"We are entering a historic phase where war is turned into a spectacle. A high percentage of people are watching without realising that it is a war," the OSCE's expert on media freedom, Freimut Duve, told AFP in an interview.

"This is dangerous for all democracies, because if it were to continue -- and I do not think it will -- then it gives a democracy the possibility to wage a war without having a public debate at home about the pros and cons of that war," he added.

"In a dictatorship, war is always heroic. For a democracy it has always been more difficult to wage war in public and now we have a different situation and it is a dangerous situation."

Duve said however that the television coverage of the Iraq crisis had become more critical since the US-led invasion of Iraq began on March 20.

During the first days of the war, it was presented as a real media spectacle to be followed around the clock, he said.

The viewer was led to believe that he "was very close" to the action, "but it was in fact a form of reportage, especially on US television, that avoided the reality of war. It was extremely far away from the realities in the cities, in the region."

In the past week, he said, "there was more information and more questions were being asked."

"Now we have a discussion on embedded journalism and on the very, very tense situation of their reporting under direct control of the military," he said, referring to journalists assigned to particular military units.

Duve said he planned to investigate reports that "embedded" journalists were cut off mid-report by military personnel who found their reporting too critical.

He also criticized the bombing of the building housing Iraqi state television, as he had criticized the bombing of Yugoslav television in Belgrade during the war in Kosovo in 1999.

"We see this as a tactic. To destroy the technology of the media of a dictatorial regime is still fighting the media," he said.

Duve said one could argue that this was a way of "silencing the propaganda," but "there are technicians and cameraman who you cannot call soldiers or propagandists and they are killed."

If one were to agree with this logic "you could also bomb newspaper distribution centres in Baghdad," he said.

He had harsh words for the initial reporting done by US' CNN and Britain's BBC, saying the latter even put images from the battlefield to music.

German television was more balanced in its reporting, because it also showed the impact of the conflict on neighbouring countries by filing reports from Amman and Cairo, he said.

The OSCE groups 53 countries in Europe and central Asia, as well as Canada and the United States.

Duve is a former publisher and the first person to be appointed in his post at the organisation.

SPACE.WIRE