Veteran reporters go to war

Ted Koppel and Jack Laurence both started their journalism careers in New York radio, and went on to cut their journalistic teeth as young TV correspondents in Vietnam. Koppel was there on his first assignment for ABC, Laurence went on three tours there for CBS, where he produced the acclaimed documentary “The World of Charlie Company.” Both are 63 and both now are in Iraq, covering the world’s latest war from posts with U.S. troops.

Vietnam is the last major U.S. war where reporters had close access to the troops and their commanders, but the technology was clumsy. For most of the conflict, reports were captured on film and flown out to the U.S., with a two-day lag time before they got on the air. In subsequent wars such as Panama, Grenada and the 1991 Gulf War, the technology made quantum leaps, but the press was virtually shut out by the military.

This time, technology and access promised to come together when the Pentagon opened slots for several hundred journalists to be “embedded” with troops. That was enough to propel Koppel to request a slot, complete with all the hardships, when he could just as easily have watched from a comfortable anchor-chair perch in Washington or Kuwait.

“That was my wife’s position precisely,” Koppel said in a satellite phone interview from Iraq late last week, where the 3rd Infantry Division, which he is with, recently crossed the Euphrates River. “But I wanted to do it because this is the first time there has been a complete convergence of the satellite technology that allows us to report on the war immediately and the promise of total access.”

He got what he hoped for. “If I hadn’t gotten total access, I would have been out of here in a week,” he said. Instead, “I have zero complaints about the way the military is treating us,” he said.

He has been one of ABC’s most visible reporters, chronicling the troops’ advance on Baghdad with brief battle dispatches and longer, thoughtful pieces for “Nightline” that draw on his position using what he said is “daily access to the two commanding generals,” sitting in on the commanders’ briefing every morning.

His status as one of TV’s most senior anchors has also helped. “I don’t think that the Army would have given the same access to any other reporter,” said Tom Bettag, “Nightline” executive producer. “By having Ted there, this was a cut above,” he said, adding that “there are wonderful people out there.” Koppel’s status, and history covering wars back to Vietnam, “gave the Army the opportunity to give one person the ‘tip of the spear,’ ” he said.

Ultimately, however, even though Koppel this time has both the access and the technology, his reports have been cited by critics not for their immediacy but because, as Bettag put it, “Ted has so much of what is lost in the current breathless journalism, which is perspective.” Koppel will report a one-hour prime-time special, tonight at 8, called “Tip of the Spear,” which focuses on his travels.

Laurence, meanwhile, has come to some different conclusions about the technology. He’s with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, reporting for an article for Esquire magazine and filing reports for National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

Embedding with troops is nothing new to him; Laurence spent three months living with and documenting Charlie Company in 1970, the equivalent, he said, of “embedding in today’s terms,” except that it wasn’t an organized Pentagon program. He got so close to the men that he was able to document their rebellion against a company commander who issued an order they didn’t like. But this time around, he said, while the rules for embedded journalists are much more elaborate and strict, “the access to information ... has been much, much more open.”

But the instant technology, far from freeing his reporting, has made it more difficult than ever, he said, because of the responsibility to withhold some information, to avoid giving away military secrets. “The challenge of knowing so much and being able to say only in general terms what you do know in a live or nearly live broadcast is extraordinarily difficult,” he said, in an interview from Kuwait, where he had returned for a day to get his tape recorders fixed. “I’m holding in my head all the information at the same time as I’m censoring myself, ad-libbing to the host in Washington who is asking questions that I could easily answer and give away information that would break the ground rules. For the TV people doing it from the front lines, it must be even more challenging.”

In the little bit of TV he’s seen so far, Laurence said he’s been gripped by the immediacy and put off by the journalistic speculation.

But while the instant pictures may have more emotional and visceral impact for viewers, he said, “the fact that this war is being broadcast with more immediacy than any in history does not make it more or less interesting to cover. Live or not, I love the challenge of covering a story in difficult conditions and trying to find a deeper truth. I don’t think the TV correspondents out there are going to get the degree of truth I’m striving for, because they don’t have the time. I get to think about what I’m told for weeks, months. They have to go live every couple hours.”

Some of the reporting he has seen has been very good, he said, but for some reporters, “it’s like covering a live sporting event. The danger is you can easily cross the line into becoming cheerleaders for an event that hits the viewers senses very powerfully.”

Esquire executive editor Mark Warren says Laurence, by contrast, “knows what he’s looking at, he’s seen this before, how it’s the same and different. He knows how to talk to soldiers, and even if he’s reliant upon them for movement, room and board, and safety, he knows how to maintain his journalistic objectivity and distance.”

Laurence’s article is expected to be published this summer.

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‘Tip of the Spear’

Where: KABC-TV (Channel 7)

When: Tonight at 8

Reporter: Ted Koppel, with the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq