TV loves a great visual, and a giant statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in a Baghdad public square Wednesday, a major demolition job started by Iraqis but finished by U.S. Marines in an armored vehicle, was an irresistible symbol of the entire war.

Transfixing those who watched as it played out across news channels worldwide and the major U.S. networks, it was replayed almost in tape loop Wednesday, destined in all probability to become the war’s signature image.

By the end of the day’s TV coverage, the symbol’s power had overtaken the hard facts. The tenor of American coverage proclaimed, as MSNBC’s on-screen label had it, the “liberation of Baghdad,” overwhelming more cautious reporters who pointed out that the U.S. forces did not yet control a majority of the capital and much more fighting was likely.

Few of the American news outlets emphasized how small the crowd of Iraqis around the statue really was.

And while all emphasized the potential propaganda value of such images going out on Arab TV, they did not allow for the fact that, as University of Chicago professor Charles Lipson cautioned, symbols are in the eye of the beholder.

“Al-Jazeera is showing these images and ultimately those images will have an effect,” said Lipson, director of the university’s Program on International Politics, Economics and Security. “But we shouldn’t assume that images have only one meaning, or that people change the negative views of a lifetime in an instant of revelation, like Saul on the road to Tarsus. The real question is, over the long run what’s going to happen in Iraq?”

The comparison that came all too easily and often was to the “tearing down of the Berlin Wall,” as MSNBC anchor Lester Holt said, ignoring that this was merely one of scores of Saddam statues in Iraq rather than the defining symbol of a half-century geopolitical rift.

Still, there was no denying the power of seeing the statue tumble shortly before 11 a.m. EDT and then get danced on and dragged in fragments through the streets.

“These pictures are the purest gold that the administration could imagine,” said Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume.

CNN’s Octavia Nasr, who monitors Arab TV for the cable news channel, said the images were being presented there with “something like an apology” after the Arab channels had taken an anti-American invasion tone throughout the war.

“You have all these anchors and reporters trying to explain to their viewers, telling them that, “although we’re bringing you first images of this demise of the Iraqi regime in no way are we in support of it,’ ” Nasr said.

The American news channels and networks, the latter returning to blanket war coverage lasting into the afternoon for the first time since the end of March, did sound some notes of caution about the meaning of such a symbol.

CNN in particular noted that its Martin Savidge had been reporting from amid a vicious firefight, also in Baghdad, not long before the statue fell in Firdos Square. And embedded Fox reporter Greg Kelly in Baghdad said that “we’ve seen pockets of resistance in the morning and now we’re seeing pockets – pockets – of jubilation.”

But by the end of the day, NBC’s Bob Arnot, also embedded with U.S. troops, had removed the veil of caution. “It feels like Paris 1944, if you’ve seen the movies, in terms of widespread jubilation,” he said.

As if to match such sentiment, MSNBC had by then transformed the statue collapse into myth. It was edited into one seamless fall, rather than the herky-jerky, two-part process it had been, and the network had, on at least one occasion, told viewers that Iraqi citizens had pulled it down on their own.

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(c) 2003, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-04-09-03 2129EDT