Selling the War on TV

Let's say you have a war to sell. You have the usual public relations tools at your disposal: highly scripted press conferences, stories leaked by White House officials to a compliant press. But what if you don't really trust the press? More to the point, what if fewer and fewer people (especially young people) are actually watching the news, and are instead gripped by the latest television phenomenon, an oxymoron called "reality TV"? Move over, Australian outback and bachelors in French chateaus. How about a reality TV show set in a war zone?

On February 27, as the soaring trumpets and military tattoo snare drums evoked the soundtracks of The Longest Day or The Dirty Dozen, viewers were introduced to ABC's Profiles From the Frontline, a six-part series about US Special Forces in Afghanistan. ABC News was let nowhere near this project. Instead, Jerry Bruckheimer, the movie producer whose totally excellent synergy with the Defense Department can be seen in Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor and Top Gun, served as co-producer. The Pentagon provided Bruckheimer's film crews with transportation, access to aircraft carriers and other military sites, as well as technical advice. As co-producer of the show Bertram van Munster put it, the military was "very enthusiastic about the whole thing. Obviously we're going to have a pro-military, pro-American stance." That's an understatement.

The music alone makes you want to run to the recruitment office. In the opening sequence, as we watch a rapid-fire montage of missiles launching, pilots soaring at a 45-degree angle in the wild blue and helicopters backlit by exploding flames, pounding drums accompany one of those Enya-style arias (kind of like a female muezzin) that have come to signify something on the order of "God Is Here." The most mundane operations are made weighty by a soundtrack of drums and bassoons, or percussion that simulates a beating heart. When one man calls "the wife" back home, the music shifts to the soulful acoustic guitar all too common on "smooth jazz" stations. Then, so we aren't choked up for too long, we get out on the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy, where the timpani-driven, violin-rich scoring typical of Star Wars enlivens your pulse and declares how endlessly romantic, exciting and noble war is.

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