Brian Williams, Anchoring and Hunkering in Iraq

NBC's Brian Williams reports in front of a helo at Camp Victory, Iraq on March 5th. (Nbc)

Soon after arriving in Iraq, Brian Williams was listening to an Army colonel describe how much safer Ramadi had gotten when another soldier shouted that it was too dangerous to stand there and hustled them inside the military outpost.

Days later at the Baghdad airport, Williams and his team heard five explosions, saw smoke rising near the taxiway in front of them, and were relieved to board the Fokker jet that carried them out of the country.

"How is it that these guys are running around with mortars, four years into this conflict?" the NBC anchor says of the insurgents. "We need to provide safe passage into that airport, and we're still doing corkscrew landings? It's crazy."

Reporting in Iraq is a series of risk-benefit assessments. The day after 118 Iraqi pilgrims were killed in a series of coordinated attacks, Williams canceled a planned visit to an open-air Shiite market, based on advice from his team, which included a retired general. He passed up other outings as well for safety reasons.

Under the circumstances, he was asked Friday, hours after landing in New York, why did he insist on going?

"So many nightly newscasts begin with Iraq," Williams says. "It is quickly emerging as the story of our times. This trip will now educate and color the way I write about this story. There is absolutely no substitute for going out and touching it and seeing it."

As the first broadcast network anchor to broadcast from Iraq since ABC's Bob Woodruff was badly wounded there by a roadside bomb 13 months ago, Williams spent most of his time with U.S. military forces. He rode with a top general in a Black Hawk helicopter to inspect Anbar province -- albeit escorted by attack jets and Apache helicopter gunships.

One drawback of reporting in the bosom of the U.S. military is an abundance of military optimism, and perhaps spin, from those who are providing protection. The Williams trip was a microcosm of the journalistic dilemma in Iraq: How do you balance the constant violence with a fair assessment of whether President Bush's escalation is starting to work?

"There was a total dichotomy and disconnect between the valiant efforts of the infantry in small outposts, converting people one by one, taking out their trash, almost, and how the overall view of all that can be erased with one car bomb or one vest bomb," Williams says. "It's valid to say that tells the story of Iraq."

Last Monday, for instance, Williams reported that targeted military patrols had produced "pockets of relative peace where there had been awful ongoing violence." But other events conveyed a darker picture. Williams also reported that evening that a suicide bomber had killed at least 20 people. The next night, "despite the upbeat tone of some U.S. commanders," he said, the news was that 10 American soldiers, and at least 150 Iraqi pilgrims, had been killed in a series of separate attacks.

Network correspondents, such as NBC's Richard Engel, CBS's Lara Logan and ABC's Terry McCarthy, already do a fine job ferreting out news in Iraq. But anchordom brings access. Among other things, Williams landed an interview with David Petraeus, the general now managing the war.

A visiting anchor also brings a fresh eye. Williams provided a tour of one of Saddam Hussein's luxury palaces, and a look at how Camp Victory has makeshift stands of Burger King, Popeye's, Subway and Pizza Hut fare.

Beyond the battlefield, coverage is shifting on the home front. The Washington Post series on deplorable conditions at Walter Reed and Woodruff's reporting on veterans with traumatic brain injuries have put a much-needed focus on wounded American soldiers who are not getting the care they deserve. Newsweek has weighed in with a cover story on problems at Veterans Administration hospitals and the New York Times has reported on maddening delays in veterans' disability payments. Such digging is way overdue and has forced the Bush administration to promise improvements.

With the fourth anniversary of the war approaching next week, no story -- not even the Anna Nicole saga -- looms larger for American journalism. If Williams enhanced our understanding just a bit, he accomplished something. With polls showing the country turning sharply against the conflict, the challenge for news organizations that got caught up in the gung-ho rush to war is to offer clear-eyed reports from Iraq without being stampeded in the other direction.

While there was some uninformed media chatter that Williams was covering the surge in response to a ratings surge by ABC's Charlie Gibson, the Baghdad trip had been planned weeks earlier. As for his safety, Williams says he left it "up to the hands of the gods or the 3rd Infantry Division."

Footnote: Times ombudsman Byron Calame chided the paper yesterday for waiting six days to follow up on The Washington Post's exclusive about shoddy care at the Army's Walter Reed facility. Times Executive Editor Bill Keller acknowledged the paper was "slow" and that "pride" was a factor, but said his Pentagon reporters were pursuing other stories and that the Times is wary of using "second-hand information" before it can be confirmed. The Times, wrote Calame, should "swallow a bit of its pride" when competitors break important news.

Money, Porn and Journalism

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When he wrote for the New York Times about a teenager engaged in child pornography, reporter Kurt Eichenwald made clear that he had gotten deeply involved in the boy's life. Eichenwald described how he persuaded Justin Berry to give up drugs, stop performing sexual acts in front of a Webcam, even referred him to a lawyer.

What he did not reveal -- even to his Times editors -- was that he had given Berry $2,000. "The check should have been disclosed to editors and readers," the Times said in an editor's note last week.

That was "a mistake," says Eichenwald, adding that it slipped his mind. Still, he says, "the people who know the story think I did an unbelievably ethical and moral thing, but anyone who reads the editor's note thinks I'm the biggest journalistic sleazeball in the world."

Eichenwald, who now works for Conde Nast, says he provided the $2,000 check, which was later repaid by the boy's grandmother, as a way of tracking down Berry, whose sexual services had been advertised online. "I was trying to find this kid and report it to law enforcement," he says of the money paid in 2005, several months before his lengthy piece was published. "I wasn't acting as a reporter." When he later decided to write about Berry's saga, Eichenwald says, he and his editors decided he couldn't use anything he learned before he began working on the story.

Why Eichenwald believes an imaginary line can be drawn, and previous involvement with a news subject declared off-limits, is hard to fathom. The check came to light in a Detroit trial, at which Eichenwald testified, of a man accused of molesting Berry.

Asked about the editor's note, Eichenwald says he was the one who insisted on writing a sidebar -- which, over his objections, ran only on the Times's Web site -- detailing his efforts to help Berry. "I fought and kicked and yelled and screamed that we had to disclose the things I had done as a reporter that might cause people to question the story. They pushed back and pushed back."

But Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says "it was understood from the beginning that we would explain to readers how the story was reported, both because of Kurt's unusual -- and, in my view, understandable -- effort to be both journalist and rescuer, and because of the legal complications of reporting the story. . . . We also incorporated a good deal of information about Kurt's role into the print version of the story."

Plagiarism Watch

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The Boston Globe suspended sportswriter Ron Borges without pay for two months after concluding he had lifted "extensive passages" for a March 4 roundup column from the Tacoma, Wash., News Tribune. The discovery was made by the Web site Coldhardfootballfacts.com.