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Recent
Stories
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Steve Perry
War Web Log 04/03
April
2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You
Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
Stew Albert
Total War
Website
of the Day
Traitor List: Sign Up Now!
April
1, 2003
Jason
Leopold
Rumsfeld: "Get Me Rewrite"
William
S. Lind
The Pitfalls of War Planning
Jorge
Mariscal
Latinos on the Frontlines, Again
Paul
de Rooij
Arrogant Propaganda
Jo
Wilding
From Baghdad: "I Am His Mother"
Tarif
Abboushi
Operation Embedded Folly
Lee
Sustar
Labor's War at Home
Akiva Eldar
Israeli Dreams of Iraqi Oil
Bernard
Weiner
The Vietnam Connection
Robert
Fisk
The Graveyard at Baghdad's North
Gate
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/01
Website
of the Day
A Collectible War
March
31, 2003
David
Lindorff
Liberating Iraqis from Their Homes
Neve Gordon
A Different Kind of Despair
John
Chuckman
Absurdities and Contradictions
Ron Jacobs
Bernie Sanders Voting Maybe on
War
Wayne
Madsen
The Siege of Washington
Mark Franchetti
Slaughter at the Bridge of Death
Robert
Fisk
Blood and Bandages of the Innocent
Robin Cook
Send Our Soldiers Home
Anthony
Gancarski
Investigate Perle
Uri Avnery
The Devil's Dictionary
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 03/31
March
29, 2003
Kathy and
Bill Christison
"Like Being Autistic with
Power": an Interview with Jeff Halper
Ben
Tripp
"My Empire for a Map!": Geography
American Style
Ann Harrison
The War on Protesters: San Francisco's
Berserk Cops
Kurt
Nimmo
Dead People: Don't Go There
Chris Floyd
Blood on the Tracks: Cheney the
War Profiteer
Ann
Pettifer
Israelis: Victims No Longer?
Jo Wilding
Dispatch from Baghdad: Nowhere
is Safe
Ramzy
Baroud
Horror Chamber: Inside the Al-Amiriya
Shelter
David Krieger
Perle is Gone, But the Looting
Continues
John
Gershman
Dreams of Empire; Eulogies for International
Law
Robert
Fisk
Bombing the Phone System
Brice Abel
War, Bush and the Jesus Torilla
Tom
Stephens
The Chickenhawk Circle of Hell
Alexander
Cockburn
"War Not Going According
to Plan"
March 28,
2003
Robert
Fisk
Bitter Truths About Basra
Daniel
Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris
and Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising
Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Steve
Perry
War Web Log
March 27,
2003
Anthony
Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Baghdad
Rahul
Mahajan
The New Humanitarianism: Basra as
Military Target
Simon Jones
A Letter from Uzbekistan
William
S. Lind
No Exit
Diane Christian
A Day of Reckoning
The
Black Commentator
Onward
Embedded Soldiers: the Press and the War
Mickey
Z.
Remembering the Real Moynihan:
Genocide in East Timor
Richard
Thieme
The Problem of Empathy
Jason Leopold
Energy Scams: Bilking California
Out of Billions
Tariq
Ali
A Naked Display of Imperial Power
Alexander
Cockburn
Up the Creek
March 26,
2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch
Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning
Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets
of Blood
Patrick
Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs,
Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert
Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A
Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria
Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The
Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25,
2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What
Democracy Looks Like: the Streets of Cairo
Bill and
Kathleen Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why
Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings
on the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood
Indicator: Casualties and the Stock Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless
Country
March 24,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers
at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The
Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How
to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony
Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We
Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other
America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Jo Wilding
From
Waiting to War: a Day and a Night in Baghdad
Stephen Banko
I Was
a Soldier Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did
We Become an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert
Jensen
Myths
and Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come
On Democrats, Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch
from Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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April 2,
2003
Punch, Punch,
Punch, Punch
Hating Wolf
Blitzer's Voice
By BRUCE JACKSON
I have recently come to hate Wolf Blitzer's voice.
I didn't used to hate it, but now I do.
Before I came to hate Wolf Blitzer's
voice the only TV performer's voice I really hated was George
Bush's.
I didn't hate George Bush's voice all
the time. When he read speeches crafted for him by Karen Hughes
I hated what he was saying, but not so much how he was saying
it. That's because Karen Hughes is one of the few speechwriters
who could get him to utter words and phrases the way people normally
utter them in English--stopping briefly where the text has a
comma or semicolon and a little longer where it has a period.
