Having read Mahira Kakkar's Voice Box column on accountability in the March Juilliard Journal, and looking with dismay upon the first war of my adult life, I figured it was time to become current-affairs savvy. So when the bombs began falling, I resolved to become more clued up than an infomaniac on amphetamines, taking in news from TV, the Internet, and newspapers. Days later, I realized I couldn't handle it. I was up to my eyeballs in "war porn." That's the name I've given to the slurry of coverage/infotainment that the war spawned. I surveyed it during the first week of the conflict in March--it was gruesome work.

Starting with television, I watched a marathon of wartime fare with straight-to-video titles like "Target: Iraq," "Wartime Countdown," "Operation Total Iraqi Obliteration" (O.K, the last one is made up, though not implausible). Is it necessary to give these shows titles and theme tunes and "more after the break" theatrics? Do people turn on a news channel to catch a specific program? I don't think so. Strangely, despite the branding, the programs seemed virtual clones of one another. No matter what station I tuned to, the anchor was transferring between spots around the globe where various degrees of nothing was happening. In Kuwait City nothing had happened all night, so the correspondent was forced to recall the previous night when nothing briefly stopped happening. Then to Baghdad and one of the many few Western correspondents left in the city. Then to the White House briefing room, where nothing will happen until 8 p.m. ... And on it went.

Tim Whitelaw

Padding is the curse of round-the-clock news, but during the war it assumed epic proportions. I saw one program that speculated on how horrific it would be if the Iraqis used chemical weapons on our boys, then proceeded to show an animation of how it might look if they did (the curiosity was killing me). That's the thing with 24/7 news--it requires the kind of integrity that you're not likely to get from commercial networks. I particularly love the "experts" they bring on: a man who did plumbing consultation in Tikrit; the manager of the Saddam International Airport's rent-a-car facility; endless war veterans proffering advice. When one CNN anchor asked a Balkans war vet what would be the best thing to do if someone started launching chemicals at you, he said "Obviously, the best thing would be to find that launcher and kill those people." Obviously. But CNN has ensured that, by loading up their video feeds with scrolling subtitles and embedded images, there's hardcore "war porn" to distract you at all times from the dead weights in the studio.

Then there's the jingoism. I heard a commentator describe Colin Powell as "the most trusted man in America, maybe the world." (After Santa, no doubt.) I saw the German ambassador telling us that Germany supports the American soldiers. The lavishly pomaded anchor then produced some footage of anti-war protests in Germany as proof that Germany isn't a bona-fide subscriber to the Bush club. The ambassador understandably countered that bigger weekend-long protests in the U.S. cast doubt as to whether even the American citizenry was behind its president.

I abandoned TV for The New York Times, whose solid coverage is blighted only by Maureen Dowd, whose self-admiringly irreverent approach had an aptness when a certain lewd indiscretion in the Oval Office was the stuff of import, but now, as the world order teeters, Dowd is still lounging in her smug chair, sounding off. Here she is last September, as war fever was rising, "commenting" on Bush's pursuit of Saddam: "There was no compelling new evidence. Mr. Bush offered only an unusually comprehensive version of the usual laundry list. Saddam is violating the sanctions, he tried to assassinate Poppy Bush, he's late on his mortgage payments, he tips 10 percent, he has an unjustifiable fondness for 'My Way', he gassed his own people..." This is desperately cute; she wants to trivialize Bush but ends up whitewashing the acts of violence and genocide perpetrated by the Iraqi regime--it ain't smart and it sure ain't funny. Elsewhere, in its March 22 edition, The Times quoted one official who said: "There are reports that he was wounded, reports that he is dead, reports that he is alive," referring to Hussein. "One of those reports is probably right." That's all the news that's fit to print, apparently.

I then turned to the British media, hoping for some relief. No such luck. The Financial Times reported that, in wartime, the demand for luxury stationery increases as people "turn to the contemplative act of letter-writing." Whoa! Better start stockpiling Parker pens. Meanwhile, the Spectator's Mark Steyn, always willing to go that extra mile for a dreadful pun, concluded that Uday Hussein was killed in the opening night of the war--"Saddam's baby got thrown out with the Baath water." Ugh. Then there was this quote from hydraulics tycoon Gus Ramirez, who, as reported in Private Eye magazine, e-mailed his employees the following: "It is not by coincidence that there is facial similarity between Saddam and Hitler and Stalin. This may be God's way of warning those who seek inaction." Praise be!

No matter where I looked, it seemed that good judgment was the first casualty of war. I've had enough. I've run the gamut of "war porn," and I'm uncertain of whether my sanity can withstand much more. I'm just not strong enough to sift through this stuff. From now on, I'm keeping the media at arms length.

Tim Whitelaw is a graduate diploma student in composition.

Voice Box is a student opinion column appearing regularly in The Juilliard Journal. To submit a column for consideration, please e-mail it to journal@juilliard.edu with “Voice Box” in the subject heading, and include a phone number where you can be reached. Columns should cover topics of interest to the Juilliard community, and be about 500 words.