When the war finally happened, it came almost as a pleasant surprise to the news anchors who had waited through the night for something to stir.By 2 a.m. yesterday morning, they were betraying their disillusionment at the lack of activity. Dawn was close.
The city was waking up. The B52s remained on the tarmac at their British bases.
Across the news channels, the cameras were fixed on the Baghdad skyline while their operators got some sleep. They were showing only empty streets and empty sky. It became a traffic report. Not too many cars on the roads, we were told. Vehicles are moving freely.
Sky News's Kay Burley chatted to the Kuwait correspondent who was being beamed live onto the studio's enormous screen, built for enormous news. She suggested that news junkies could catch some sleep and try again tomorrow.
"Blitzkrieg? Not tonight, it would seem." She spoke too soon. "Air raid sirens!" her co-host yelled at 2:32 a.m.
Within minutes, the pictures had taken on a sombre familiarity. The limp anti-aircraft fire rising into the sky, swatting at ghosts. The green of the night-vision camera. The reporter at the end of a phone line, searching the skyline for flames. "Now things are really picking up," he said, just as they died down again.
The attack was brief, but it was a start. For most of yesterday morning, the news channels replayed the pictures constantly until the chemical attack warnings took over as the story. For a few hours in the late morning, it was difficult to find a report not being filed from behind a gas mask. Some reporters even got to demonstrate their panic as sirens sounded during live reports.
This is a highly technological war, as confirmed by the array of gadgets at hand to both Fox News and Sky News. Fox has a massive map room in which retired US generals push electronic forces across a computerised map.
Meanwhile, as debate grew over the authenticity of Saddam's television address, the station was first to come up with the idea of placing the tape side by side with a previous one. This, though, only confused matters, as we now couldn't be sure if either of these Saddams was the real one.
Sky News labels its favourite gadget the "Skystrator", the main function of which seems to be to allow its experts place little mushroom clouds on a map of Iraq. That Sky News had a satellite image of plumes of smoke pouring from Iraqi oil fields less than an hour after news broke of their destruction suggested that the station now has access to more military technology than most developed nations.
Against such massive hardware, though, RTÉ struggled bravely on with Richard Downes in Baghdad, Mark Little in Northern Iraq, Charlie Bird in Kuwait and extensive, gadget-free coverage from the studio.
By early evening, while CNN was reporting "flashes, sounds of explosions," the same flashes and explosions could be seen and heard live on Fox News.
Rupert Murdoch's unapologetically "patriotic" station is bringing the war into the living room in the way that CNN did in 1991. It had a camera on the front-line, its night-vision lens capturing grainy green pictures of the artillery barrage on Iraqi positions.
Reporter Greg Kelly watched it like a kid at a fireworks display.
"Wuh!" he would say as a round launched close by. "Jeez!" he would add. "The only thing that's missing is return fire."
As night fell, it was back to the night vision images and the wail of sirens. ITN showed the strike jets taking off for Iraq and the BBC showed the bombs landing.
You could watch Baghdad burn as you ate your dinner.