When he's speaking without Karen Hughes's
script, Bush usually talks in four- or five-syllable bursts,
with the caesurae coming at points there is no reason for a pause.
There is no link between phrase and content, but he hits those
dead stops and his eyes dart left and right over that smug born-again
grin as if there were. It drives me nuts, that dissonance between
George
Bush's content and phrases. Watching
and listening to unscripted Bush is like being the victim of
some mad disco DJ who keeps stopping the disk when everybody
is still moving and then starts it again before anybody has figured
out where to go next. Neither Bush nor the mad disco DJ give
a damn where you are. It's all in terms of some inner beat only
they can hear, one that wouldn't make sense to you even if they
told you about it.
Wolf Blitzer's voice is a lot like that,
only with him it's the punch rather than the pause. Unlike Bush,
Blitzer can utter an unscripted and unrehearsed complex sentence.
He can utter an unscripted and unrehearsed paragraph. Wolf Blitzer
is a very intelligent, informed and articulate man.
But, when he's on camera, all of his
sentences have the same number of punches, no matter what the
substance. Bush has irrelevant silence; Blitzer has irrelevant
punch. It's like they went to the same elocution school but reversed
the polarity.
Blitzer has the same velocity, the same
hysteria, the same triple stress in every phrase. If I were a
musician scoring his voice, the bars would be perfectly regular,
the tempo allegro or presto, and I would have at least one fortissimo
notation in every single measure. Bam! bam! bam! bam! bam!
Wolf Blitzer is not like that in conversation.
In conversation he's like you or me, with ordinary major and
minor stresses, inflected and uninflected syllables, and with
phrases of varying duration. I've listened to him take a few
cell phone calls: there too, his voice is like anyone else on
a cell phone. The driving relentless voice is Wolf Blitzer's
on-camera television voice. That voice and velocity and stress
pattern belongs to his on-camera persona.
You're maybe thinking,"Well, Jackson,
if you don't like Wolf Blitzer's voice you don't have to turn
on the tv." I hardly ever turn on the tv. Most of the time
I have the experience of Wolf Blitzer's voice only when I go
to the kitchen to get coffee or take a break from working at
my desk elsewhere in the house. My wife likes to work in the
kitchen. She is capable of sitting at the kitchen table and reading
the newspapers, grading exams, or getting ready for class while
the tv is on. I am incapable of ignoring the images and voices.
When I come into that kitchen from the other part of the house
I hear the punch punch punch in Wolf Blitzer's voice before I
get close enough to make any sense at all of his words. For Diane,
I suppose it's like elevator music; for me it's like somebody
doing angry carpentry in the next apartment or someone working
with a pneumatic jack down the block..
I became aware of the newsreaders' punching
technique at the movies. William Hurt's character Tom Grunick
tries unsuccessfully to teach it to Albert Brooks' neurotic Aaron
Altman in James L. Brook's Broadcast News (1987).
"And try to punch one word or phrase
in every sentence," Grunick tells his hapless friend. "Punch
one idea a story. Punch!"
When he's on camera, Wolf Blitzer is
punching all the time. It matters not one iota what the story
is. Sometimes the subject deserves punching: major awful things
are indeed happening out there, halfway around the world, where
the holy war, the terrible jihad of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
is being executed. But just as often the subject could have been
dealt with in an uninflected aside. It matters not: Wolf Blitzer
will fill the time segment with the same number of words, the
same number of punches, the same passionate intensity.
A humvee went off the road? a Huey went
down killing all aboard? bombs destroyed a market where civilians
were shopping for food? Rumsfeld and the generals say the war
is going well? food and water are being offloaded at Iraqi port?
the Brits have something to say? It's all punched exactly the
same, it's all of equivalent value.
Cut for a few minutes to the commercials
(a huge portion which seem to be for garden or pharmaceutical
products) or to the guy back in CNN stateside HQ with a tabletop
mockup of the war zone, a pointer, and a general as his foil
or respondent, or cut to Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference
doing his
Claude Rains imitation ("You ask
me THAT? I'm shocked! SHOCKED!?) and then cut back to Wolf Blitzer
with those slightly-out-of-focus Kuwait City minarets over his
shoulder and it's as if the camera had never cut away. No matter
what the subject: bam! bam! bam! bam! bam!
