Messenger Outshines the Message

Operation Rather.

Because personalities are thought to be the key to ratings, maximizing the messenger is an old television news tradition. Thus on Tuesday morning, CBS News arranged a conference-call interview between TV critics in the United States and Dan Rather in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Perhaps 75% of the questions were not about Somalia or the U.S.-led mission there but about Rather himself.

Not just Rather the reporter, but Dan the man.

And the anchor--who has been fronting “The CBS Evening News” from Mogadishu and dominating his network’s coverage of the Somalia story this week--did not pull any punches in giving his answers:

“I want to know how your flak jacket is holding out.”

“I’m not wearing one.”

And: “How much physical danger do you feel?

“It’s real and present.”

One critic wanted to know how Rather was responding “as a human being” to seeing starving Somalis. “Not very well,” he said. “I will not come out of here the same person I came in.” Somewhere across the long-distance line, a word processor clicked noisily, recording Rather’s words.

The questions continued. Was Rather finding it difficult to eat? Was he staying in a hotel? Had he come under fire? Would he describe his typical day in Mogadishu? “How much sleep, if any, are you getting?” a critic asked, “and can you keep up a pace like that?” Rather said he slept “when I can” and added that, although he hated to admit it, earlier that day . . .

Yes?

“I was whipped.”

The word processor clicked.

“Dan,” another critic asked. “Are you protected in some way?”

Rather replied that when he arrived in Mogadishu last week, he was met at the airport by an armed security guard consisting of an elderly man and two boys, 11 and 13. But he also said, emphatically: “I like to think my experience and my savvy is the protection I have.”

Asked how he felt being around children toting guns, Rather responded that some nights he lies in bed wondering: “What in the hell is all this about?”

Another questioner wondered if Rather thought that had he “and the other network big guns been there (in Somalia) two weeks earlier, the troops would have been there earlier, too.”

Rather said he didn’t think so. Besides, he added, “I don’t consider myself a big gun.”

Which, of course, was why he was holding this press conference.

Operation Oops: Another tradition of TV news is its frequent depiction of anchors as sages for all seasons, icons of knowledge concerning every story they’re plugged into.

How are the pontificators doing in Somalia? Network anchors and other reporters are “promulgating all these inaccuracies,” charges Anna Simons, who has lived in Somalia and now teaches anthropology at UCLA. Amina Adan, a Somali who teaches history at Orange Coast College, agrees.

“The image of Somalis is being distorted and destroyed,” Simons said. “To describe Somalia as an 18th-Century agrarian society, as (NBC’s) Tom Brokaw did more than once, is to do an injustice to all Somalis.”

Simons said that Brokaw, while reporting from the Mogadishu airport, described Somalis as being “awe-struck and amazed” by U.S. military transports and other technology. “In fact, there’s been a military presence in Somalia before,” Simons said, “and Somalis have seen airplanes before.”

Simons also criticized Brokaw’s repeated blanket description of gun-toting Somalis as “yahoos” as an insult to a large segment of the population. “You can’t tell a good Somali from a bad Somali,” she said.

Moreover, Simons and Adan agree that the TV coverage has tended to present Somalis as a monolith by making the southeastern capital city of Mogadishu--where U.S. forces landed--a metaphor for the entire country.

“There’s only a little triangle of the country where all of this (violence and mass starvation) is going on,” said Adan, who is from Somaliland, the northern section of Somalia that was once a British colony. “I challenge the media to go to Somaliland,” she said. “There they will see Somalis who have not been helped by everyone and who have helped themselves, and where for two years there was not a single shot fired.”

Both Simons and Adan also agree that anchors and reporters have misinformed viewers by reporting that Somalis get “stoned” from continually chewing a weed-like plant known as qat, thereby creating an image of drugged-up gunslingers whose senses have been impaired.

Simons said she’s heard CBS health correspondent Bob Arnot liken qat to Valium and others describe it as having the effect of alcohol. “In fact, it’s a stimulant that keeps people awake and lucid,” Simons said. “It does not impair anything,” Adan said.

Instead, both women wonder what is impairing reporters.

Operation Clowns: Those funny guys at KCBS-TV Channel 2 are at it again.

The station sent reporter Dave Lopez and a producer (but no camera operator) to Somalia, earlier this week loudly advertising Lopez as the “only Southern California television reporter with the Marines.” Typically, the Channel 2 hype ignored reality, for KCAL-TV Channel 9 anchor David Jackson and KTTV-TV Channel 11 reporter Dave Bryan also were en route to Somalia.

But Lopez did turn out to be the only Southern California televisions reporter with the Marines in Kenya.

With Jackson and Bryan already filing “live” from Somalia, Lopez reported “live” by phone on Channel 2 Tuesday that he was stranded with U.S. troops in Kenya and unable to cross over to Somalia because the border between the two nations had been sealed. But this is Channel 2, right? So not to worry.

On its 11 p.m. Tuesday newscast, Channel 2 attempted to give the impression that Lopez was indeed in Somalia by having him do a voice-over narration of CBS footage from Somalia and announcing that Lopez was reporting live “from Africa.” Well, it’s such a tiny continent. Maybe he was looking at Somalia through a telescope.

Lopez did finally show up in a Wednesday evening newscast doing a hasty, generic stand-up with a pickup camera crew from Mogadishu, becoming only the third Southern California television reporter with the Marines in Somalia.

And what is this? When it comes to delivering Somalia coverage, anchor Michael Tuck is now seen standing in front of a bank of monitors, an area of the studio that Channel 2 has impressively titled its “Satellite Center.”

Center of fakery, that is.

In reality, Tuck is standing in front of one of those blank blue screens upon which footage of flickering monitors--beamed in from a TV newsroom at a station in another city--is being superimposed electronically.

Why fool around with all this business? Why not just dress Tuck in a bush jacket, flash pictures of Mogadishu on the screen and pretend he is right in Somalia?

In any event, like the newscast it appears in, Channel 2’s newfangled “Satellite Center” is actually vacant.