Rantingprofs: Making the Case

January 30, 2006

Making the Case

The Times' television critic reports on the news coverage of what happened to Woodruff and Vogt, and although given her area of expertise she couldn't possibly claim special knowledge of the level of progress in the country, her piece is an exemplar of what I wrote about in my earlier post so perfect even I couldn't have dreamt it.

She writes:

Bob Woodruff was in Baghdad for ABC reporting the good news that the Bush administration complains is ignored by the news media, and he ended up as a glaring illustration of the bad news.

Mr. Woodruff, the newly named co-anchor of "World News Tonight," spent Friday chatting with friendly Iraqis on the street and slurped ice cream at a popular Baghdad shop to show how some in Iraq are seeking a semblance of normalcy.

Yesterday he and an ABC cameraman, Doug Vogt, were badly wounded while traveling in a routine convoy with Iraqi military forces who are being trained to impose that normalcy and allow American troops to go home.

You see? He went searching for that normalcy, even found some, just as the administration said we would, but in the end what he found -- and therefore what we all found -- is that whatever normalcy exists is a charade, a mask. The normalcy isn't what's real about Iraq, the violence is what's real. (And since the convoy was "routine," one must assume that attack was as well, nothing random or unlucky about it.)

Then she writes something brutally honest and telling:

What happened to Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt was one of those chilling television moments that mark a milestone. This conflict has shown all too clearly that soldiers, civilians, aid workers and journalists are all targets.

Soldiers, American and Iraqi, are wounded and killed by roadside bombs and ambushes every day in tragedies so common they float to the back pages. But until now, at least, network anchors always seemed to sail through hot spots with an inalienable aura of invulnerability, like senators or movie stars.

Mr. Woodruff's plight underscored at a whole new level that Americans there feel like sitting ducks, picked off by a faceless enemy.

What makes this a "milestone," or "a whole new level?"

Nothing more than the fact that Woodruff is network.

Of course, lest we permit the press to get too self-righteous about this, take a moment to remember who it is who decides what makes the front page and what gets relegated ("floats") to the back pages. It isn't us.

She concludes:

The attack was not a Cronkite moment, of course. Nobody in this era of what Ted Koppel, the former "Nightline" host, describes dismissively as "boutique journalism" has the kind of mass audience and unconditional trust Walter Cronkite held when he shook the nation by declaring the Vietnam War unwinnable. Mr. Woodruff, an experienced, talented newcomer, had neither the fame nor the stature to report anything truly groundbreaking about the Iraq conflict.

But, sadly, he did not need to. What happened to him on his third day back in the country said plenty.

The attack on the anchor, merely because he is an anchor, in other words, is to be taken as a representative anecdote for the state of affairs in Iraq.

Don't tell us about progress. Don't tell us about things getting better. Don't give us statistics and peaks and valleys or tell us about troop morale. Because an anchor was hurt, and really, what else do we need to know?

Posted on January 30, 2006 at 06:11 AM | Permalink

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January 30, 2006

Making the Case

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