Some media thoughts on Gulf War II coverage



Sometimes FOX News is hard to take. Late nights here on the west coast we get Laurie Dhue, an OK anchor who wears LOTS and LOTS of lipstick. It is kind of gross. Then Rita Cosby comes on. She is ok but ALWAYS says "my sources" watch and see. If you watch long enough you can tell when it is coming. Lots of times it goes like this "...the bomb fell on the house earlier this afternoon." (Oh god here it comes...) "In fact My Sources tell me it was daytime."



Whoever is directing Fox at night is confusing the anchors. Lots of "where are we going looks" and reporters thinking there is going to be tape rolling during a report. Sometimes you hear "what you should be seeing right now..." a not too subtle wake up call from a pissed off reporter trying to stay cool.



A favorite Fox moment was the night of the war starting one of their retired military guys, a really gruff guy, was asked what the Iraqi leadership was doiung now that the war had begun. His reply "If it was me I'd be filling up the toilets."



During the war coverage I am in picture in picture mode surfing for live shots. I don't even know what station I am watching I just look for live reports. The shots Fox had of the tanks at the Palace Sunday were amazing. Tonight MSNBC seems to have had the good live shots from the field but they tend to show the generic talking head anchor shot when there is no live feed instead of running tape of a previous report. I don't need to see an anchor close up that much. And I can't stand that map they use where the guy has a stick shoving stuff around. Looks like they are playing Risk.



CNN is full of blabbing gasbags. Aaron Brown is the worst. He takes f o r e v e r to say anything. I love it (well not really) when he tells a guest "we don't have much time left here but if you could give me a quick answear to this question blah blah blah. The question(s) take forever no wonder you have no time! They do have some good live feeds and I'll watch those. Just about all I see Larry King doing is talking to other journalists. Who cares! When he takes a live feed or talks to Hackworth I turn up the sound.



SInce I watch it all on my Dish Network setup and CNN, FOX, and MSNBC are all close that is all I see. Don't know what CBS or ABC are doing.



Is Dan Rather wearing his fly fishing war vest?



Why don't the networks have translators standing by on the set to do translations 24/7?