www.War.com

 The imminent war against Iraq has become significant in a couple of respects, particularly for the media. Firstly it has turned out to be an opportunity for competing news organizations to show their prowess as advances in digital and communications technology have created a more level playing field for all media players, and secondly it would mark the emergence of the Internet as the principal disseminator of war stories around the globe, unlike the first Gulf War of 1991. What will make the online affair so significant is the watershed of information that is likely to go through the Internet at the time of the war, particularly in the form of ‘newsblogs’.
The first Gulf War has seen the rise of the satellite television, particularly as a medium of political propaganda with the ascent of the CNN and it took almost a decade for an alternate voice like Al-Jazeera to come up. CNN’s live coverage of the war had a tremendous impact on viewers around the world, who did not know that most of it was a stage-managed affair, shot in the CNN studios at Atlanta. It was totally a partisan version of the war that helped create a pro-American sentiment, and news stations the world over were compelled to replay the CNN clippings because there was no other alternative source available. Running a television network is enormously expensive business, but not so that of an internet portal. The internet has rendered news and its distribution more democratic, as anyone with access to the Net, can publish news.
News and commentary sites' known as Blogs, offer this possibility for every netizen. Blogs-short for Web logs-are selective collections of links to news items, often, accompanied by the compiler's commentary. Since a blog can be created by any­one with an Internet connection, read­ers should take some of the matter with more than a pinch of salt. But the fact remains that it helps in bringing forth diverse accounts and opinions. The average blogger's role is in filing 'sec­ond-day' stories than first-hand live information. Most blog creators have ideological leanings, and it is upto the user to discern them. One such blog is the widely-read Instapundit.com.
Thus the war on Iraq will be car­ried more on the Web than on televi­sion screens unlike in the 1991 war. The Internet as it is now known didn't exist in 1991; today, billions of homes and businesses have access to the web. The fact that the Internet can provide more detailed coverage than traditional media because it can carry complete documents, and video on demand, among other things, has firmly placed it on the top rung of the media ladder, above satellite television. The post-9/11 coverage was the real road test for this new media vehicle, and it helped to establish the Internet as a primary news medium.
 Today along with hundreds of news blogs, all the global media contenders are in the race for covering the impending battle. The greater integration of websites with their corresponding broadcast and print entities, has enabled them to be on a high war­-alert, with each happening hitting the website even as it happens. Leading newspapers, wire services such as As­sociated Press and Reuters, and ma­jor US broadcast networks such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, are to lead the coverage. A recent article in Online Journalism Review tells us about the preparations made by an MSNSC correspondent. He functions as a one-man band, delivering a vari­ety of video reports, live commentary and conventional text stories, with a videophone, which is a 264k satellite phone and a box which channels the lines together into a 128k connection that's enough to give a decent video signal. This is the way most of the pre­mium news sites go about their busi­ness. An array of such reports can be found at special pages of these sites, www.foxnews.com/waronterror, www.msnbc.com/news/attack_front.asp and dedicated sec­tions of the CNN and the BBC. The Web is also replete with well-main­tained alternative voices like Iraqjoumal.org, Middle East Report (www.merip.org), www.iraqaction.org, www.indymedia.org , www.rsf.org and zmag.org which offer excellent material and links to the Iraq crisis

Reporting Baghdad

The Bush bid to villainise Iraq and its leader has been ably supported by the media powerhouses.

Iraq has once again become the fulcrum of global politics. The world is polarised between the imperialist in­tentions-supported by the media powerhouses-to control Iraq's vital resources and the concerns of a con­siderate world community comprising of anti-globalisation groups, leftist organisations and the alternative me­dia. The rift in the allies of the 'Em­pire', with France and Germany back­ing out of a military action, and the mounting protests of the public across the world, have resulted in ways wherein the so-called free media is bending backwards to justify an attack on Iraq.
That is exactly what the Gulf war scenario had precipitated-a close watch of the corporate media would teach you innumerable ways to kill a story, how to twist the truth or how not to report an incident. The media is straining itself to hype the wicked ways of Saddam Hussein, while ignor­ing the stark images of malnourished, dying children in Baghdad; it has been assessing Iraq by exaggerating its strike power while not really delving into the impacts of the Gulfwar, which are seen in acute economic disparities, shortages in food and medicine, and the deteriorating school system. The media also has not been giving space to describe the apprehensions of an Iraqi populace haunted by the inevi­tability of a US military invasion. Al­though the UN weapon inspectors have not come up with sufficient evi­dence that Iraq indeed possesses a vast arsenal of mass-destructive weapons, the pro-US media is still searching for such material in a vein, to justify an attack.
Thus, a terrible under-reporting and over-reporting of events have marked the journalistic excesses on Baghdad-a crime equally grievous to that of withholding humanitarian aid to Iraq. These excesses have been car­ried out by the likes of The Washing­ton Post, The New York Times and CNN for the US, and The Financial Times and BBC for the UK. And these are the "agenda-setting media", as put by Noam Chomsky, "because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates". Their agenda is forever linked to the political economy and their mission is to endorse the causes of corporate globalisation and impe­rialism. Bush's words that "we must make sure that control of the world's oil resources does not fall into his (Saddam) hands, only to finance fur­ther aggression" are the greatest proof of the political character of the
immi­nent war.
Another case in point is the "moral panic" these media powers unleash. Moral panic is a condition whereby an episode, person or group of per­sons; come to be defined as a threat to societal values and interests. Its nature is presented in a stylised and stere­otypical fashion by the mass media, and the moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians, or religious or racial groups. Here a group or a per­son is identified as a 'folk-devil' against whom something must be done. All the efforts of entities like the Time magazine, CNN and BBC are now centered around creating a moral panic over Saddam the 'folk devil'. If you take a look at their websites, there is undue stress on stories highlighting the cruelty and arrogance of Saddam, and the humanitarian gestures of Bush. The BBC website creates that war like ambience with biased analyses, and a war is justified on grounds of "benevolent genocide".
Moral panic is also created through intelligent articulation of words such as "kicked out" and "expelled" to de­note the departure of the UN inspec­tors, and when it comes to Iraqi alle­gations, it is merely reduced to "Saddam says”. A recent study con­ducted by three US local TV news sta­tions on the media coverage of Iraq over a month, reported 97 stories in favour of war, and 12 against war ­mongering. Some of the terms used by these media to represent Saddam Iraq includes "Iraqi threat, "terrorist proxies", "Iraqi defiance", "dictator­ship", "tyrant", "crafty", "Iraqi intran­sigence", "brutal elimination", "deftly manipulated", "evil", “unholy ·alli­ance”, "a decade of defiance", etc. The most powerful method of demonizing Saddam Hussein is by using Hitler analogy. Saddam is equated with Hitler, Iraq with Nazi Germany; and the 1990s with the 1930s – a metaphor that seems intended to silence any de­bate or critical thought. A New York Times editorial depicts Bush as "leader of all countries", while US diplomats "appeal to high moral values and the lessons of history":  This moral panic slowly transforms into mass hysteria and delusion, and this is exactly what the global media wants.
The stage is set for another Citizen Kane.