1642 - Video DE-EN

Speaker 1:

It is war. And there’s a relentless hunger of TV consumers for pictures and information.
Who benefits most are those channels that deliver news around the clock. There are hundreds of journalists stationed in Iraq, and it’s those who make the permanent info fire possible. Some of them also have an internet presence, in the shape of a so-called weblog, a personal diary, containing thoughts and pictures that are taboo in big media or just have no space there.
One of the [best? unintelligible] weblogs is the homepage of BBC journalist Stuart Hughes. He’s stationed in Northern Iraq in [unintelligible], together with two of his colleagues, and he reports from there regularly for multiple TV channels.
BBC correspondent Jim Muir, here seen reporting live from the front, is part of the team. And this is how the three look when they’re being witty while taking a break from work. This is Stuart, the internet geek. On his homepage he tells about his daily life, about his encounters and conversations with Iraqis, about fears and exertions of the journalists at work, and about the grieving over fatal victims. In between there are personal pictures, maps, and links to articles in the international press. Stuart shows openly what he thinks about war as much as about the media machinery that he’s part of.

Speaker 2:

“We’re creeping up a switchback near the Ansar Al Islam front line. Peshmerga on either side of the road are heavily armed. Suddenly, our telephone rings. It’s London, asking if Jim can go live right now. We decline, saying that the situation is too precarious currently,  we can’t stop. London is upset and sees us as unwilling. Long live the era of the 24-hour-news.”

Speaker 1:

Another location, aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln. This is where the journalists M. L. Lyke and the photographer Grant M. Haller work. Apart from personal reports about the [unintelligible], the two journalists also show rarely seen photographic material, for example, young men and women waiting for post from home and trying to rest their minds for a few hours before war comes back.
It’s not only the US soldiers that get lost sometimes in the sandstorms of the Iraqi desert. When researching, internet users, too, turn up in strange worlds in which irony and inelegance are difficult to separate.
There is, for example, the fake homepage of president Saddam Hussein. Saddam tells us daily what he’s thinking about. For instance, he wants to write to the Arab TV station Al-Jazeera and send them his reference for the journalist Peter Arnett, who was fired by the NBC, so that Arnett can be interviewed by Iraqi television again. Also, Saddam lets us know, he finally wants to go into exile, to Saudi Arabia.
Even stranger is a virtual duel between US president George Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In the internet, war has many sides.