CSI & CSI Miami

This Column first appeared in the Age on April 5

I read in the newspaper last week that a woman in China cut off her own finger to cure, or perhaps distract, her husband from his addiction to television coverage of the Iraqi war. On the radio I heard an Iraqi man talk about how he planned to watch CNN for the latest updates of the bombing raids, not hide in the shelters, where the was, of course, no TV. 'I await my fate,' he said. I received an email giving me the website address for Raed (http://www.dearraed.blogspot.com/) a young Iraqi man who is keeping a vivid diary of what is happening in Bagdad.

A newspaper photo that affected me strongly was one of a dead Iraqi soldiers shoes, still on his lifeless feet. The shoes were cheap, full of holes. One day every major paper in NSW - the Daily Telegraph, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald - had the same image on it of a captured soldier being cradled and given water by an American. This was media spin big time: we fight for freedom, the picture said. We are harsh but fair. But spin aside, there is something about still photos, about the written word, which gives me space to think about this war in a way that television does not.

Before the war began, Channel Nine was promising, in a series of rocket-fuelled ads, that they would be reporting, live, from Day 1. This interchannel warfare has worked and last week Channel Nine killed its competitors, leading by a margin of 34.4% of the total audience share. On top of that they'll SMS you up to four times a day with breaking news if you ask them to (and pay).

How long will war be a ratings winner? It seems the 'shock and awe' technique isn't quite panning out. Will viewers really want a blow by blow for weeks, if not months? Possibly. This is an era where shows like CSI (Tuesdays, Channel 9, 8.30pm) top the ratings. CSI is big on spin: Tony Gregg insisted when commentating the cricket over summer that he and his wife loved the series and they couldn't wait for the sister series, CSI Miami to begin.

CSI is about violence and how it can be understood using forensics. How the crime scene has everything you need in it to solve a crime. Like much - though certainly not all - war coverage, the show is obsessed with detail and graphics, in the way cartoons are. People often talk about the show as representative of a new kind of TV made for a TV-literate audience who have an internal a template, which allows the show to leap straight into stereotypes. Well, I am TV literate, but I can't get past the fact CSI grosses me out and that forensics only interest me if I care about the people who have been killed or those who are trying to solve the crime. This is a show that would do an extreme close-up of the Chinese woman's severed finger to show us how mutilated it is, and perhaps prod into the flesh with tweezers to pull out a bit of flaked metal so we know what the weapon she used was. Then it would rerun the video of what the husband was watching at the time to see if her violence was triggered by any particular incident or whether it was random. But this is not a show that would ask what drives a woman to such acts or what kind of world we live in that war can become an addiction.

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