COMBAT IN PANAMA : Invasion Gives New Meaning to ‘Live’ TV

The invasion was televised live--geopolitics verite.

Even in Panama, people could learn about events outside their doors by watching American news broadcasts. The United States was the invading force and the broadcasting source.

Starting at about 9:30 p.m. PST, the four network news operations broadcast the American invasion of Panama live, and shortly thereafter aired uninterrupted coverage for 12 hours.

Yet this was not television as we have come to know it--full of pictures, unforgettable images, a sense of video appearing so seamlessly in one’s living room that it doesn’t seem quite real.

Instead, most of the news came from network correspondents holed up in their hotel rooms to avoid abduction, talking on the phone, painting pictures with their words. At one point, NBC and CBS correspondents whispered into the phones as Panamanian troops pounded on their doors, trying to abduct them. Their words were carried live.

Several journalists were taken--some with guns held to their heads. They included reporters from the Associated Press, Reuters and the New York Times, and producers for CBS, ABC and NBC, though most apparently have since been freed.

“People watching this stuff in their front rooms, sometimes they don’t realize the danger. It was real today,” said Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief for NBC.

Word of the invasion was leaked even as troops were leaving Ft. Bragg, N.C., and was aired on the CBS and NBC evening news nearly seven hours before the White House announced it.

In fact, when CBS broadcast a detailed discussion of the troop movements and NBC showed pictures of American C-141 planes landing in Panama at 3:30 p.m. PST, it was 1 hour and 20 minutes before the Pentagon had alerted the journalists who were supposed to travel with American troops as part of a highly secret Pentagon media pool.

And, over the course of the night, Americans who stayed up to watch got a full dose of reality programming. NBC, for instance, talked live with an American in Panama who had locked himself in and was hiding in the bathroom of his hotel room. At one point, Tom Brokaw had to calm him down.

The politicians were out late. One could watch Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) at 1:30 a.m. (4:30 a.m. on the East Coast, where he was), and Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) at midnight. (It was 3 a.m. for Dole.)

ABC and CBS had their own recently retired military personnel as paid consultants staying up all night and advising anchors on what was happening. ABC had Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., recently retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. CBS had Fred Woerner, the former commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama.

ABC even put Noriega’s attorney from Miami and his press spokesman from Panama on the air while the invasion was going on.

The tone shifted markedly over time. In the early hours, anchors and correspondents talked about the invasion raising concern in Latin America about Yankee imperialism. By morning, after hearing that some Panamanians were even helping the Americans, the tone seemed widely supportive, said Richard Noyes, project director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington think tank that monitors the press.

With advance word, all the networks except CNN trotted out their top talent. Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw were on the air continuously after 10 p.m. ABC’s Peter Jennings showed up about an hour later.

The coverage seemed generally restrained most of the evening, Noyes said. But Rather did get overexcited at one point after Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin L. Powell finished their briefing for reporters at the Pentagon about 4:30 a.m. Rather declared that viewers could not have asked for a better briefing on a current military operation than they had just gotten. This was just how the military leadership should behave, he said.

The problem, beyond editorializing, is that it could be proved wrong. The military operation may well have been more confused than Powell said, and military expectations may not have been met as well as he suggested.

CNN also suffered because of a less experienced staff. It had only a stringer in Panama, Berta Thayer, going against seasoned correspondents on the three commercial networks. One CNN anchor appeared to confuse Panama with El Salvador when he asked if the Green Berets who last month had been trapped in a San Salvador hotel might have been doing reconnaissance for Tuesday’s invasion.

And the Pentagon pool still had some problems. When it landed in Panama, for instance, the pool reporters were stranded on the tarmac for several hours and did not finally file video footage back to the United States until Wednesday evening. The reporters in Panama who had been not part of the pool had delivered their footage by about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

“Compared to Grenada, this is certainly better,” said NBC’s Russert, referring to the invasion of Grenada, during which the media were kept away from the action. Still, he added, “it needs more refinement.”

Times staff writer Jane Hall contributed to this story.