How to get your war covered on TV: A guide for dummies

Attytood

OK, so you want to launch a war! Congratulations, but as any two-bit terrorist or respected world leader can tell you, deciding to drop some bombs or kill civilians willy-nilly is the easy part. The hard part is making sure that CNN or the other cable networks actually pay attention.

We believe it was Jimmy Stewart who said famously that "a televised cause is the only cause worth fighting for." The world is littered with examples of self-proclaimed "freedom fighters" who sought glory and 72 virgins by blowing up themselves and 50 innocent women and children in a crowded marketplace — only to be relegated to the CNN crawl, right after "Irving R. Johnson, a character actor who appeared in more than 70 films in the 1930s and ’40s, has died in a Hollywood nursng home at the age of 97…."

Look at Lebanon and Iraq, for example. Right now, CNN’s overcrowded Lebanon-Israel depth chart looks a lot like the first week of an NFL training camp, before all the free agents and low draft picks get sent to the taxi squad. (Notice the 9 outside linebackers on Haifa, for example).

But just an intermediate-range missile shot away in Iraq…we mean, for cryin’ out loud, who does a Sunni cleric have to sleep with to get Anderson Cooper to just do an airport drop-in?

That’s why we’re here to help. Backed by more than 25 years of experience, here’s a short version of Attytood’s Guide for Dummies: How to Get Your War Covered on TV.

1) Don’t just focus on the highest body counts. That’s a rookie insurgent mistake — we’ve seen it almost literally a million times. Right now in Iraq, terrorism and warfare are killing more than 100 people a day, which would be more than 36,000 dead people in just one year. That’s a lot more folks than have been killed in Lebanon and Iraq, where a mere 312 people have died in 13 bloody days. So which one gets the cool graphics, and which is “The Forgotten War”?

What gives here? It’s not how many you kill, but who you kill, and how. Let us explain.

2. Make sure that you attack people in predictable places, at predictable times. Ever notice that the latest, horrible carnage in Iraq seems to take place in a new city every day, sometimes in places you’ve never even heard of. Can you imagine the news chief of CNN telling Christiane Amanpour, “Go stand in the central market in Kirkuk and wait several weeks until there’s an explosion…or until you get kidnapped — whatever comes first"? Ain’t gonna happen.

Better to bomb the same targets daily — the Beirut airport, for example, because anyone who’s ever seen a Jerry Bruckheimer movie can relate to an exploding runway, or port cities like Tyre and Haifa. Hopefully, there’s a mountain or a rooftop that’s close enough for a telephoto lens, yet far enough there’s little danger that you’ll get blown up yourself. Remember, TV crews need a lot of time to get set up to get the right shot — just as, in a way, you do!

3. We can’t stress this enough: Make sure that your war has a clear beginning, and a clear ending (or least, tell people there’ll be one.) Everyone knows that TV news execs have the attention span of a gnat…on Ritalin. Israel’s leaders say they can wrap this all up in a couple of weeks — just in time for back-to-school shopping and the X Games on ESPN. Brilliant! In fact, most TV correspondents should be home in time to enjoy one or two weeks in the Hamptons before Labor Day.

Compare that to Iraq — a conflict that could drag on for five years, 10 years, 100 years, who knows? Why send Anderson to Baghdad now when those crazy Shia and Sunnis will still gang-banging away in 2009, or 2019 for that matter? Pacing is critical! Don’t get to be like “Lost,” where soon we’ll be seeing flashbacks of suicide bombers when they were young just to flesh out the story line for five or six years. Just tell us what the Dharma Project is, already! Jeez.

4. Everybody loves a traditional rivalry. Who doesn’t take sides when it’s Yankees and Red Sox, or Coke and Pepsi, or Arabs and Jews?! Your war needs to have a clear, easy-to-relate-to story line that goes back decades. What does Iraq have that compares with the Curse of the Bambino? All those Sunnis and Shias and Kurds — who can keep ‘em straight? Even George W. Bush can’t, and he’s the leader of the Free World!

5. Branding is everything. Look at “the war on terror” — that gets more coverage than what’s going on in Iraq, and that’s not even a real war! How can something called “sectarian violence” compete with the “the plot to flood New York’s financial district.” Does it even matter that New York’s financial district is above sea level? Apparently not.

6. Whatever else you do, if you want news coverage, don’t insist that troops be “embedded” with military units. Oddly enough, the embedding process has been hailed by members of the media — even as it has limited the number of reporters, their free movement, and the scope of coverage. Anyone notice how much news is coming from Lebanon, where there is no embedding?

A corollary: Don’t make the mistakes that Americans have done in Iraq — and let the country become so unsafe that journalists can’t move about freely without a military escort. That has really limited news coverage — we bet Bush and Dick Cheney just hate that!

There’s a lot more, but these six simple steps are a good start. Who knows, maybe the combatants in Iraq can do a successful “re-branding,” although we suggest they take the advice of Andy Card, who knows a thing or two about marketing a war, and wait until September.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? Every day, in addition to the unconscionable killing of thousands of civilians, an average of two or three Americans dies over in Iraq — decent, young, working class men and woman from small rural towns and hardscrabble urban neighborhoods. It’s sad, it’s tragic, and you would think the American media would be all over a story like that.

Maybe we are just dummies, after all.