Michiko Kakutani

About the author: Michiko Kakutani is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the New York Times.

Network producers have turned real-time reporting of the 2003 war in Iraq into prime-time reality TV entertainment. Rather than presenting the real horror of the war, newscasters are discussing the conflict as though it were a movie. Producers are engaging in willful sensationalism and sentimentality in an effort to keep viewers from changing channels or not watching at all.

Adecade or so after the Vietnam War ended, in the wake of a legion of Vietnam movies, some veterans put bumper stickers on their cars that read, "Vietnam was a war, not a movie." They did not want people to forget the losses that they and their comrades had sustained...