context for Pynchon's Foreword: NYRB re The New Newsspeak

[pynchonoid]

The New Newsspeak

By Russell Smith

The coverage of this war in the press and on
television has been disgusting. North American
reporting, and in particular on the US television
stations, has been cravenly submissive to the Pentagon
and the White House.

The worst culprit was also the one with the most
"embedded" reporters and the most exciting live
footage, and so it was, sadly, the one that I watched
most of the time: CNN, the voice of Centcom.[*] CNN
was more irritating than the gleefully patriotic Fox
News channel because CNN has a pretense of
objectivity. It pretends to be run by journalists. And
yet it dutifully uses all the language chosen by
people in charge of "media relations" at the Pentagon.
It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their
bunkers as "softening up"; it describes slaughtered
Iraqi units as being "degraded"; some announcers have
even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism
"attrited" (to mean "we are slowly killing as many of
them as we can"). I don't know if I'm more offended by
the insidiousness of this euphemism or by the
absurdity of its grammar.

To recite from a Pentagon press release that an Iraqi
division has been "degraded by 70 percent" is an
astounding abdication of journalistic responsibility.
A journalist these days must not just report the
facts, but also explain the news, give it color and
significance. The graphic reality of "degradation" is
a large pile of dismembered bodies. Surely some
picture or explanation of what the wiping out of an
entire division with high explosives actually looks
like is called for.

Many readers and watchers of the news were baffled as
the battle for Baghdad came suddenly upon us without
any large-scale engagement with the dreaded Republican
Guard. What happened to those three or five divisions
that were supposedly ringing the city? The facts of
their destruction were grudgingly mentioned almost in
passing. They were destroyed from the air. This did
not make a glamorous or even central story to anyone's
coverage of this war, because there were no embedded
reporters with the Iraqi troops. It's hard to get a TV
camera into a line of trenches that is being puréed by
bombs. Instead of reporting that this peripeteia in
the war's narrative was happening, and that it
entailed thousands of deaths leading to the rapid
collapse of the Iraqi regime, the television and the
press simply downsized the story. No pictures, no
story. This is the real meaning of "degradation."

The same thing happened in the first Persian Gulf War.
Nobody seemed to mind the failure to report the extent
of Iraqi casualties then; we don't mind it now. We'd
rather have a twelve-hour cycle of interviews with one
parent of one rescued POW. The story came out later.
In Anthony Swofford's memoir, Jarhead, he describes
coming upon trenches of dead Iraqis: "Some of the
corpses in the bunkers are hunched over, hands
covering their ears, as though they'd been waiting in
dread. Many seem to have died not from shrapnel but
concussion, and dried, discolored blood gathers around
their eyes and noses and mouths...." He is describing
the effects of the Daisy Cutter, the smaller version
of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast that the US now
uses. That language is not degraded.

The Canadian press and television have not been immune
from patriotic lapses in objectivity. A day after the
fall of Baghdad, a CBC Radio reporter on the evening
news gave his breathless analysis of the significance
of this event. He concluded that General Franks had
just run "one of the most brilliant campaigns in
military history." This is nonsense. General Franks
couldn't possibly have lost. He had complete air
superiority, massive technological advantages, a
better-trained, better-equipped, better-paid force,
and a limitless budget. He was fighting an isolated,
impoverished, demoralized conscript army which was
already decimated by bombing. If he had not been able
to take Baghdad swiftly and decisively he would be
regarded as an incompetent.

Why are Canadians so terrified to contradict or even
interpret the Pentagon publicity machine? Are we
afraid of bullies like the US ambassador to Canada,
Paul Cellucci? Or of bullies at home—are we all so
terrified of being accused of "anti-Americanism" that
we forget basic journalistic principles? Who are we
afraid of?

Notes

[*] Canadians watch the same CNN that Americans do,
not the European version.


<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16294>
Volume 50, Number 9 · May 29, 2003


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