Annoyingly, a good piece about Saddam Hussein's execution in today's Irish Times by Fintan O'Toole is hidden behind a pay wall. But, if you can get to it, it is a rewarding read. It takes up some of the arguments made by commenters to my earlier posting about the media debate on the execution.
Here are a couple of key extracts:
"The unofficial video of Saddam's execution can be seen as the moment when the new media age moved definitively from shaping the reporting of events to shaping the nature of those events themselves...
"The video shows us, too, that what has happened to propaganda bears an exact parallel to what has happened to war. The United States perfected conventional warfare, and its easy victory in Iraq demonstrated a kind of invincibility. It also perfected the management of the reporting of warfare...
"But just as conventional military superiority proved relatively meaningless in Iraq, so victory in the conventional propaganda war is proving equally useless... Likewise media strategies can all but flatten independent journalism, but they are useless against the anarchic, formless, hit-and-run nature of the new media".
O'Toole puts all this in context, of course, so read it if you can. But these extracts provide enough of an argument to make us think, do they not?
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