It’s a Jungle Out There for Serious News Shows

Today’s topic is endangered species.

Specifically, the Hairy-nosed Wombats put at risk by changes to the landscape and their native habitat as a result of human activity. No, not those whose chances for survival are said to be greatly diminished in the Queensland region of Australia.

The Hairy-nosed Wombats of the media.

That’s right, serious TV journalists who think of news as something more than a cheap thrill or juicy sound bite. We take them for granted until they’re threatened with extinction.

You know of Operation Anaconda II, ABC’s campaign to squeeze serious news from 11:30 p.m. and enthrone CBS late-night star David Letterman in the time slot occupied by “Nightline” for 22 years because his show makes even more money and has the younger audience that advertisers most covet. You know that Letterman, after getting his deal sweetened, has decided to stay at CBS, meaning “Nightline” will presumably remain intact, with Ted Koppel as boss and primary anchor, until ABC checks out the availability of Howard Stern.

The original story broke while I was off doing something else, and by now has been reported in laborious detail everywhere but on the Food Channel and Qatar’s Al Jazeera.

So I was going to pass on it, until tuning in last week to a segment of “TalkBack Live,” CNN’s daytime news chat, audience-participation hour whose jagged lobotomy scar is glaringly visible as it regresses daily from dumb to dumber. Watching it drove home to me the wisdom of preserving “Nightline” in its present form and Koppel as a force for serious journalism in a TV environment where the “TalkBack Lives” appear to be prevailing.

In a segment scrunched between discussions of Andrea Yates and sluggers Tonya Harding and Paula Jones putting on the gloves, “TalkBack Live” asked viewers: “What Drives War Correspondents?”

It’s always a good question, but especially now given what happened to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (although he was in Pakistan when targeted for murder) and Italian photojournalist Raffaele Ciriello, who was killed last week while covering a clash between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

In fact, “Nightline” tackled something similar the previous night in a crackling good discussion preceded by a tape package on the increasing peril reporters face in war zones. Said ABC’s John Donvan about Afghanistan: “In this war against terrorism, there is no safe haven, no government to guarantee protection for journalists, no one is an official guest.”

“TalkBack Live” weighed in the next day. It went briefly to CNN’s Ben Wedeman in Ramallah for an update and report on dangers to journalists there before recently installed host Arthel Neville moved on to Newsweek photo chief Sarah Harbutt and another guest with a familiar face. Not a journalist who’d served abroad under fire, but someone with even greater knowledge and expertise to impart.

Actress Andie MacDowell.

How is it that MacDowell knows so much about dangers to journalists in combat situations? Well, she didn’t memorize her lines as the wife of one in the just-released movie “Harrison’s Flowers” for nothing.

Recalling CNN’s ardent promotion of a recent Monica Lewinsky documentary on HBO (both are owned by AOL Time Warner), I immediately suspected “Harrison’s Flowers” of being produced by another of the news network’s corporate kin, Warner Bros. Why else, except for self-serving reasons, would it grant the movie this free publicity under the banner of serious analysis? Try stupidity.

In fact, “Harrison’s Flowers” is from Universal.

Which means that instead of being unethical, CNN was being dense. It means MacDowell was booked because someone at celebrity-minded CNN actually believed she’d have something to contribute to this topic beyond advertising the next day’s opening of her movie.

So roll that clip of “Harrison’s Flowers,” and let’s hear from Andie, whose husband on the big screen is an American photojournalist who goes missing and is reported dead in Yugoslavia in 1991.

Neville: “Wow, some powerful scenes there.” And later, after a lengthy exchange with MacDowell: “Andie, you know what? I have got to take a break for a news break right now, but I definitely want to hear some more about this movie, because those scenes do look amazing.”

A bit later, after Harbutt noted that 47 journalists had died in the Balkans during this period, the still-amazed Neville made the movie the basis for a question to her about combat journalists possibly getting cold feet.

Deep into the segment, she asked MacDowell if she thought her movie provided “a pretty good look inside the life of the family of a photojournalist who covers war-torn families.”

McDowell had to admit that it did.

Just as television sometimes covers conflicts almost as cinematic extravaganzas--giving them dramatic titles and intro music to set a mood--this, too, was an example of news and entertainment being juxtaposed misleadingly for the purpose of putting on a good show. And if only it were an isolated case.

Not that “Nightline” and Koppel don’t go slumming themselves from time to time. Or that everyone who winced at CBS wanting to bump it for Letterman even regularly watches Koppel’s show in an era when knee-jerk talk radio and talk TV have the day’s headlines pretty much hashed over before the sun sets.

But that is usually space-filling blather, whereas Koppel has always been a master interviewer and even mid-range “Nightline” a thoughtful alternative to ABC, a network whose commitment to news under its Disney masters appears to be waning as it seeks ways to recover from its overall ratings doldrums. And, as many are asking, when do NBC and CBS follow?

So carry on, Arthel Neville and others teeter-tottering up as the other end crashes to the ground. As in Afghanistan, there is no safe haven. Late-night comics are not an endangered species on TV, but serious journalists appear to be.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays.