Wounded Newsmen Show Slow Recovery

Woodruff was spending time with Iraqi troops because the question of whether they can assume more of the military burden from U.S. forces "is the big single issue. . . . You can't assess their readiness unless you're traveling with them and observing them do their jobs," Vargas said.

ABC executives and journalists were angry about what they viewed as an insensitive front-page sub-headline in yesterday's New York Times that said, "Field Reports Were a Ratings Strategy."

"That's not why you send someone in harm's way," ABC's Barbara Walters said on her talk show, "The View." "This just drove me crazy."

Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said yesterday that "the subhead was a poor choice of words, and I called David Westin today to express our regrets. We at the Times hurt for Bob Woodruff as we would for one of our own correspondents."

Media analyst Andrew Tyndall said that "you don't drive viewers to your network by reporting on Iraq. I applaud ABC for the way they tried to solve the thorny problem of the dual-anchor format. Do they now throw in the towel on that strategy? Do they turn Vargas into a news reader and abandon on-the-road reporting for six months until we find out whether Woodruff can come back?" ABC said it has no such plans, in part because its new approach of providing live West Coast newscasts requires an anchor to remain on duty until 10 p.m. Eastern time every night.

Some online critics have questioned whether the media are devoting too much attention to two wounded journalists when such injuries are all too common in Iraq.

"Look, it is a tragedy whenever this happens to anybody there -- soldiers, contractors or journalists," ABC's Schneider said. "When it happens to someone we know and love, it's particularly devastating."

Landstuhl is the U.S. military's largest overseas hospital and usually the first stop for U.S. forces severely wounded in Iraq. Most patients stay at the Army-run hospital for 48 to 72 hours before being transported to medical clinics in the United States. ABC says Woodruff and Vogt may be able to return to the United States as early as today.

Woodruff's brother, David, told ABC from Landstuhl: "The doctors have been communicating with us all the time. The care he got in the field -- he was taken into the Balad field hospital within just about 30 minutes. . . . The actions that they took saved his life, no question about it."

Staff writer Craig Whitlock in Germany contributed to this report.