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The unraveling of U.S. propaganda |
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Frank Rich
14 May 2004
International Herald Tribune
NEW YORK
http://www.iht.com/articles/520000.html
[...] In 'Control Room', the revelatory documentary about the Arab satellite news station Al Jazeera, opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, the audience is taken into the Central Command media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action.
[...]The [Jessica] Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; the troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in 'Control Room,' the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what.
The documentary captures some of the briefing at which the dramatic Lynch story was first laid out. An American journalist on hand, the veteran CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, grumbles afterward about how the 'minute by minute' account of the rescue has superseded the major news he and his colleagues had been waiting for: the fate of troops just entering Baghdad. His cavils were useless, however; the instant legend was moving too fast to be derailed.
Soon the U.S. military would buttress it with a complementary video, shot and edited by its own movie crew: an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations rescue raid, bathed in iridescent 'Matrix' -green glow of night-vision photography.
But The marketing of this Jerry Bruckheimer-style video was itself an exercise in hype, meant to blur and inflate the Lynch episode further. The director of 'Control Room' is Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American who is a protege of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the chroniclers of the Clinton campaign in 'The War Room.' Though Noujaim's principal subject may be the Arab station that has been widely condemned as a fount of anti-American propaganda, her eye for the American media is no less keen.
The true control room in 'Control Room' is not so much the Al Jazeera HQ as the coalition media center. It is there, from a costly Hollywood set, that the military commanded its own propaganda effort, which was aided and abetted by an American press media sometimes as eager to slant the news as its Arab counterpart. The attractively forthright American press officer we follow throughout the documentary, Lieutenant Josh Rushing of the Marines, doesn'y deny the symmetry: 'When I watch Al Jazeera, I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing, by choice. Same thing when I watch Fox on the other end of the spectrum.'
Revisiting the invasion of Iraq again In 'Control Room,' one can see how much the administration of George Bush was seduced into complacency early on, not just by the relative ease with which it took Iraq, but also by its success at news management.
The Lynch triumph was followed within days by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (which looks more like a staged event than a spontaneous Iraqi outpouring when Noujaim shows it in wide-angle shots). [...]
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