The News Program That Ventures Beyond The Comfort Zone

Actor Don Cheadle with Sudanese refugee children in Chad, on tonight's "Nightline." (Rick Wilkinson -- ABC News)

Even as ABC's universally praised "Nightline" totters yet again on a precarious perch -- facing possible extinction or massive remodeling -- the program that has brought more distinction to ABC News than any other continues in its resourceful and innovative ways.

Tonight's edition, at 11:35 on Channel 7, is a report from Chad and Sudan that features an unusual correspondent: Don Cheadle, the Oscar-nominated actor who plays courageous hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina in "Hotel Rwanda." The film, a highly respected, and Oscar-nominated, docudrama with an unusually high foundation in fact, celebrates one man's heroism in shielding fellow Africans from the 1994 genocide that eventually left 800,000 people dead.

Cheadle traveled with a five-member bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission investigating conditions in refugee camps filled sometimes beyond capacity with displaced persons. Traveling with them is the man Cheadle plays in the film, a resourceful and desperate survivor who used money, deception and whatever other ploys he could think of to help save lives. He rescued people from the path of madness and turned the Hotel Mille Collines into a refugee camp like none other.

The faces of children are what make the biggest impression as the "Nightline" crew follows Cheadle on his travels with the committee, first through a village whose former population of 40,000 has been reduced to less than 200. One of the next stops is a refugee camp where 16,000 huddle in makeshift shelters, kids play soccer on the dry and dusty ground, and a woman who has lost her husband holds her head in her hands.

Cheadle and the others move on to a larger and better equipped camp where another 21,000 refugees wait, fighting off "disease, despair and fear," as Cheadle says in his narration. There are no wells, so water comes by truck, and not often enough. Again, it's the children who make the strongest impression, many of them with faces that are inexplicably full of hope. Nothing is crueler than when that kind of hope is betrayed, wherever the warfare or catastrophe.

During the report, the actor explains why he made the trip: "We are in a time where we are seeing these sorts of micro-genocides just multiplying and the displacement of humans at such an extreme number with no end in sight. I think it would just be very disingenuous for me to have been saying all this time, since we have been making the movie -- we can't allow this to go on and we have to get involved, and I had an opportunity to get involved and didn't."

Cheadle does his final on-camera reporting next to barbed wire that prevents access to a body of water, a symbol of the hardships endured every day in a place that the network news departments rarely visit, seldom report on. The final image, at least in a rough-cut of the report, is a still photo of still more children huddled together.

Segments anchored by Ted Koppel were not included in the tape sent for preview by ABC News. Koppel will be appearing as rumors circulate that he may leave "Nightline" to take over the network's struggling "This Week" show on Sunday morning, Koppel being one of the few personalities left in network news to have anything like the stature of "This Week's" founding father, David Brinkley.

What will become of "Nightline"? It may be reworked into a happier and funsier show, presumably not the kind of program that would devote itself to conditions in African refugee camps. At every network now, what we have long known as "the news" is under fire and endangered because it appeals only to viewers who know how to think and who give a hoot about the world around them.

Those tend to be baby boomers and older, an "undesirable" demographic. Joking about his presence as a "Nightline" correspondent during the special report, Cheadle says, "They don't need the ratings that badly." It's a nice thought -- but, unfortunately, they do.

'Slavery and the Making of America'

In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush said Americans should congratulate themselves on turning "the abolition of slavery" from a dream into reality. Now there's a man who sees the glass half full, no matter what. He'd like to view slavery, the foulest blight on the history of this great nation, as something positive, a real victory for Our Way of Life.

Obviously, this is not quite so, a point at the heart of "Slavery and the Making of America," a new documentary miniseries produced by New York's Channel 13 for the Public Broadcasting Service. The first two hours (1624 to 1800) air tonight at 9 on PBS stations, with the concluding two hours (1800 to 1876) next Wednesday at the same time, and though the production seems hampered by a limited budget and a lack of arresting visual material, "Slavery" is bound to tell most viewers a great deal they did not know.

Morgan Freeman narrates the program, which gets underway with "The Downward Spiral," an episode about slavery's beginnings. First, producer-director Dante J. James gives us the obligatory (on PBS) explanation and rationale for doing the film in the first place. Peter H. Wood, a Duke University professor and one of a huge slew of academic commentators gathered for the series, says that in terms of "race relations" in this country, "We'll never get further until we look more closely at slavery."

Another professor, James Oliver Horton of George Washington University, declares, "Slavery was no sideshow in American history, it was the main event." One may feel an urge to quibble with some of the pronouncements from the great academic on high, but there's no question slavery is a scar so long, wide and deep that it can never be covered over or covered up, and the program makes its case for further study not so much in the words of windbag professors as in the stories of people who lived through what one expert calls simply "an obscenity."