Iraqis get Geraldo treatment

At one point over the weekend, I thought I was watching Geraldo Rivera vote in the Iraqi elections. This turned out to be wrong -- Rivera was only in Iraq doing what he does, making the story about himself. He was standing in a queue outside a polling station, and he was being frisked, lifting up his flak jacket, his Fox News Channel microphone in his right hand. Behind him, ordinary Iraqis, people who’d braved death threats to exercise a right they’d been deprived of their entire lives, were forced to wait that much longer. They were getting, in other words, an early lesson in American-style democracy.

“Rita, I wish you were here,” Rivera said to Fox News anchor Rita Cosby. “What I saw was 1776.” This was late Saturday night in Los Angeles and Sunday morning in Iraq, the election in its infancy, the tension palpable through the television from the moment CNN, Fox News and MSNBC began to show ordinary Iraqis dipping their index fingers in inkwells.

In MSNBC’s in-studio “Listening Room,” a young translator named Jacob had his ear pricked to the Arab media. Given that Al Jazeera ought to be part of every American’s basic cable package, having Jacob on hand was a touch of genius. Immediately, he gave me news I could use -- that Al Jazeera was saying interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had voted in the heavily fortified Green Zone because the polling station in his own neighborhood was too dangerous. Bill Fitzgerald seemed to jump on him. “That could be propaganda,” he admonished.

Fox News was much less equivocal about how democracy was going in Iraq during those first few hours -- extremely, extremely well. As Cosby put it, sounding as though she were anchoring from an awards-show red carpet, “Anyone who’s anyone in Iraq” was voting. “Looks like you’ve got a really good turnout there,” she said to reporter David Lee Miller, who was reporting by satellite phone from a polling station in Mosul. The video showed just a slow trickle of people, with at times no voters visible. This as the Fox News ticker, quoting a New York Times story, reported that the Bush administration had complained that Al Jazeera’s broadcasts have been “inflammatory, misleading and occasionally false.”

In a star-driven broadcast news culture, it’s the news personalities and their personal relationships to the stories that get the most play. While it’s hard to fault the networks for sending their top talent to a flashpoint in history, something inevitable happens: The anchor stands in front of the story, instead of to the side of it.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper kept declaring that the insurgents had lost on election day. It turned out he was right for the most part, in the sense that roughly 60% of the eligible population voted, according to news estimates, and the death count was lower than feared. Cooper is intelligent and articulate, but at the time he was declaring victory he was standing on a rooftop in a puffy jacket, conveying nothing more powerfully than the fact that he was on a rooftop somewhere in Baghdad wearing a puffy jacket, visibly moved by his brush with this story.

Though he’s becoming a kind of relic, nobody does on-site bombast quite like Rivera, though. “What’s the point of this insurgency?” Rivera demanded Sunday. He had found a pickup truck whose bed was carrying the body of what Rivera said was a young woman killed by the insurgents. “What are these heroes after?” Rivera demanded. “This makes any civilized person absolutely sick. God rest her soul, this is deplorable.” And then he walked away. End scene.

On “At Large With Geraldo Rivera” Saturday night, Rivera’s rooftop location was identified as “outside Baghdad.” As he drew those analogies to 1776, video of Rivera at a polling station shaking a voter’s hand played in a loop. Later, interviewing a U.S. military officer, Rivera noticed the video on the monitor. “There’s my footage of Iraqis voting,” Rivera gushed, interrupting his own interview to emote about his own video. “I wanted to kiss that guy. I started crying twice there, I felt like such a sap.”

By Sunday evening Rivera’s hair looked better. He hosted “At Large” from Camp Victory, surrounded by two divisions of U.S. military police. It still felt strange, what he was doing, but you had to admit it worked as TV.