(2003-04-17) Wolff Iraq Media

Michael Wolff on Big Media at the War On Iraq. But behind this stripped-down facade, invisible to the public, was a secret, very pleasant theatre of the absurd. We were in on the joke. We were the high-school kids who got it. The embedded reporters, on the other hand, were the rah rah jocks... Other than the pretence of a news conference - the news conference as backdrop and dateline - what did we get for having come all this way? What information could we get here that we could not have gotten in Washington or New York, what access to what essential person was being proffered? And why was everything so bloodless?... The question it turned out, spoke powerfully to people who think this whole thing (not just the news conference, but, in some sense, the entire war) is phony, a set-up, a fabrication, in which just about everything is in service to unseen purposes and agendas. But it seemed to speak even more dramatically to people who think the whole thing is real, pure, linear, uncomplicated, elemental... And what's most pathetic is that we reporters could have been dumb enough not to understand that this whole million-dollar business, the plasma screens and such, were not for us, but directed over our heads towards the US audience.