When the U.S. first went to war in Iraq, one of the
consequences was a revolution in
telecommunications: Cable news became a force
in the media, and the world woke with a shock to
just how much and how fast information could
travel, even in wartime. Eight years and what feels
like several technological ages later, the U.S.
went back to Baghdad. Has the Internet changed
the way we experience war?
Not yet. Certainly the mainstream news sites havent. Without the resources or contacts to provide first-hand coverage, they were forced rely on other media for their coverage, choosing either to rewrite stories that arrived over the wire services, or in the case of sites such as CNN (a member of the Time Warner family, as is Time Digital) that are affiliated with a TV network, to simply stream television coverage of the crisis over the Web.