Perspective

Noth­ing like the full Amer­ican PR machine to put the world into per­spect­ive. Bremer: “We got him”. Fas­cin­at­ing state­ment because it’s pos­sible for him in this media-sat­ur­ated world to make that state­ment. We all *know* who “he” is, because if Bremer is making the state­ment live from Bagh­dad, he can only be Saddam Hussein.

The reac­tions from the Arabic-speak­ing press were intriguing. None of the ques­tions had reas­on­able answers, of course. Bumbled abom­in­able hand­ling by Chan­nel 7 with ratio shifts all over the place and no trans­lator for the entire first speech of the guy from the Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil. Chan­nel 9 did okay with split screens and shaky trans­la­tion switch­ing between a male and female trans­lator. They did not trans­late the journ­al­ists shout­ing what was appar­ently “Death to Saddam” during the broad­cast of the cap­ture video. The ABC in Sydney appar­ently switched over to CNN, but ABC Mel­bourne has hap­pily kept play­ing the Swing doco I’m cur­rently listen­ing to. Chan­nel 10 just kept play­ing the movie it was playing.

No polit­ical ana­lysis, avoid­ance of the ques­tion of when US troops will leave, vir­tu­ally no men­tion of ‘Coali­tion’, avoid­ance of the ques­tion of whether Hus­sein will be tried by Iraqis, and also avoid­ance of the DNA ques­tion, even though other media are now saying DNA test­ing has proved identity.

So, this means what, exactly?