#Saddam hussein capture picture tv#

'I'm getting peppered all the time, 'Do you have pictures of this? Do you have pictures of that?'' says Air Force Col.

#Saddam hussein capture picture tv#

No sooner does an image play on the TV news than do Pentagon, Central Command and White House officials call Combat Camera to ask for similar ones for their briefings. Now, the 150 Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force photographers in the Iraqi war zone have to keep up with a much larger force of fiercely competitive news organizations producing torrents of images in real time. In Grenada, Panama and the first gulf war, Pentagon strictures on news coverage had assured Combat Camera a virtual monopoly on images from the front lines. postage stamp in 1999.īut the new demands on Combat Camera have come with a host of challenges. Its 1967 image of American soldiers leaping from a chopper in Vietnam didn't see such wide play until it was released on a U.S. Such quick release is a departure for Combat Camera. 'And by 11:15, we had the videotape downstairs in public affairs, where all the civilian news media were.'Ĭombat Camera's clip of Tomahawk missiles rocketing off Navy ships - tinted green from a night-vision lens - was playing on network news programs within minutes. 'We literally - within about 30 seconds of the president finishing his speech - had the images up and available on the Web,' Reger recalls. The Joint Combat Camera Center got to work assembling images of America's military might even before President Bush had wrapped up his speech to the nation on the first night of the war. 'This war is a grand narrative, and it's a grand narrative told by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld primarily, and they have a lot at stake in making this story come out right.' Lance Bennett, a University of Washington political scientist who edited the 1994 book Taken By Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S.

'This further reduces the chance of seeing anything that resembles realistic warfare,' says W. Some critics have a less charitable view, saying the work more closely resembles propaganda. 'It's been a way to keep that from getting slanted or going too far one way or another.' Chuck Reger, the operations chief at the Combat Camera Center. 'It's been a way to balance what the external media has shown,' says Master Sgt. Photos of bombed-out Baghdad neighborhoods and so-called 'collateral damage' are not. troops are easy to find among Combat Camera's public images. Photos of sleek fighter jets, rescued POWs, and smiling Iraqis cheering the arrival of U.S. And Combat Camera photographers have become the Pentagon's visual storytellers, snapping images that shape the look and feel of a war that is also being chronicled by 600 embedded news reporters. In the battlefield of public opinion, experts say, images are a potent weapon.