Gag

Good column about the media coverage.

In America, we get Peter Jennings choking up while talking to a POW's mother on the phone. And Aaron Brown turning moist about almost everything. The other night, while examining pictures of the GI suspected of killing a fellow soldier, Mr Brown, my least favourite man on American television, pressed his lips together and pinched his nose in a manly grimace of repressed emotion.

"It's just an unsettling thing, General," he said. "I mean there's so - you know what - OK." He broke off here, to cough back tears. "There's just - there's just so much at stake for so many people. And then to have this sort of thing happen ... it's just so sad."

CNN's military consultant, General Wesley Clark, gazed at Brown's quivering nostrils with ill-concealed embarrassment. I was praying that he would tell Brown to pull himself together but alas, he took pity on the big girl's blouse. "It is unsettling," he agreed, in the manner of a kindly uncle comforting a hysterical child. "But you know, our leaders have to be able to deal with things like this. These things do happen."

...

But it is true that the American news media have a bad habit of characterising their own overwrought responses to the war as those of the American public. In the first hours of the invasion, the videophone images of "unopposed" tanks rolling through the Iraqi desert had the network anchors jumping up and down in their seats.

Their excitement appeared to be one part patrioticfervour and three parts delight in the whiz-bangtechnology. "This is amazing!" they kept shouting."This is historical journalism!"

For a few days, the high-fiving hysteria continuedunabated. Then when "sobering" news began to filter in, the anchors swivelled in their seats andfixed us with reproving stares. "This is not going to be a cakewalk," they said, wagging their fingers at we naïfs at home. "The American people may haveto revise their expectations of an easy win."

With his usual unctuous self-righteousness, AaronBrown went so far as to claim that he had beenwarning against unrealistic expectations all along. "Itried to say to people: don't expect that these tanksracing through the desert is like a car chase on TV. I said: this is not the war. This is getting to the war. "Er, no, you didn't.