Oh! What a Lively War

There’s no biz like war biz.

That’s true on television from prime time to news time, from CBS entertainment to journalism’s GI Joe (Geraldo Rivera) to CNN.

The calamity of Sept. 11 and subsequent White House nudging of Hollywood to salute the flag came well after taping began for “American Fighter Pilots,” a planned “‘Top Gun’-like reality series” that eyeballs military fliers learning their dangerous trade. The light initially guiding it was last season’s improved ratings for the network’s other military series, the scripted drama “JAG.”

But you can bet the campaign against Osama bin Laden and terrorism is now driving this series project that CBS is calling “patriotic fare that’s both exciting and entertaining.” As the same war is now subtext for “Combat Missions,” a coming USA network series from “Survivor” creator Mark Burnett that has “soldiers, warriors and heroes” competing “in a drama of real-life combat.”

After many of the fliers it followed in training went on to serve in the air war against the Taliban, the “American Fighter Pilots” producers dispatched crews to interview them in that environment, strengthening ties to actual combat.

“American Fighter Pilots” is from the network’s entertainment division. As we know from “Survivor” and its many progeny, entertainment and “reality” are incompatible. If this new show catches on, however, expect clones of it to arrive in waves of red, white and blue. Then look out. Would you believe “God Bless American Fighter Pilots?”

Now ...

Have you heard the latest? Geraldo is packing heat. That’s right, packing.

What, you expected Rupert Murdoch’s one-man Special Forces to slip into Pakistan and cover the fall of the Taliban quietly for the Fox News Channel without making news himself?

Rivera has built his TV career on being “the only.” As in being “the only” tabloid talk-show host to have his honker broken on the air by a chair-swinging skinhead. Yearning for bigger action, he’s now probably the only member of the U.S. press corps to arm himself in a war zone where eight journalists have already died. And definitely alone in wearing bandoleers of bravado.

“If they’re going to get us, it’s going to be in a gunfight,” he vowed on a recent newscast from near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, later indicating to an anchor that he had access to a gun. He would have hung around to explain, but the Clantons were waiting at the O.K. Corral.

Many reporters in Afghanistan have been wearing flak jackets and some even helmets as protection. And anyone can relate to journalists instinctively wanting weapons in a hot spot where they too are potential targets. But here’s why doing it is both dumb and irresponsible, say those with more combat ribbons than Geraldo.

War correspondents have a long history of being noncombatants, a status they rely on to ensure them the best possible chance of survival. That’s because bearing arms would blur the line between soldiers and journalists. So by talking trigger, Geraldo may be putting not only himself but also his colleagues at increased risk.

“He’s endangering every other journalist who’s in the area, and that really outrages me,” said Arthur Lord, a former NBC News bureau chief in Burbank who earlier headed the network’s Saigon bureau for a year during the Vietnam War.

Carrying weapons is “an absolute no-no,” for reporters “are observers, not warriors,” Lord said. “We were always noncombatants. When you got captured by the enemy, if you said you were a journalist, produced the proper credentials and you were not armed, generally they would let you go. You shouldn’t make it more dangerous than it has to be.”

If you’re Geraldo, landing on the war front like a superhero, you’re not listening.

Still landing on TV, meanwhile, are tales of John Walker Lindh, the American captured fighting in Afghanistan with the Taliban. The scariest of these had Lindh reportedly telling his U.S. captors of an imminent Al Qaeda attack on the U.S., this one probably biological. Right. Like Bin Laden and his crowd would tell this lowly sap about it.

Yet here is how such things operate on all-news networks with wide-open spaces filled by chitchat. Even after reporting that U.S. officials felt Lindh was not a reliable source on high-level Al Qaeda strategy, the Fox News Channel still was able to whip up some alarm by airing a segment speculating about the effect of this biological attack that it said it expected not to take place.

There was more Lindh on CNN’s “The Point With Greta Van Susteren” on Monday. The question for her guest panel: Could he “redeem himself or is he a traitor?”

CNN was giving this the weight it deserved, the participants including no less a moral authority than Jerry Falwell.

(Insert laugh track.)

No, this was not a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” but the Rev. Frozen Grin himself, offering evidence anew that once in a TV news Rolodex, only exorcism can erase you. Whether widely adored or reviled, you’re in it for the millennium when perceived by news show bookers as a box-office draw or someone who delivers lively, provocative TV. Your place at this table of television-anointed sages is secure as long as you serve the format, however twisted your mind and tongue.

And in Falwell’s case, however often you’re impaled on your own rhetoric.

It was Falwell, you’ll recall, who publicly suggested that Tinky Winky of the “Teletubbies” was spreading the “gay lifestyle” by carrying a purse and wearing purple.

It was Falwell who said in a speech that if the antichrist is alive today, “he must be male and Jewish.”

And it was Falwell--speaking without rebuttal from fellow televangelist Pat Robertson on “The 700 Club”--who blamed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks partially on “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians ... , the ACLU, People for the American Way” and all “who have tried to secularize America.”

When Vesuvius blew, Falwell issued an apology, but even the conservative Weekly Standard urged him to take “a vow of silence for the duration of the current struggle.”

Fat chance. As if he truly felt shame.

TV calls, he accepts. So here he was stroking his chin again this week, invited by CNN’s amnesiacs to weigh in on Lindh as a moral issue, as if vastly more credible mainstream theologians were not available for this gig. But on the new CNN--now in the process of installing its own anchors as heavenly constellations capable of outshining events they cover--marquee wattage is everything.

“Let’s go to Rev. Falwell,” said the host on the subject of Lindh’s potential for redemption.

Falwell was pumped: “If this man will place his faith and trust in the crucified, buried, risen Savior, Jesus Christ, God can forgive him, Bin Laden, anyone--as he did the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. That does not mean, however, that he is not a traitor.”

This was too much for another favorite TV lip on the panel. “Is it really true,” asked Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, “that you believe Bin Laden can go to heaven, but many of the victims of Bin Laden at the World Trade Center [and] the Jewish policemen and firemen who gave their lives, they cannot go to heaven?”

“Yes,” replied Falwell, unaware he’d been lit. “Bin Laden, as atrocious a man as he is, can receive Christ and be saved and then he should be executed.”

Dershowitz threw on more oil. “But the people who were killed in the World Trade Center, who chose a different way and a different God, will have to spend eternity, not in heaven, but in what, in hell?”

Falwell stressed that anyone who “receives Christ as Lord and Savior goes to heaven. And those who deny Christ go to hell.”

Dershowitz wondered if Falwell knew how “insensitive” he was sounding to victims’ families?

Now flaming like a bonfire, Falwell replied, “I pray for those families every day.” How comforting for them.

Coming next on “The Point,” a discussion of the economy with Tinky Winky.

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