Isolationist TV: Viewers Pay the Price

It’s curious the things that pique your interest when you have a videotape universe at your fingertips.

Here, for example, is a video that former NBC foreign correspondent Arthur Kent mailed a short time ago. Available only in video stores, his 30-minute documentary is titled “Return to Afghanistan.”

Long a preferred invasion route for outsiders, Afghanistan is where violent history plays out again and again. Network newscasts paid relatively close attention from time to time when occupation forces from the former Soviet Union and U.S.-backed guerrillas battled it out there during the 1980s.

But when the battered Soviets withdrew from the land they and their Afghan allies had ravaged, “the world turned away, distracted by other wars and disasters,” Kent says from a serene village that was aflame with war when he last visited in 1986.

Come to think of it, when did you last see anything about Afghanistan on ABC, CBS or NBC? Did the Afghans topple into China? Slashed budgets and narrowed ambitions have gripped the once-nightly network news divisions in a bear hug of provincialism. When it comes to international news, these days it’s hard getting them to venture beyond Trafalgar Square.

So are the Kents of TV journalism a future lane of the information superhighway? One that will lead directly to the video store for the only electronic source of news (with the exception of occasional pieces on CNN and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”) about hot spots and even lukewarm ones that have since vanished from regular newscasts like blips from a radar screen?

Will privately bankrolled independents like the Canadian Kent, working via the home-video market, be the only alternative for in-depth global perspective on TV as the networks largely preoccupy themselves with all the news that’s fit to sensationalize and reduce to headlines?

And putting aside Kent’s highly worthy documentary for the moment, what is this? The face, the voice . Like a trusted ghost of Yule past, it’s Wooly Walter filling the screen in “The Cronkite Report,” Wednesday’s 60-minute documentary on the Discovery Channel exploring “Christianity Reborn: Prayer and Politics.”

Cronkite has worked on TV sporadically since ending his long reign as the Mt. Rushmore of CBS News. He has been doing these quarterly programs for The Discovery Channel since May, 1993, and getting even this small whiff of him turns you into an instant nostalgianik.

Beyond that, however, is the deep imprint of fairness and civility he puts on this hour as narrator and reporter, just as Kent does on his documentary. The program is somehow meticulously balanced without being wimpy, as Cronkite visits numerous venues of Christianity, from the user-friendly WillowCreek Community Church--a vast edifice of soft-sell evangelism--to the First Iconium Baptist Church, where hard-preaching Rev. Tim McDonald rails against the “family values” of “right-wing religious folk.”

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No agenda is favored here, and even when Cronkite gathers some of these polar-opposite Christians around a table for a brief chat, the debate is calm and free of the emotional “Crossfire” harangue that we’ve come to expect from such televised disagreements about religion.

“Christianity,” Cronkite says early in the program, “is thriving and as prosperous as it’s ever been in the United States.” He adds that “religion is alive and well in America.” If he’s right on both counts, then shame on mainstream TV for virtually ignoring Christianity and just about all religion outside of Sunday mornings, except for the anti-abortion screamers and hard-right political ideologues who regularly capture the attention of newscasts.

And shame on mainstream TV news for playing the role of isolationist and doing so little to widen its landscape beyond the United States.

Like “Christianity Reborn,” Kent’s documentary is also about renewal, at least in the rebuilding community that he initially revisits, a now-quiet village just 50 miles from bloody civil strife still raging in the Afghan capital of Kabul--a lingering torture, featuring competing warlords, that probably few Americans are aware of.

Kent juxtaposes his footage from 1986 with his latest pictures. He finds familiar faces, including a man who embodies the spirit of the surviving guerrillas who resisted the Soviets.

“The time you took our picture after the jets bombed us,” the man says through an interpreter, “we came back to rebuild. And then they bombed us again. Again we went to the mountains and returned, only to have our houses bombed again.”

No quitter, the man recalls this standing in front of his new house.

In Kabul, though, death and suffering cover the city like a shroud. Kent revisits the now-barren killing fields where a thriving bazaar once stood. And “the avenue with style” that he shot in 1986 is now an unrecognizable ruin. At a Kabul hospital, foreign aid workers in a crowded operating room face the same dangers as their patients, evidenced by the rocket attack that forces them into a basement shelter.

The scenes recall the Bosnia-Herzogovina massacres on today’s slender network news agenda. “The fighting is just for power,” Kent is told by a gritty and determined young man who is head of his family despite being only 19. His body a stump, he has lost his legs in the explosion of a mine left behind by the departed Soviets. Members of his family help him into his wheelchair.

* “Christianity Reborn: Prayer and Politics” airs at 10 p.m. Wednesday on the Discovery Channel.