To tempt fate, up close and personal

He was “a complicated man with an apparent death wish,” an adrenaline junkie who found a stillness in the wild, replacing drugs and alcohol with the rush of getting up close and personal with 1,200-pound Alaskan grizzly bears, whom he named and talked to and attempted to nuzzle, as if they were pound dogs. In 2003, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were attacked and eaten, maybe by an ornery bear he’d named Olly.

Werner Herzog’s absorbing documentary about Treadwell, called “Grizzly Man,” airs tonight and Saturday on Discovery, after a successful theatrical run and numerous awards (though it was passed over this week for a best documentary nomination in the Oscars).

“Diary of the Grizzly Man,” a 30-minute film in which four of Treadwell’s friends are interviewed about Treadwell and “Grizzly Man,” follows Herzog’s film. What made him do it? Was he a public nuisance or savior? Did he see his actions as tempting death? It all feels queasily topical, airing at the end of a week in which ABC World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt became symbols of a different kind of wild, the Iraq war, both severely injured when a somewhat-armored Iraqi army tank in which they were riding hit a roadside bomb.

Woodruff and Vogt were not showing off; they were trying to convey whether Iraqi forces were progressing in their ability to secure the country. And yet theatrics -- inevitably, given the mandate of TV news -- came to play a part, cameraman and reporter filing the report from an open-air hatch at the back of the Iraqi tank, having requested to ride with local troops instead of better-armored American tanks.

Treadwell’s work was not journalism of this sort. “Grizzly Man” is part nuanced examination of a self-invented eco-showman who spent 13 summers communing with bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park, part testimony to the magical footage Treadwell, a onetime waiter and struggling actor, gamely captured with his camera.

But his on-air histrionics, coupled with his ability to turn the summertime bear population of the Alaskan coast into his theater of drama, translates as the mad end of a trend increasingly hard-sold in TV news -- what Ted Koppel has deprecatingly called “tender engagement,” the “I care and therefore you should care” approach to news delivery.

Treadwell, self-anointed and hammy as he was, conveys strikingly the outer reaches of the broadcast news mandate to get so close to the story you can touch it; he is, in a way, a version of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the grizzly man who routinely walks into hurricanes wearing nothing but a windbreaker. “I’m in San Diego because we’ve been given remarkable access to the tunnel discovered last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents,” he wrote in his CNN blog Monday, reporting from outside a drug-smuggling tunnel along the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s no surprise drug cartels will do just about anything to bring narcotics into the United States, but the sight of this tunnel up close is remarkable.”

“Up close” is what’s operative there. Cooper, it can be said, is doing a public service, going to wherever the story is, but Treadwell, a minor celebrity who brought his experiences into classrooms, was on a mission too; when he died, he was making a film about the grizzlies that he apparently hoped to produce as a wildlife documentary to raise awareness about bears and the poachers who he believed threatened their livelihood.

And so Treadwell embodies that mishmash of gonzo self-aggrandizement and greater good; he was a survivalist and activist who also did multiple takes of his stand-ups, like someone play-acting at intrepid adventurer, and who, according to his close friend Jewel Palovak, carried a comb and mirror in the pocket of every jacket he wore in the wild.

Just as Treadwell knew the park’s Grizzly Maze, so Woodruff and Vogt were experienced in theaters of conflict, a point emphasized by ABC News. But if Woodruff was there out of a reporter’s admirable zeal, risking his life to beam back an important story, he was also there, it seems safe to say, because ABC News is in the midst of transition, attempting to spotlight their new nightly anchor team, Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, both of whom have gone to Iraq as Terry Moran did in the first week of the post-Koppel “Nightline.”

“What choice do we have but to figure out, as best we can, how to cover that story? That’s what we do,” ABC News President David Westin said, appearing on “Good Morning, America” with Vargas the day after their colleagues were injured.

Beneath this rhetorical certitude, though, are Treadwellian contradictions. The Woodruff coverage, with its tinge of overemphasis on celebrity, also refocused eyes on the chaos in Iraq, personalizing it in a forum, the nightly news, that has been widely criticized for failing to bring the war home.

That’s not to diminish the risks taken by journalists who are grappling with covering a war that lacks conventional battle lines, one in which journalists have become targets. TV news, in this context, works at a disadvantage; it must have images or it has no story. One way around not being able to roam the streets in Iraq is to first-personalize the story, to emphasize the star reporter’s very presence in the hot spot.

The piece Woodruff and Vogt were shooting, it has been pointed out, was a report on Iraqi progress in tamping down the insurgency, an angle the Bush administration has complained is lacking in the doom-and-gloom coverage of Iraq. Now Woodruff has become the story -- ABC sending out updates on his and Vogt’s condition from National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. -- in a way that the journalist in him probably wouldn’t care to.

Treadwell exhibited none of this ambivalence. It is why what comes across in “Grizzly Man” is so strange and yet so familiar.

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‘Grizzly Man’

Where: Discovery Channel

When: 8 to 11 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)