12 April 2003

US sends broadcast team to Baghdad airport More US broadcasting plans for Iraq were announced today. The US military says it's planning to start TV and radio broadcasts from Baghdad international airport early next week. Captain Frank Thorp, briefing reporters at CENTCOM in Qatar, says a ground-based broadcasting team is on its way, and it's hoped to be operational on Monday. He did not give details of the content or frequencies to be used, but presumably this will be a service for the Baghdad area that will be able to broadcast live announcements and information. 6:34:48 PM     comment on this entry []

Radio Free Iraq expansion plans   The deputy director of Radio Free Iraq, Kamran Al-Karadaghi, is planning to return to Iraq after 23 years in exile to set up the station's Baghdad bureau. RFI director David Newton says the station wants to expand broadcasting to 24 hours a day. It broadcast five hours a day before the war and now is currently the air for 10 hours daily. 6:21:40 PM     comment on this entry []

Towards Freedom TV Despite all the confusing and partly contradictory information coming out of London and Washington over the past two days, I am hopeful of being able to publish a coherent account of what's planned by Monday. I think that the ease with which Baghdad fell took everyone by surprise and led to calls for an acceleration of a plan which was still not fully developed. It should all have been thought out months ago, of course, but it seems that in the past couple of days some officials in Washington have been making it up as they go along! In the meantime, we may be missing the daily outpourings from Comical Ali (Al-Sahaf), but Donald Rumsfeld is proving a pretty good replacement. After watching several reports from different parts of Baghdad where even hospitals had been gutted by looters, Rummy stood before the world's media and said it was all press exaggeration and that - yes - everything was under control. One interview I saw last night could be significant. BBC World had an all-too-brief interview with a guy who was once Saddam's Chief of Staff, but fled 10 years ago after three attempts on his life because he tried to reveal the brutality and corruption. This guy said he knew for a fact that Saddam had a fleet of private jets. The US military say they found five of them, but he said Saddam owned a lot more than five jets, leading him to believe that he had fled the country along with his family and other top officials. But I am left wondering how he could have done this without the coalition forces knowing about it. Speaking of BBC World, they - along with other 24-hour news channels - are gradually slipping back into their accustomed format. Last night, anchorman Adrian Finighan "welcomed back" the sports news :-) That's the signal that I, too, may be able to indulge in watching something other than war news. It's been 24 days now. But we will continue to watch media developments in Iraq. especially the behaviour of the many clandestine stations that have been broadcasting into the country in recent years. 12:15:31 PM     comment on this entry []

© Copyright 2003 Andy Sennitt.