Viewers losing interest in war

Viewers losing interest in war

By Torin Douglas
BBC media correspondent

In the media war - as in the war itself to some extent - disillusion has set in.

Audiences are slipping and the novelty of the wall-to-wall coverage, with its unprecedented media access to the front line, has worn off.

Only a few days ago, millions in Britain and elsewhere were marvelling at the live TV battle coverage from Umm Qasr and applauding the freedom granted to the correspondents and camera crews "embedded" with fighting units.

Now the drawbacks of this torrent of media coverage are becoming apparent.

The public is beginning to lose interest in TV war coverage

Much of what has been reported turns out to have been premature, or wrong.

Umm Qasr was "captured" almost a dozen times before it actually fell. The popular uprising in Basra - widely greeted as a turning point for the Coalition - proved exaggerated, at best.

The BBC's director of news Richard Sambrook has acknowledged it's difficult for the media to get the full picture.

"Reporting the war is about putting together fragments of information," he said.

"We're all trying to work out this jigsaw and what the overall picture is. The difficulty with a 24-hour news channel is you're trying to work out live on air what's true and what isn't."

Impartiality questioned

Objectivity is in doubt. American reporters - particularly the "embeds" - have been accused of identifying too closely with the forces, saying "we" when referring to the US troops.

This impression is reinforced by the camouflaged flak jackets and helmets worn by many of the embedded reporters.

The Times' Janine di Giovanni, ordered out of Baghdad by her own editor, said: "Most experienced war reporters balked at the notion of being so controlled and having to obey a 12-page booklet put forth by the American war machine.

"Now they are marooned on borders everyone thought would open up."

The "big picture" is getting lost, or misinterpreted. A BBC correspondent has criticised news teams back in the UK for exaggerating the setbacks and downplaying the achievements of the coalition forces.

Some TV channels have been showing prisoners of war

Arab media go to war

TV war brings live action home

A memo from the BBC's Paul Adams to news executives, leaked to a newspaper, said: "I was gobsmacked to hear, in a set of headlines today, that the coalition was suffering 'significant casualties'. This is simply not true".

A BBC spokesman said such debates about editorial tone were going on in newsrooms all over the world.

Relatives of those captured, killed, injured or missing are learning the news from broadcasts, not through official channels.

In New Mexico, Anecita Hudson saw her 23-year-old son Joseph interviewed on Iraqi television as a POW, via a Filipino station the family receives.

"He looked so scared" she said. "It's like a bad dream, seeing your son captured on television."

In Britain, the mother of a Royal Marine saw her son burning as he ran out of a building in the Iraqi base at al-Faw.

War appetite waning

And other parents have described the fear they felt at reports of the crash of two UK helicopters, before the casualties were named.

Horrifying pictures are being shown. Images of two dead British soldiers released by Iraqi television and shown by al-Jazeera, have been condemned by Tony Blair and military spokesmen.

And there was live coverage on some channels of the aftermath of the Baghdad market bombing, in which at least 14 civilians died.

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Many claimed this was why the Iraqi leadership was still allowing western journalists to broadcast and file from the capital - to report such "atrocities" back to the west.

And the audience's appetite for war news is waning. After the first few days, newspapers have seen no sales increase, resuming their steady long-term decline in sales.

They also face increased costs as they update their pages in the early hours to produce late editions.

And TV audiences, which rocketed in the first few days for the main bulletins and the 24-hour news channels, are slipping too.

But there is one positive development. The customary wartime rows between government and the media have not so far caught light.

CNN has incurred the wrath of the Pentagon for showing footage of prisoners of war before relatives had been informed.

The American and British authorities have turned their fire on al-Jazeera Television.

But compared with previous conflicts, British ministers and MPs have remained remarkably uncritical of the broadcasters' coverage.

Perhaps it's early days.