Doubts cast aside, TV news heads to the front

If you’ve watched TV in recent days, you’ve seen members of the United Nations jockey over whether there will be a U.S.-led war on Iraq and antiwar activists continue protests in belief that conflict can be headed off. ABC News’ “Nightline” scheduled a 90-minute “Town Meeting” for Tuesday on the war topic “Why Now?”

The message seems to be clear: The war option is still open to debate.

Behind the scenes, however, TV news operations aren’t believing their own reports. They have started mobilizing their own troops in a way that makes clear they believe that bombs will fall, perhaps soon.

It takes time for TV media, in particular, to get in place to cover an event as big as a war. Equipment is getting lighter, but much of it is still bulky and must be hauled in, installed, communications links established, and good camera angles and visas secured. And so, last week, even as the public still debated whether there would or should be war, TV operations that weren’t already in place began the delicate dance of guessing when it would start.

“This is going to be the last e-mail that I write for a while,” “Nightline” executive producer Leroy Sievers wrote to viewers on Feb. 21, a missive that raised some eyebrows for its stark language. “A good part of the ‘Nightline’ staff, including me, is going to head off for the Persian Gulf next week to get ready to cover the war that now appears all but inevitable.”

Chris Bury, who anchors “Nightline” two nights a week, late last week started his trip to Doha, Qatar, where he expects to stay for a month at least, covering the U.S. Central Command. In 1994, he was in Haiti, waiting for the U.S. invasion that, with a last-minute deal, turned into a benign troop landing, but he doesn’t expect a nonviolent ending this time.

Speaking from an Amsterdam stopover, he said, “I do think there is a disconnect” between what many in the media think based on their reporting and Bush administration briefings, and what the public is still thinking. “I do think it has taken viewers and readers awhile to catch up to the determination this administration has to go to Iraq.

“You want to be in place before commercial airlines stop flying,” he said, and get the lay of the land; he has previously been to Saudi Arabia but not Qatar. Reading the tea leaves, Bury said, “it just seemed to be the right time to get in place, even if we sit around for a while, or even if we come back and there is no war. It reaches a point where the safest place is to go.”

Better to get to a scene too early than too late is the obvious rule, and possible start dates been flying daily through e-mail and phone lines. The conventional wisdom that any war will have an early March start has been replaced by mid-March, with some convinced that nothing will take place until later in the month. On Thursday, a Pentagon briefing for network bureau chiefs caused a flurry when the warning came that Baghdad will be a much more dangerous place than in 1991 and that the journalists “may not get another warning before the bombs fall,” CNN reported. Some took that to mean that war was imminent.

Accurately assessing the timing of a conflict is a major issue for TV news operations, in particular, because the costs of a miscalculation are much higher than they are for the print media, which don’t have to send camera crews and buy advance satellite time, or make sure they have enough staff in the office back home to get the pictures on the air the second the bombs start falling. Bury, for example, is going to Doha with “three producers, a researcher, support folks and camera crews.”

A senior executive at one network estimates it could spend as much as $1 million per day once it is fully mobilized overseas. Each network breaks down the figures differently, but several executives estimated that ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC combined will spend close to $100 million on war coverage, not including lost ad revenue when commercials are suspended to report on the initial airstrikes. The networks generally won’t talk about how many people they have deployed, except for CNN, which will have more than 200 people, including roughly 45 correspondents, in the region. according to Eason Jordan, head of newsgathering for the network.

Fox News Channel declined to discuss its plans.

Chuck Lustig, director of foreign news coverage for ABC News, said ABC is about “90% deployed” and will reach 100% in the next two weeks. “In this particular case, there could be something Iraq does preemptively that causes the military conflict to begin sooner than the U.S. would like,” he said of ABC’s planning. Moreover, he said, “When people are going to be in an area where possibly there will be military conflict, it’s better to get there early, have them be comfortable with their surroundings and their equipment. You don’t put a monetary value on that.”

NBC has more than 50% of its people and equipment in place, said Bill Wheatley, vice president, NBC News. As the only network with a cable news operation-- MSNBC -- NBC doesn’t pay as heavy a financial price for guessing wrong because its personnel are reporting for two channels. “It has not been a case of people sitting out there waiting for a war to start,” he said. MSNBC this week expands its 6-week-old “Countdown: Iraq” program to two hours.

Left on NBC’s “to do” list, he said, is finalizing the coverage plan with the rest of the network, putting in wiring to handle the extra satellite feeds coming in from across the Atlantic, preparing internal communications and finalizing the around-the-clock staffing plan so that there are also enough people rested to cover any big domestic story that breaks.

CBS News is “practically finished” in its deployment, with just a handful of people to go to the region this week, said Marcy McGinnis, senior vice president, news coverage. “Our thinking is, we just better be in place for when it happens, and we think it could happen any time now.” One of her biggest headaches, she said, is guessing whether the conflict will start on a weekend, which would necessitate having more staff in place than usual. “Knowing when breaking news is happening is a fabulous thing,” she joked, and of course, by definition, impossible to know.