Paul Boutin has all the details in Slate, right here.
“Viewers be warned: American TV networks make daily decisions on what to show or not to show their viewers. On the Internet, it’s easy to route around those decisions. If blogging makes everyone a journalist, then tricks like this one make everyone their own news producer. If you’re squeamish, or if you’re the relative of an American soldier, you may not want to watch images that the TV networks have deemed unfit for American audiences. But if you want to narrowcast the Iraq Satellite Channel to yourself to see what’s being fed to the Iraqi people during this war, you can.”
UPDATE I: Oops. Too bad we just blew it up. AP reports one version of the story, and CBS reports another, as follows:
The U.S. Air Force has hit Iraqi TV with an experimental electronmagetic pulse device called the “E-Bomb” in an attempt to knock it off the air and shut down Saddam Hussein’s propaganda machine, CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports. The highly classified bomb creates a brief pulse of microwaves powerful enough to fry computers, blind radar, silence radios, trigger crippling power outages and disable the electronic ignitions in vehicles and aircraft. Iraqi satellite TV, which broadcasts 24 hours a day outside Iraq, went off the air around 4:30 a.m. local time (8:30 p.m. ET Tuesday). Iraq’s domestic television service was not broadcasting at the time.
Officially, the Pentagon does not acknowledge the weapon’s existence. Asked about it at a March 5 news conference at the Pentagon, Gen. Tommy Franks said: “I can’t talk to you about that because I don’t know anything about it.” The use of the secret weapon came on a day that saw intense action on the battlefield.
(via Paul Boutin’s blog), Discuss
UPDATE II: CBS News has altered their story linked above — now, all references pointing to the so-called “E-Bomb” have been removed.
UPDATE III: Commenting on a Wednesday morning CNN report that Iraqi TV is back online again, Paul writes, “the story is being changed online as I type,” and “I’m only able to get a static image of what looks like a press conference, above. But it’s different from the image that was online while the station was reportedly knocked out last night.” More on Paul’s blog here. BoingBoing reader Bob posts in the “discuss” forum, “The Iraqi TV feed is back up on Telstar 5 as of 1000 Eastern 2003-03-26. One satellite board I read said it came up around 0245 this morning.” And Reuters now reports that the world’s biggest journalists’ organization claims the bombing “was an attempt at censorship and may have breached the Geneva Conventions.”