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Showtime Iraq: on network news, war''s a spectacle and debate''s a bore. (Television).

Article Excerpt
THE PREGAME SHOW IS TICKING toward the opening kick-off. The networks are updating their SHOWDOWN and COUNTDOWN logos, upgrading their drumrolls and trumpet snippets, cueing their cruise missile videos and maps of hitherto obscure regions. The color commentators and military consultants are sipping their coffee in the green rooms, getting pumped. War is the spectacle of spectacles, and for television news there's no business like spectacle business. To air debate about whether war makes sense is decidedly, a lesser priority. The tedious stuff of policy chats is for Sunday mornings, when the political wonks get to come out and play, not the evenings, when, despite ratings declines, the pharmaceutical companies still pay top dollar to win the attention of maximum eyeballs. If you seriously crave an argument that takes more than five minutes, get you to C-SPAN.

Thus, it is not exactly surprising that on Sept. 23, when Al Gore spoke in San Francisco against the Bush administration's gallop toward war with Iraq, all three network evening news shows contented themselves with brief anchorman paraphrases. None mentioned that Gore had, in the course of his speech at the Commonwealth Club, declared opposition to "an emerging national strategy that ... appears to be glorifying the notion of dominance." And: "President Bush is presenting us with ... one of the most fateful decisions in our history--a decision to abandon what we have thought was America's mission in the world--a world in which nations are guided by...