Pair Take Unorthodox Approach to War Coverage

The picture shows the two of them crouched behind an embankment of dirt and rocks. With a few tufts of brush in the foreground and a hazy mountain skyline, it’s a typical Mojave Desert scene.

But the caption says it’s a former Al Qaeda entrenchment in the vicinity of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

If that is true, the two young men from Southern California have accomplished a journalistic coup at least as bold--if not as breathless--as Geraldo Rivera’s encounter with hissing Al Qaeda bullets. Without credentials or the resources of a news organization, they have trekked halfway around the world and inveigled their way to the front of America’s war in Afghanistan.

They’re not about to replace CNN, but that’s not their objective.

Former UC Santa Barbara students Todd Ruiz, 26, and Adam Prentiss, 27, say they are attempting to offer a different perspective on “marginalized, forgotten and misunderstood” parts of the world.

Staying in budget hotels, mingling with the working class in countries from Thailand to India and using any means necessary to secure travel documents, the would-be photojournalists are recording their experiences on an Internet site called FrontLine Media.

“Hopefully,” the introduction to their Web site says, “your experience through us as an armchair [or desk chair] participant will provide some insight into life apart from the narrow scope of your bourgeois, unexamined lives.”

According to the Web site, Ruiz and Prentiss crossed into Afghanistan and reached the Tora Bora front around Dec. 19. They stayed five days witnessing the last stand of Al Qaeda and are now in Islamabad furiously writing up their war dispatches.

As yet, their postings have mostly consisted of irreverent impressions of their Asian travels and an eruption of familial rivalry between Ruiz (who uses the pen name Tod) and his father, Reuben.

The squabble started with a story in the Pasadena Star-News that quoted Reuben Ruiz about his fear for his son’s safety.

“When I read or hear . . . these stories of journalists or other travelers getting robbed or killed, it upsets me because he doesn’t have the resources that journalists have,” the father was quoted as saying.

Soon, the son filed a riposte flaming the article as paternalistic.

“A more fitting title might have been ‘News flash: Man concerned for family!’ ” he wrote. “Besides the ravings of one maniacally misrepresentative senior citizen, there is only one single quote taken from the site.”

In an interview with The Times, Reuben Ruiz, a Pasadena resident, said his slight, friendly, vegetarian son grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, graduating from Temple City High School before attending UC Santa Barbara for a couple of years, leaving before he earned a degree.

In a bio posted on the Web site, Todd Ruiz describes himself more floridly as “environmental extremist, performance artist, experimental musician, computer programmer, writer and graphic designer.”

He also worked long enough as a computer technician to save up for an eight-week trip to Asia last year, Reuben Ruiz said.

“This year, after Sept. 11, he decided to do something different,” his father said. “On Oct. 2, he announced he was going to Afghanistan. I thought he was just talking. I didn’t believe him.”

‘Cajoling, Bribing and Lying’ Their Way

He teamed up with his old school friend Prentiss--last employed teaching digital art and theoretical approaches to visual literacy at UC Santa Barbara, according to the Web site. They flew to Taiwan and made their way through Thailand and India to Pakistan by rail, bus and other unspecified transport. How they entered Afghanistan isn’t clear, other than that it involved an “ordeal of charming, cajoling, ignoring and ultimately bribing and lying to various offices of Pakistani officialdom.”

The announcement of FrontLine Media’s arrival at the front was not only tantalizingly brief, but came from Charles Baker, the FrontLine Web master back home in Pasadena.

“No further details are available at this point,” it said. “However, we will keep you posted on the latest developments as soon as they are available.”

The next posting, from Pakistan, contained a grisly photo essay on that country’s meat packing industry but nothing on the war other than a come-on worthy of Geraldo.

“The perennially lucky [guys] that we are managed to survive our first combat experience, while also gaining amazing access to political and military figures,” it said. “Instead of mildly interesting anecdotes, we return to Pakistan with a bounty of unbelievable stories.”

They were “holed up in FLM HQ, our $2 hotel in a back alley of the smugglers’ bazaar, writing stories, going through our hundreds of images, and using a sharpie and razor blade to forge--oops, extend--our Pakistani visas.”

Inconveniently, the intrepid journalists had left the war zone without arranging any independent verification that they were actually there.

There were photos of them posing in front of a tank, soldiers praying before going to fight, even a purportedly well-known anti-Taliban commander strategizing with his men.

But they hadn’t photographed themselves with any recognizable landmark or personality, not even Geraldo.

“I attached a photo of some carpet bombing [it shows a single dust cloud on a barren hill], but it’s not like I am also in the picture,” Ruiz e-mailed in response to a query from The Times. “I didn’t shoot with providing empirical evidence of my presence in mind.”

Media’s Skepticism Frustrates Duo

Grasping for a reference, he came up with the name Nick, a producer from Fox affiliate SkyNews of London. Ruiz said they had camped together in Tora Bora, but he couldn’t remember Nick’s satellite phone number.

An e-mail query to SkyNews produced no immediate response, and as the days passed, Ruiz grew more frustrated at The Times’ skepticism.

“Never has there been more anticipation than when Geraldo opened Capone’s vault,” he wrote sarcastically in an e-mail sent from an Internet cafe in Islamabad. (“The primary purpose of these Muslim Internet cafes is enjoying your Allah-offending pornography in private.”)

He also became more introspective.

“I have always aspired to be a photojournalist, and decided that I had done enough aspiring and it was time to just go and do it,” he said in one e-mail.

The mainstream media skepticism was weakening already when the deputy news editor of SkyNews at last e-mailed back.

“Have spoken to our producer Nick, who has confirmed that they were camped with him at Tora Bora while he was there . . .”

The story was true.

The latest from FrontLine Media is that Ruiz and Prentiss are trying to arrange passage back into Afghanistan, but they also are keeping an eye on the Indo-Pakistani conflict.

“If they go to war, we are only a couple hours from the border and might head that way,” Ruiz wrote from Islamabad.

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The Web address where they promise to post their war reporting--any day now--is https://frontlinedispatch.com.