Saddam's Speech
Well, that was an odd experience. Having just watched Saddam's "Speech to the Nation" [24 Mar] on BBC, CNN, and SkyNews (hell, an hour later and still nothing on their website, lamers), I'm inclined to favour the BBC translator. His slightly stutter-start translations are in a more resonant tone than that of the SkyNews trier, and the guy CNN got, hells bells, did they just go out and hire Death? His slow bassy monotone rendered Saddam's merely mundane performance into a total snoozer. Anyway, the weird thing was flicking between the three translations that were all happening on the fly, and trying to compare the nuance of interpretation. I couldn't do it of course, I'd have needed three video recorders. Duh. Anyway, the post-analysis was fantastic. The BBC went to a tidy looking brit-reporter guy in Baghdad who quickly said: "yeah, not live, Saddam's not done live broadcasts for months. Hard to know, nothing conclusive, really." Sky News went to some studio talking heads, so I flicked to CNN and watched Amarnpour and some glammed up anchor launch into it...

Seriously, the first the thing they talked about for on length was "whether or not it was live." This after the BBC had just said, seconds before, "the idea that Saddam would be doing a live broadcast is ludicrous." Ahahaha. How I laughed. Of course, the beeb brit-reporter could be wrong, but he seemed to have a pretty good grasp on what was going on in Baghdad. (What I thought was interesting was his observation that Iraqi TV shows a lot of of Saddam in its propaganda. And yet we see none of it on the western TV news services. I mean, despite the fact it's propaganda, I'm intrigued to see what form it takes. Although, if Salam's take on it is worth anything, maybe not.)

Speaking of propaganda, it was interesting to see this on CNN
"EDITOR'S NOTE: CNN's policy is to not report information that puts operational security at risk"

Bummer that Al Jazeera didn't get their english-version channel up and running in time for 'Strike on Iraq.' A non-western point of view with the same sort of scope as CNN, BBC, SkyNews would be fantastic. Yes, it's on the web, but TV is so much easier on the OOS.

As long as the USA doesn't sabotage the attempts for the channels growth (remembering that they've tried to 'reign in' the channel in the past) (although, now that I look, the US does recognise a useful information source in times of need.).

Oh, and I enjoyed stumbling upon this, particularly the story on the USA changing it's name to "The Coalition." Ahahaha. And this (discovered by my favourite web girl as an offshoot to a geeky web lookup for something totally non-related to what I was supposed to be doing).
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