Casualties Of War Coverage

Mark Jurkowitz
Boston Globe

   The surest sign that the first fevered rush of terrorism coverage has ended was The New York Times’s decision to discontinue its separate “A Nation Challenged’’ war news section and its “Portraits of Grief’’ capsules of the Sept. 11 victims. Their termination coincided not only with the new year, but also, at least for now, with some ratcheting down of the crisis mentality in the nation and its news media.
   The screaming headlines are giving way to a more measured flow to the story (as well as to other news, which had been virtually blacked out since Sept. 11.) And while I will miss “A Nation Challenged,’’ here are a few wartime staples that fall into the “good riddance’’ category as the media adapt to a different phase of “America’s New War.”
   Richard Butler: We’ll be better off when the TV pundits and generals take a little vacation from our living rooms. And this guy surely won’t be missed. A former UN chief weapons inspector and Saddam Hussein hater extraordinaire (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Butler comes across as Dr. Ghoul, laying out worst-case anthrax and terrorism scenarios in that unnerving Aussie whisper of his. “Paula,’’ he would intone to the CNN morning anchor, Paula Zahn, “This is a verrrrrrrry disturbing development.’’ Butler might have been a very good weapons expert, but he is the Vincent Price of pundits.
   High gloss mags get war fever: Yes, you can read quality journalism in the high-end celebrity journals, but shouldn’t we be skeptical when they suddenly start mimicking Foreign Affairs magazine? The January issue of Vanity Fair, featuring a bare-chested Tom Cruise on the cover, has eye-catching stories about “The Secret Bin Laden Files,’’ “Crisis in the CIA,’’ and the exiled king of Afghanistan. The January issue of GQ, with the actor Hugh Jackman on the cover, includes an expose on Islamic suicide bombers and another piece called “Is a Holy War Inevitable?’’ I’d be more inclined to believe that these magazines had unraveled some of the biggest post-Sept. 11 mysteries if they had actually had a picture of the exiled king of Afghanistan on the cover, rather than of the handsomest hunks in Hollywood.
   Al-Jazeera: The US news industry had a fascination with the major “independent’’ journalistic voice in the Arab world. So did a lot of U.S. officials, who began showing up on Al-Jazeera as if it were the “Meet the Press’’ of the Middle East. But the body of evidence suggests that its claim to objectivity is a worse fit than Fox News Channel’s “Fair and Balanced’’ slogan. It’s a propaganda vehicle in dire need of some Journalism 101 lessons.
   The debate over Time’s Person of the Year: Talk about a tempest in a teapot. Somehow, the fact that Time magazine picked Rudy Giuliani over Osama bin Laden for Person of the Year has triggered a heated debate in the journalism community. Let’s just give credit to Time for Barnum-esque public relations instincts — Los Angeles Times critic Howard Rosenberg correctly called the concept a “clever marketing tool’’ — to milk the selection for all it was worth. But in this climate, they were as likely to bestow that honor on bin Laden as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is to award him the best documentary Oscar for the video of him gloating over the World Trade Center casualties.
   The cable-TV crawl: Some of the recent headlines across the bottom of the cable news channels — like “Study Finds Women Have Jumped Ahead of Men For the First Time in Using the Internet to Do Holiday Shopping’’ — suggest that we could see a return to more normal news. And the disappearance of those blood-pressure-raising headline crawls, initiated right after Sept. 11, would be a good sign for our society. But it might be too late for the cable networks themselves. The ugly truth is that I’ve become — and I suspect others have as well — a closet crawl junkie, completely trained to ignore whatever the anchor is saying, and instead to scan the crawls for updated news. They could prove to be the medium’s Frankenstein monster, obviating the need for actual cable news programming.