So far, this war has been a lesson in the dramatic limits of the media (television particularly) to accurately convey the weight of matters of life and death. The demands of the 24-hour news cycle has, over the years, created an industry that has perfected the task of making minor events seem momentous, while totally losing the ability to convey the scope and complexity of what should be important in the real-world. Our news system, which should be informing us about the world, is capable of covering Michael Moore's comments on the Oscars (Ed Harris and Martin Scorsese: For! Jon Voight and Cliff Robertson: Against! Harrison Ford: Discomforted smile! Adrian Brody: Better writing!) but falls far short of providing any insight into how the Iraqi war will play out.

Meanwhile, Friday headlines read "Dow soars on hope of a quick war" and Monday headlines read "Dow crashes as pessimism sets in." Journalists refer to the bombing of Baghdad as "last night's show," ask whether we're facing a "quagmire" because the war wasn't over in 100 hours, and talk breathlessly about minor firefights in a war that may see the widespread use of nerve gas near urban areas. The prospect that the Iraqi invasion would trigger a widespread general uprising against Hussein is clearly a myth, but the media is giving us no analysis of the real support for Hussein, which is the key fact that will determine how many people will die in the weeks, months, and years to come.

The twenty-four hours news stations show cameras locked on targets in downtown Baghdad and, as long as fireballs aren't rising into the sky, talk about the surprisingly routine days. Oh, and several thousand bombs have been dropped elsewhere in the country. These soda straws of video fill the airwaves (some of the news stations are using 4-way split screens so that not a single detonation will be missed) but add up to nothing. A bomb hits a building in downtown Iraq and news of its burning is broadcast around the globe. Is whatever function the building served degraded? And if the reporters can't answer that (and they can't), these images are just warporn.

One huge component of this is, if not particular to television, at least characteristic of TV. As far as TV is concerned, there is no history. At best, there is the current emotion of "surprise" as in "Are you surprised by the tactics used by the Fedayeen?" The Afghanistan campaign was only 18 months ago and right up until the sudden collapse of the Taliban regime, these same reporters and news stations were using the exact same rhetoric of quagmires and surprisingly slow progress. With the news cycle so compressed, all that matters is how the last 24 hours compares with the previous 24.