Shining Brighter Than the News They Cover

Box office-driven television news is famed for its own celebrities rising above the stories they cover, mirrored by ABC’s Connie Chung drawing at least as much buzz early this week as whatsizname , the California congressman she was to quiz Thursday night.

So you can anticipate what’s coming from “Breaking the News: A Museum of Television & Radio Special,” when narrator Mel Gibson announces reverently: “Thousands of TV reporters have put their lives on the line to get their stories on the air. Their careers are the stuff of legend, courting danger, dodging bullets, interpreting history....”

All true. With just a couple of exceptions, however, the honorees on tonight’s CBS program are newscasting’s gleaming stars, the shining marquee lights that deliver ratings, not the lesser-known grunts muddying themselves in the trenches for so little credit.

In addition to star worship, a time warp grips these two hours, offering little hint that, electronically, America gets much less breaking of news these days than breaking of rumor and wild speculation. Blame that on talk radio, the Internet and 24-hour news channels for redefining information as any piece of raw meat that pulsates.

Meanwhile, prepare for TV archives overflowing tonight with the usual Rolodex of famous journalists noting how their careers intersect epic history. Here again is Mt. Rushmore himself, Walter Cronkite, somberly reporting the murder of President Kennedy. Here is ABC’s Peter Jennings at the Berlin Wall, where he was joined at the hip with Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC in 1989 when noting the demise of this hated Cold War artifact. Here is ABC’s Barbara Walters dwelling on her power chats with world political figures.

Here is just about everyone pondering his or her importance on the planet.

And so on and so on, the emphasis on combat, while earnest and viscerally compelling, affirming how mayhem drives nearly all global news coverage on U.S. television, nourishing the false hypothesis that violence, chaos and misery mostly lie beyond these borders.

From retirement comes former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, reliving his harrowing night of reporting live from inside a Baghdad hotel during U.S.-led airstrikes that began the Gulf War in 1991 but omitting that with him under a table that night were his colleagues Peter Arnett and the late John Holliman.

From war zones elsewhere come more of TV’s drummers, fifers and Yankee Doodle Dandies, battle lines visible on their aging faces; Morley Safer of “60 Minutes,” for instance, recalling at one point about his hazardous reporting duty in Vietnam: “You keep talking... , the cameraman keeps rolling.”

The anonymous cameraman.

Deep in the program is a fleeting photo spread of the crew captured by Iraqis with veteran CBS correspondent Bob Simon during the Gulf War. Otherwise, omitted most egregiously here are field producers and camera operators, some of whom are the platoon leaders yelling, “Follow me!” in front of bigger shots trailing them like privates from Peoria.

Nor will you see Saira Shah. Along with producer Cassian Harrison and cameraman James Miller, she exposed herself to substantial risks while gathering evidence of terror, squalor and despair inside Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for a chilling news report that aired two months ago on Britain’s Channel Four.

The same hour, titled “Beneath the Veil,” is scheduled to air Sunday on CNN.

Reporter Shah is a Britisher whose father is from Afghanistan, where women are oppressed and rendered all but invisible by the rigid Islamic regime. She and her crew were not the first Western journalists allowed inside Afghanistan by the Taliban, but some of the secret footage she brought back may break ground. Supplied by the underground Revolutionary Assn. of the Women of Afghanistan, it shows executions being carried out before cheering throngs in a Kabul football stadium against veiled women and others for crimes unknown.

Shah notes how distant this is from her “liberal Islam” upbringing. As is a secret schoolroom for girls that she visits, its teacher saying that merely organizing the class is a hanging offense. Then comes “the most subversive place of all,” an underground beauty parlor where women paint the faces they are forbidden to display in public.

Later, Shah and her crew arrive at a village where they are told of recent alleged massacres by Taliban as part of ethnic cleansing. Supporting the charges is footage of strewn bodies almost too grisly to witness, including a youth’s skull said to have been skinned by his murderers.

Now cut to three young sisters. Tears rolling down her cheeks, one tells Shah their parents were murdered before their eyes.

The experienced Shah has put in years reporting from hot spots for British TV. Yet even if she were an American, she wouldn’t have the star wattage to crash tonight’s lineup.

Rather does.

Included, unfortunately, is his own 1980 invasion of Afghanistan shortly after the Soviets invaded there to begin a bloody war and occupation. It became the lead piece on “60 Minutes” for which Rather was famously titled “Gunga Dan” by a Tom Shales column in the Washington Post.

And no wonder, given the way he was comically “disguised as one of them” in a ratty blanket and Afghan hat to avoid being fatally mistaken for a hated Soviet when approaching a band of refugees (“Hello, my name is Dan Rather”).

There he was, too, silhouetted against a night sky, describing a skirmish in a breathless whisper after narrator Mike Wallace had announced: “Up on a ridge, Dan Rather found the war he came to cover.” As if it didn’t exist until he discovered it.

Personalized reporting has a long and honored tradition (“We climbed a ridge to see and we were machine gunned,” Ernest Hemingway wrote from Spain in 1937 during that civil war). It tends to individualize violence and suffering beyond the mere “parade of film clips of guns firing and of smoke rising and of refugees fleeing” that irked critic Michael Arlen about TV coverage of the Vietnam War.

But what of self-glorifying theater, as reflected also in one of several Ed Bradley stories cited here?

Applaud Bradley’s compassion in wading through rough waters to help ashore Vietnamese refugees fleeing a capsized boat off the east coast of Malaysia and later waving goodbye to them, but not “60 Minutes” for featuring these scenes of him prominently in the story.

By the way, you may be wondering why movie star Gibson is attached to a tribute to journalists in jeopardy. He played one in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” didn’t he? He’s a big draw, isn’t he? And like the stars of tonight’s program, he’s a celebrity, isn’t he?

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“Breaking the News: A Museum of Television & Radio Special” can be seen tonight at 8 on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-LV (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for coarse language and violence).

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“Beneath the Veil” can be seen Sunday at 6:30 and 10 p.m. on CNN.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.