March 25, 2003
Do You Have Enough Information Now?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
With the recent actions in Iraq, the media and the military have converged in a stunning moment that shall forever be marked in the history of technology. While journalists have accompanied the armed forces in times past, it might be days before their copy was filed, their footage aired, their photos published.
In both an unprecedented and an unexpected move, the military has embedded some 500 international journalists at what appears to be every level of operation. Couple this "embedding" with the advanced state of mobile communications, and the result is a virtual tsunami of data.
The images, audio and first-hand reports of these journalists has flipped the balance of every network's massive ability to broadcast with the information available to it. In the past, a small amount of data was fed almost identically to every channel. Today, it is the reverse: Each channel can't begin to air what its journalists in the field can provide.
I don't know whose brainchild this was, but I'm all for it.
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Few people have experienced firsthand a tank, a military aircraft or a cruise missile. Fewer still have been part of a fighting force. Now we have witnessed a veritable moving sea of equipment, huge numbers of trained personnel, and the precision bombing of Baghdad.
Soldiers in the field have begun to have faces, and we begin to understand the jobs that they do. Consider the interview of a medical evacuation helicopter pilot, describing his recent decisions. He ordered another helicopter to take off, due to the severity of its soldier's injury. He waited for ten minutes for further casualties, which had been promised, but he had to save the life of the person he already had. He decided he couldn't wait, and so he took off.
He tells us point blank that one soldier has lost a foot; another, both his legs. It's too late to turn away; his words are seared into our brains.
To my mind, the closer the world can come to understanding what war is, the better.
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This is not a video game, a trumped-up reality show with a million dollar prize, or a made-for-TV movie. It is relentless and fraught with danger and dread, strength of character and adrenalin. It is gut-twisting and sobering. It is the Mother of all reality shows, broadcast worldwide to billions, where real people die, where the winners have earned trust and not betrayal. And no one who watches television is immune.
There are times in history when multiple technologies come together in such a way that they alter the course of human events. Such was true of the technologies that converged in less than two years to make the first atom bomb. This time the convergence has spawned instant communications. The "shock and awe" of this war goes beyond the bombing of Baghdad.
What we have seen tells us who we have become as a human race, and reveals the scope of the technology revolution which has gotten us here.
The ultimate outcome - from every individual to the world at large - is yet to be written, but I believe the world will change as a result of this information onslaught. What I don't know is how.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
