[wordup] Warnography: are TV newscasters having a little too much fun?

[Adam Shand]

Alright I said I wouldn't post anymore about the war and I'm cheating 
... kinda.

Adam.

Via: RCB <http://blogs.salon.com/0001437/>:
From: http://boingboing.net/#200087181

     The war has authored lots of odd media moments, none odder, perhaps,
     than that witnessed by anyone who crashed home at 3am on Sunday
     morning and turned on the telly to find Angela Rippon, live on the
     ITV News Channel, describing the skyline of Kuwait as "elegant". But
     one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of
     the conflict - and every other conflict of the modern TV era - is
     the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and
     graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts
     usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you
     would rather not sit next to on the tube. (...)"As a scholar of
     porn, I look at this and say 'these are boys with phallic toys',"
     sighs Linda Williams, professor of film studies and rhetoric at UC
     Berkeley.

     For the most part, the representations of war don't put too much
     store in reality. "I've never had a great deal of sympathy for
     Baudrillard... but there is something to be said for the
     hyper-reality of this situation: it is intensified reality, verging
     on the unreal."

     All the lavishly reproduced fact files and whizzy graphics, the 3D
     cartoon missiles and gleaming formation of tanks, photographed from
     above, seem to be engaged in an enterprise as unreal as their
     equivalent in the sex industry - an attempt to pass something ugly
     off as something beautiful.

Link
<http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,922115,00.html>,
Discuss <http://www.quicktopic.com//21/H/TGDMgUwngaxTY>

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