characterized the war.  And the U.S. media have been
complicit in staging these illusions.

The purpose of television news should be to provide an
unbiased report of local and world events.  But when
advertisers pay for news production, that goal is difficult
to achieve.  No advertiser wants his ads interspersed by
defeat and gloom.

Carter Burwell has a lot of experience in shaping public
impressions through movies and television.  He has composed
musical scores for more than 50 films.  Here’s what he has
to say about television news:

"We want to feel good about ourselves, the advertisers want
us to feel good about their products, the producers want the
advertisers to feel good about their news shows, the state
wants the producers to feel good about its government"

News is not supposed to be treated the same way as
entertainment.   What’s acceptable in story telling is not
acceptable in news reporting.  Viewers of the news are not
supposed to be manipulated to follow proscribed story lines.

Yet that’s exactly what happened in the U.S. television
coverage of the invasion of Iraq.   "There was a great
divide between the tone of coverage here [in the U.S.] and 
the rest of the world," says Burwell.

American television networks invested heavily in
melodramatic elements for the invasion of Iraq.  They used
staging normally reserved for entertainment.  Titles,
graphics, and musical scores were commissioned to provide
and emotional context for the reports from embedded
journalists.

Music dictates the viewer’s response to the images on the
screen.  Remove the background music and the emotional
content can become vague.  Without music, you risk
presenting an image that the viewer will fail to interpret
in the way that producers intend.

Network executives told composers what the theme of
background music for the invasion of Iraq was to be.  Music
scores were to be "serious but not down, uplifting," and to
make the public  "feel good about itself, it hadn’t felt
good for a while."

For the first Gulf war in 1990 composers were directed to
write scores related to the conflict of cultures and
ideologies, the Arabic east versus the West.  But the
scores for the new invasion of Iraq were just  "Techno  - -
we’re going to knock the crap out of them - -music."

Many TV viewers think that programming done with them in
mind.  The viewer is a distant third, behind advertisers and
government.  The viewing public is important only because
they need to be relieved of their money, or in the case of
the Bush administration, relieved of an informed opinion.

The American people were sold war pyrotechnics through a
slick message of kick-ass machismo, fear and misinformation
initiated by President Bush and abetted by private
television broadcasters.

The beneficiaries of the Iraq invasion were the U.S. weapons
manufacturers who spent billions of American tax dollars in
a high tech show of shock and awe.

A public broadcaster is a better idea.  Canada’s CBC is not
perfect but it provided a more factual presentation of the
news from Iraq than U.S. networks.  Some Americans began
watching CBC news to find out what was actually happening.

Television news is expensive to produce but viewers are
going to pay one way or another.  If not through tax dollars
to the CBC, then through a version of the news that scripted
and scored to deliver an illusion that suits the whims of
the powerful.  There is no free news.

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