While Blitzer's voice punches away, headlines
of disasters on the battlefield and elsewhere crawl telegraphically
across the bottom of the screen, along with the single constant
in the CNN universe, the phrase "CNN the most trusted name
in news." It appears down there in the telegraphic crawl,
as if it were the same order of fact and deserved the same kind
of belief as the number of dead reported just before and the
number of bomber sorties flown against Baghdad reported just
after.
And when there is no new news for a minute
or so? Then Blitzer asks the "CNN Web question of the day,"
which on Sunday was, "What's the biggest threat to Coalition
forces in Iraq? Friendly fire? Weapons of mass destruction?"
There was a third alternative I didn't write down and forgot.
In what world of sane journalism is such a question subject to
a vote by members of a television audience every one of whom
is ignorant of every fact at play? Why would "the most trusted
name in news" waste time pooling such ignorance, processing
it in its computers, making charts and graphs of the results?
Why would "the most trusted name in news" give currency
to the idiotic notion that people of good will can vote on facts?
Before we got any answers, there was
another cut to commercials for pharmaceuticals or garden products,
after which Blitzer read questions and emails from audience with
exactly the same stresses, same velocity, same im plication of
significance he earlier reported battlefield casualties and statements
by presidents of nations and leaders of armies.
There is no difference, no discrimination.
CNN is a world of equal-opportunity information. Facts and pooled
ignorance, off-the-wall opinion, all are equal in the carnival
of 24/7 reporting.
Anyone who has ever taken high school
physics can recognize what is going on. It's all about gas. A
gas will always expand to fill whatever container it occupies.
Put the same amount of gas in a little container and a big container
and the gas will fill either. The only difference is the distance
between gas molecules and pressure in the container. The gas
couldn't care less. It has no shape, no form, no structural identity
of its own. The only shape comes from the container, the space
available to be filled.
Jim Lehrer, in his three- or four-minute
summary at the top of "Newshour" provides just about
everything you might have learned in a full day watching CNN
or any of its less competent clones. A few minutes spent reading
the day's briefs on the Guardian's
website will give you a wider range of far more accurate
information and a much wider range of informed opinion.
When I was carrying on about this a little
while ago in the kitchen, where the tv was on and Wolf Blitzer
was talking about something, Diane said, "You don't get
it. For you, tv is information. You're thinking the wrong generation.
For Blitzer and CNN, it's entertainment. CNN isn't news; it's
entertainment. Get it?"
I got it, and she's right. This is war
as entertainment, as titillation. It's war as computer game,
only it's more passive because you don't even get to fondle the
joystick. Facts don't matter except as things with which to fill
space between commercials. One fact is exactly as good as another,
one bit of videotape exactly as important as another. CNN is
a medium in which there is no difference between noise and information.
All that matters is that ever-changing eye-candy appears on the
screen, voices you cannot ignore are heard, and you're awake
for the lawn product and pharmaceutical commercials.
I hate Wolf Blitzer's voice not because
of what he's saying, but because everything he's saying is exactly
the same, everything has exactly the same value. All those things
are not exactly the same and they do not have exactly the same
value. Some are awful, some are unspeakably horrible, none is
simple--and not one of the terrible facts in dispute will be
resolved or even clarified by a vote of the well-meaning ignorant.
Bruce Jackson
is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits Buffalo Report.
His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
Today's
Features
Alexander
Cockburn
The Politics of Casualties
David
Lindorff
Making America Safer...for Iraqi
Fighters
William
Blum
Some Observations on the Recent Behavior of the Empire
Gustavio
Sierra
The Morning After the Slaughter at
Nasser
Patrick
Cockburn
Playing Into Saddam's Hands
Robert
Jensen
Peter Arnett: Whipping Boy of the
Pentagon
Jeremy
Brecher
Uniting for Peace Update
N.D.
Jayaprakash
The Siege of Basra
LaDawn
Haglund
You Can Jail the Resisters, But You Can't Arrest the Resistance
Robert
Fisk
Truth and Subterfuge
Jemima
Khan
I'm Ashamed to be British
Stew
Albert
Total War
Steve Perry
War Web Log
Website
of the Day
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