If you've ever seen the TV series "Breaking News," you can view it as an introduction to the war in Iraq. The series, which was produced two to three years ago for the TNT cable network, has had a limited run on the Bravo cable network.

In the series, reporters head into the field with

In the war against Iraq, reporters are sent into the field-embedded with the troops-with small consumer-style digital camcorders, edit their footage on laptop computers and send it into the networks by satellite phone or e-mail.

Who knew?

Everything a war correspondent uses to file stories has gotten smaller and easier to use, from telephones to cameras, from night scopes to satellite uplinks.

While satellite phones have been around for some time, indeed CNN used one during the 1991 Gulf War, this time everyone has one, and like most electronics, they have gotten better and much smaller, and somewhat less expensive. Twelve years ago, the satellite phone required a fixed position, plenty of extra batteries and lots of crossed fingers. Today's satellite phones are the size of a large cell phone, have good batteries and can be used while crossing the desert in an armored vehicle at 50 miles per hour. You can also connect a video camera to the phone, to generate a live picture.

Broadcast television cameras have remained about the same size for 20 years. But there has been a huge improvement in professional consumer video cameras. Even palm-sized digital camcorders generate an acceptable broadcast picture for around one percent of the cost of the broadcast camera. While no one will mistake their capabilities for what broadcast cameras provide, they perform exceedingly well. And, instead of large machines to edit the footage, connecting a cable from the camera to a laptop computer turns that machine into anything from a basic edit bench to one that can be comparable to fancy editing systems. And, the output of those computer-editing systems can be converted to a digital file and sent to the network by e-mail or via the satellite phone. It takes time to do it this way, but it has been done many times during the early stages of the war against Iraq.

Satellite uplinks are also now smaller and more mobile. In the 1991 Gulf War, the "flyaway" satellite uplink came in 10 cases and weighed in at around 500 pounds. Today's version is down to two cases that come in at less than 100 pounds.

And while no journalist can go to war without batteries, all of this equipment can be plugged into a vehicle's electrical system to provide power to operate the gear or to charge the batteries.

The technology is really amazing, and, so far, it has been used to provide us with what have been called "slices" of war. It has enabled us to see at least pieces of the war up close, sometimes in "real time" or a lot sooner than we would have just a few years ago. It is a good thing, but as with all technology improvements, we must be careful to remember it is the story we tune in for and not the toys that bring it to us.

David Cohen, a member of SJR's board of advisors, was the Midwest bureau chief for ABC News from 1986 to 1988. He is currently a public relations consultant in the San Francisco area.