The day in review
Most of today's mainstream coverage of the Iraq war has focused on Baghdad. Unfortunately that has led to some inaccurate reporting of the media situation. A lot of journalists do not seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that there's a difference between a transmitter and a network. When they say that Iraqi radio and TV is off the air, they mean in Baghdad. Today's reports from BBC Monitoring indicate that there's still some state-controlled media on the air in northern Iraq, and some unidentified pro-Saddam programming monitored on 657 kHz, a frequency previously used for the regional service in Kurdish for northern Iraq. I suspect that there's also pro-Saddam programming on FM and maybe low powered mediumwave stations.
We have, possibly, seen the last of the Iraq Satellite Channel for the time being. It's now more than 24 hours since they briefly appeared last night, and I got a couple of screenshots of what might be the last news bulletin aired under the Saddam regime. Some news agencies seem to have missed this brief reappearance, saying it had been off for two days!
Today, of course, we had the loss of more journalists who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I spent a lot of the day piecing together what happened in two separate incidents this morning, and I'm fairly confident that the account on this page is as close to the truth as we're likely to get while military action is ongoing.
There have been some lighter moments. One article I read said that US military briefers have been given coaching in how to pronounce the names of the towns that crop up in the briefings. Apparently one individual's attempt at Umm Qasr came out sounding like the Arabic for "dirty mother". Not the sort of thing to say when you're trying to win peoples' hearts and minds!
7:42:02 PM 
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