Wired on Friday: When Carole Coleman was feistier in her interviewing style than President Bush was expecting, it didn't make headlines here in the United States. There were a few below-the-fold stories, or quotes in the wire reports taken from a "contentious interview". The US is often accused of parochialism in its foreign news coverage, but in this case, it was no different from most nations. Tours abroad by heads of state are not generally front page news.
But even if news is not conveyed by the headlines, these days it can find its way around the American public through other routes. RTÉ kept a video and audio archive of the interview online, which meant that the American public - or at least those with a broadband connection - could see it for themselves.
It's been fascinating to read US reactions to Coleman's interview on the websites that carried the link. Some applauded her interruptions of the president's set piece. Some felt her points were marred by her - to American eyes - uncivil approach. Others made the case (shared by many on the European side of the Atlantic) that such combative quizzing, while entertaining, still seems to allow politicians to slip by having done little more than repeat their talking points. But all of them were sitting watching Irish television, probably for the first time, in their American homes. And their replies showed that it was being watched in a very different way in this new setting.
In the short days of the US invasion of Iraq, I wrote in this column about the effects (some good, some bad) of the wider dissemination, via the internet, of personal opinion on the war against terrorism.
At that time, it was mostly textual, forwarded news articles that let the US and its foreign critics see for the first time what each were writing about the other. Now, just a few months later, that thin stream has been augmented. Pictures and video now send their messages across national borders.
Coleman's discussion was peppered with references to the video and stills that have come out of that war and its aftermath: shots of dying US soldiers and the horrific images of detainee abuse. The images of Abu Ghraib flew around the world without the internet's help. But the chances are that they would never have left the Iraqi prison if it wasn't for the ready prevalence of digital cameras among the troops.
And then there are the beheadings. Elided on every mainstream television news show in the US and most international news programmes, the clips sent out over the internet by the terrorists are easily accessed for curious spectators.
There is a peculiar symmetry to how this imagery is distributed across the internet. Posted initially on Arab fundamentalist websites, many of the links to hostage footage seems to be mainly on conservative Western sites. Angry that the media had given so much publicity to Abu Ghraib, and so little to the violence among US opponents, these sites set about giving bandwidth time to their enemy's actions.
"Starve them of the oxygen of publicity," Britain's Margaret Thatcher once demanded, prohibiting Irish Republican groups from speaking on British television. But what we see now is the very opposite, the purest oxygen of imagery fanned into a much freer media by both sides.
Iraq has become the war of the internet cut-up: a 30-second night vision clip of a helicopter gunship attacking an Iraqi car. Galleries of troops' photo albums give a softer view of the US army's presence. One person links to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice denying the presence of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq in 2000. Others link to Bill Clinton and Al Gore warning of Iraq's nuclear and biological caches during their administration.
Fiercely against the war and Bush, Al Gore has taken to giving speeches to the volunteers of MoveOn.org, an internet-driven political grassroots organisation. Videos of his speeches fly across the internet, even though they are given little coverage by television media here. And, in turn, his detractors have cut and sampled the same speeches. Images of his face in mid-tirade are turned into distorted, fire-breathing caricatures, and spread among conservative- leaning internet users.
Imagery on MoveOn.org has also changed. They held a competition to provide an anti-Bush television advertisement from internet users' contributions. Among the many entries, some used imagery from Nazi Germany to villainise George Bush. Republicans seized on this at the time as being a distasteful indication of how extreme the Left had become in the US, showing clips of the Nazi ads to emphasise their point. Now those images have found their way into an anti-Kerry television campaign.
The moment they appeared, Kerry's office put out a press release which condemned Bush's comparison of Kerry with Nazis. They even started a mass email campaign encouraging their online membership to complain. So the same Nazi video, mixed up and re-edited online, has now been used to attack Bush, attack his denigrators, attack Kerry, and now is being used to attack Bush again. All with hardly any discussion of any substantial issue at all.
We tend to see photographs and video as the conclusive end to discussion: the arresting image, we say. There is certainly little to say when faced with images of torture or murder. But what happens when the whole discussion can take place in an exchange of images: where the audience can provide their own interpretations or frame the image in their own creations? With broadband, the internet is moving from being the place where "everybody has a printing press" to a place where everyone has their own editing suite.
Will such power diminish the hold the image has over us: whether it's torturers smoking cigarettes or a president in his vest? Or will handing out that power to everyone drown out any reasonable conversation about our differences that we might once have hoped to conduct?
