TV GOES TO WAR.(television coverage of the Iraq War)

"Shock and awe”: it was no euphemism. Not since September 11, 2001, has the world seen images of such tremendous devastation occurring in such an unbelievably short amount of time. Beginning at around 9 p.m. in Baghdad on Friday, as many as two dozen buildings were destroyed in spectacular fashion in mere minutes, by some three hundred cruise missiles. The veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett, reporting by telephone from Baghdad, was no more able to find original words for the event than the rest of us were, and resorted to the now common cliche used to convey the magnitude of man-made disasters in terms that American audiences can understand: "It's like an action movie, only this is real."The silent green static images of Baghdad that we'd been seeing from locked-down nightscope cameras for the previous twenty-four hours gave way to live footage, courtesy of Abu Dhabi TV and Al Jazeera, showing huge, incongruously pink clouds rising from blown-up buildings, with accompanying booms that seemed to rock the ground under you, wherever in the world you happened to be. At a press briefing half an hour later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that the weapons used in this campaign did their job with pinpoint accuracy. It was a reassuring statement--or so it was meant to be--and also a chilling one, as he followed it with the announcement that the two-minute apocalyptic bombing was just the beginning of the air war in Iraq. People hearing this news could be forgiven for feeling an aftershock of shock and awe, for the barrage they had just seen looked and sounded not like the beginning of anything but the end of everything.

"Coalition of the willing”; "target of opportunity”; "decapitation strike”--this war has already given rise to a number of memorable phrases. The word "embed"has been put to a new use, too, describing the placement of hundreds of reporters with military units. Two hours after Friday's strike on Baghdad, a reporter on the U.S.S. Constellation, in the Persian Gulf, was on hand to explain the loud noise made by a returning warplane as it landed on the aircraft carrier. The Pentagon's decision to allow reporters to virtually join the armed forces was a good one, though of course, in addition to being a boon to the news business, it has public-relations benefits for the military. If today's weapons really are as microsurgically precise as we have been told they are, perhaps we will see that it's possible to conduct a war with little collateral damage, and perhaps we will be less likely in the future to question those who get us into wars. For reporters, it is a chance to convey the minute-by-minute reality of war in a way that no one has ever been able to do; and we at home have been able to watch ...