The changing sounds of war: Television news music and armed conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq

From their earliest days, moving images have served as the privileged medium for the public representation of armed conflict, from the Spanish-American War of 1898 to the countless military skirmishes and wars of the early twenty-first century. As Paul Virilio has pointedly observed, "war is cinema and cinema is war."3 That moving images of war are eminently newsworthy as well has repeatedly proven itself in American media over the past century, from newsreel applications of the journalistic dictum "if it bleeds, it leads" to cnn's meteoric rise to preeminence in the field of television news through its slick reporting of the Persian Gulf War of 1991.4 When we add the sonorous realm - sound effects, music - to the visual representations, a new level of experience results in the audio-viewer:5 In his classic text The Theory of Film from 1960, Siegfried Kracauer makes the following perceptive observation about the addition of aurality to film images: