Risky Business

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006 1:30 PM

I had just been with Bob Woodruff in New York last Monday, when he said goodbye to Elizabeth Vargas and his other ABC colleagues before heading to the airport, en route to the Middle East. I had spoken to him several times in the previous two weeks, about his life and why he got into journalism, and my piece on the network's new co-anchors had just run in Style yesterday morning.

That's when I got the chilling news. Woodruff and a cameraman, Doug Vogt, badly wounded in Iraq. Roadside bomb. Head injuries. Going into surgery.

Every death or injury in Iraq is important, whether it's a journalist or soldier or civilian. But when you know someone, or have talked to someone, just before things take a turn for the worst, it hits home in a very personal way. I remember the same feeling in 2003 when I interviewed David Bloom by phone from the Kuwaiti desert just days before his death.

I've asked reporters this question again and again: Why go to places like Iraq? Why risk your life? How do you blot it out and work when danger is always lurking just around the corner? I've asked John Burns of the New York Times after he was kidnapped and Jackie Spinner of The Washington Post after an attempted kidnapping and Canadian journalist Scott Taylor, who spent weeks in captivity and says he was tortured. The answer, I think, boils down to the fact that for some correspondents, it's in their DNA. They are drawn to the story, by the sense of history and the importance, or excitement, of serving as an eyewitness.

After Jill Carroll's kidnapping, there was a sense that stringers like her, with no armored cars or security apparatus, are taking the greatest risks. But being embedded with an Army unit, as Woodruff was, may be even more dangerous, despite the illusion of safety from being surrounded by soldiers, because you're literally on the front lines.

Woodruff didn't have to go to Iraq. He could have stayed home and anchored from the safety of a Manhattan studio. But he chose to go, wanted to go, and thereby reminds us of the risks that lesser-known journalists in Baghdad take every day.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff was with David Bloom outside Iraq days before the NBC correspondent died of a pulmonary embolism, and he immediately raced home to help Bloom's family with the funeral arrangements -- and to comfort his own wife, Lee, and their four children.

The reason, Woodruff explained to New York's Daily News in 2003, is that "they equate my life and situation with Dave's." The families have remained close since then.

When Woodruff left ABC's newsroom last Monday, hauling two suitcases and a computer bag, he betrayed no sense of nervousness about the risk of returning to Iraq, where he and a cameraman, Doug Vogt, were seriously wounded yesterday by a roadside bomb. He talked about deadlines, such as landing in Israel in time to interview Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, and the challenge of sleeping on overseas flights, but not about the danger he knew all too well from repeatedly flying into war zones.

In the four weeks since Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas became co-anchors of "World News Tonight," ABC has made clear that the new format would keep them constantly on the road. That was just fine with Woodruff, 44, a former London correspondent who reported from Pakistan for four months after the Sept. 11 attacks and also covered the war in Afghanistan. He was in the midst of his second trip to the Middle East this month and embedded with an Army unit when the bomb exploded.

"He is one of the bravest and most rugged and curious journalists I've ever worked with," said former ABC correspondent Linda Douglass. "He came into our bureau, so handsome you couldn't even find the words to describe it, and won everyone over by being hard-working and nice. He has an insatiable desire to get to the story, along with great devotion to his family."

Woodruff saw himself in the mold of Peter Jennings, whom he and Vargas succeeded after the veteran anchor's death from lung cancer last summer. A lawyer by training, Woodruff was moved to get into television by the Persian Gulf War, after having spent time as a CBS translator in China following the Tiananmen Square uprising. Since then, Woodruff said last week, his main aspiration has been "to be the best damn foreign correspondent I can be."

"Once it's in your blood, the difference in being on the scene firsthand is dramatic compared to being back at a desk at headquarters," said Donatella Lorch, a former foreign correspondent for NBC and the New York Times. But, she said, "the danger that journalists face in Iraq is really unparalleled. These roadside bombs make you a target regardless of whether you're in the vehicle that's blown up."

Woodruff's injury, following the Jan. 7 kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor stringer Jill Carroll, whose fate remains unknown, underscores the perils for western reporters in Iraq. Sixty-one journalists have been killed in that country since the 2003 war began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and there have been numerous close calls.

"Personally I feel probably more nervous if I'm driving along in a Humvee, armored or not, because a U.S. convoy or a military convoy of any kind in this country is such a target," CNN correspondent Michael Holmes said from Baghdad yesterday. His car was shot at in a 2004 attacks in which his cameraman was shot in the head and two Iraqi staffers were killed.

"When it happens right on top of you and you are the target, it's very hard to get across the sheer violence of something like that, and terror," Holmes said. "You know, I'm not afraid to admit that. It's an intensely personal and horrific experience."

At ABC News, where the loss of Jennings is still acutely felt, feelings of shock and concern yesterday were tempered by cautious optimism when Woodruff and Vogt were pronounced in stable condition after surgery. Vargas underwent a separate trauma when her husband, singer Marc Cohn, was shot in the head last summer during a carjacking, though he has since recovered.

While media attention to the Iraq conflict has ebbed and flowed as constant casualties have become a fact of life, the spotlight has shined brighter during periodic visits by high-profile anchors.

"It's more and more critical to have your person on the ground," said Lorch, who now runs the Knight International Press Fellowships Program. "The American audience sees news through a person. They identify with the anchor or correspondent they see every night."

On CBS's "Face the Nation," anchor Bob Schieffer praised Woodruff's bravery, saying: "Wars are not fought on the training ground, nor can they be covered from a TV studio. They are not reality shows, they are reality. Young men and women have to fight them and correspondents have to cover them if we are to understand what they are about."

Broadcasting & Cable has some background on Doug Vogt.

Along these lines, I was really struck by this piece by the LAT's Alissa Rubin:

"The truth is that we are working in a war zone where no rules apply. No one is safe: not Iraqis, not Westerners, not men, not women. For most journalists in Iraq, it's hard to be honest about danger, even though we talk about it all the time. We follow daily reports about the number of roadside bombings, suicide attacks and abductions. We chart violence the way other people watch the weather. But talking about the danger in Iraq for what it is -- my life, my death -- is too scary. So we make it ordinary. 'Oh, did you see any gunmen on your way over, there were some at the intersection yesterday, and would you like a cup of coffee?'

"To family and friends not in Iraq, it is incomprehensible why you came here, and certainly why you returned twice, three times -- in my case, over and over for nearly three years. I could say something like 'The cycle of risk and survival makes life more valuable,' but that wouldn't be true, although some journalists do become addicted to the danger, to the high of sidestepping death.

"For me, at least, what is true is that once in a while as a journalist you get the chance to witness history, a moment when tectonic plates shift, when more is at stake than you ever imagined you would touch or see. It's the adrenaline surge of being in a place where people's lives are in the balance, where every decision counts and where what you're writing might, might just matter. And you feel more alive than you've ever felt -- but you're also often closer to being killed. You notice I wrote 'often.' I needed a qualifier."

On a lighter note: If there's been a more scintillating hour of television lately than Oprah's evisceration of herself and her lyin', cheatin' author, it doesn't immediately spring to mind.

I was in New York much of last week, profiling ABC's new anchor team (I'm deducting points if you missed it), but got back just in time to watch Ms. O own up to one of her biggest blunders.

My sources say the assembled journalists didn't know that Winfrey was planning to body-slam the literary giant she had all but created, or to issue a heartfelt apology for having defended the fiction artist, and that they were as amazed as anyone by what unfolded in that Chicago studio.

I guess Oprah didn't transform herself from a trashy talk show host to a megacorporation and magazine publisher with the power to create instant best-sellers without having an exquisite sense of showmanship. Plus, her own story followed the arc of hubris, crisis, disappointment and redemption that has been such a daytime talk staple.

Rob Spillman exclaims on the Huffington Post:

"A public figure admitting they made a mistake? Stunning. On her show, Oprah flat out said that she was wrong about James Frey and that the truth does matter. For an hour she dragged Frey over the coals for lying to her and a million plus others who not only believed 'the essential truth' of his memoir, but the literal truth about his fight against addiction. Frey gets credit for going on the show to take his medicine like a man, though still doesn't seem to quite get it, what with his meek mumbling about learning from his mistakes."

The politically charged headline: "Oprah Apologizes; Why Can't W?"

Boston Phoenix media man Mark Jurkowitz is less than overwhelmed:

"I had to choke back the gag reflex watching clips of her carefully choreographed performance. To me, it felt like the secular version of some kind of overwrought televangelism morality play. I think Oprah's amassed too much power and influence for everyone's sake."

Jeff Jarvis remembers Oprah's roots:

"Well, I'm glad that Oprah has been brought down a few notches . . . by Oprah. I don't know who anointed Oprah the arbiter of culture, ethics, and behavior in America. Well, actually, I do know who did that: Oprah. So now she had to confess her mistake anointing James Frey. But in typical Oprah fashion, she didn't really take the fall herself. She pilloried Frey in the process. We already knew he was a liar of Glassian/Blairian proportion. But what this was about was really whether we can trust Oprah. That's what her empire is built upon.

"But we forget it was Oprah who trashed up daytime TV. She took the Donahue format and threw in shouting, screaming lowlifes, which made her a ratings hit and which everyone else -- including Donahue -- then copied. Then, and only then, did she get religion. She did a show about how wonderful she was to recant and become, overnight, the queen of quality TV. Her bookers tried to get me on that show -- as a TV critic at the time -- to praise her. To the consternation of my company's flacks, I refused."

In the NYT, Virginia Heffernan sees a virtuoso performance:

"Just like back in the days when her guests were abusers and sexual deviants, Ms. Winfrey came for vengeance -- and vengeance on behalf of the poor, the voiceless and the women above all, who get conned and defrauded and violated by men who think they're so bad. But because Ms. Winfrey never sounds just one note, she turned in an uncanny performance, modulating her aggression with such finesse that she seemed to be the penitent one, and not the one with the whip hand.

"She had promoted Mr. Frey's book in her all-powerful book club; now he had embarrassed her. But the mistake, to hear her tell it, was Ms. Winfrey's own: she had defended Mr. Frey, most notably on 'Larry King Live,' and in so doing 'left the impression that the truth does not matter.' Having come clean herself, she felt free to savage Mr. Frey, hammering him with questions and heaving deep sighs of fury until he stammered with cartoonish diffidence: 'I -- I -- I --.'"

Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal says Oprah was just retooling her product:

"Winfrey's righteous anger and regret over the role she, her show and her book club played in this tawdry episode may well have been genuine. But it was also a shrewd move by a brilliant businesswoman, acutely aware that millions buy what she sells because they believe in her, and she no longer believed in something she had sold them.

"It was good business and great TV. After all, when an automaker recalls a defective car, you never get to see the head of the company tearing into the engineer responsible for what went wrong."

In Salon, Hillary Frey (no relation) is uneasy:

"Good for Oprah, right? Admitting being wrong, as Oprah has no doubt counseled guests on her show many times, isn't an easy thing to do, especially in front of millions of people. . . .

"No doubt her many, many followers (and admirers like myself) have been waiting for Oprah to finally pronounce James Frey a fraud, and to distance herself both from the flimsy book that she made into a phenomenon, and from the lying man she made into a hero.

"Yet, even for those of us who have wanted to see Frey go down in flames for his lies, 'Oprah' was unnerving. As Oprah pounded Frey over various moments in his memoir that have either been proved false or remain dubious (for instance, when and how Lilly, his rehab girlfriend, died, or whether Frey had two root canals without anesthesia), one couldn't help (dare I say it) feeling a little bit sorry for James Frey. As the audience clapped when Oprah spit out a real zinger ('It's a lie!'; 'I think you presented a false person'), it was hard to avoid thinking that Frey was being put on display not to set the record straight, but for a public flogging. More than once Oprah emphasized that this experience has 'embarrassed' her. Her revenge: shaming another person in front of a live studio audience. Who knew that Oprah was an 'eye for an eye' kind of lady?"

At long last, Frey's publisher is doing something :

"Million Little Pieces publisher Doubleday, still smarting from its initial defense of Frey's best-selling book, is running an advertisement in today's USA TODAY apologizing to readers.

"And Riverhead, the publisher of Pieces sequel My Friend Leonard, is trying to distance itself from Frey. Riverhead is reconsidering a contract with Frey for future books and is referring inquiries about the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard to the author."

John Kerry has been getting kicked around for urging an Alito filibuster, but Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum gives a thumbs-up:

"Would this end up hurting Democrats? It might. And the end result would probably be the spectacle of Bill Frist and Dick Cheney ramming through the 'nuclear option' to force debate to a close and install Alito on the Supreme Court regardless.

"But in politics, if you only fight when you're sure of victory, you're never going to fight at all. Senate Dems blew the Judiciary Committee hearings as a chance to educate the country about Alito's radical views on presidential power, and a filibuster fight would give them a second chance. They should take it."

Betsy's Page, however, disapproves:

"Could there be anything more typical of John Kerry than that he would be calling for a filibuster of Samuel Alito's nomination from Switzerland?. . . .

"It seems that Kerry is traveling down the same path that Al Gore has been traveling. Maybe the realization that you have lost to George W. Bush just sends these guys into a tailspin where they end up clutched in the embrace of the Moveon.org and Kos crowd and they lose all touch with political reality."

Finally, I've heard a lot of campaign vows in my time, but this one, via Reuters, is the strangest I've ever encountered:

"Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is famous for his ambitious promises, but he is unlikely to be called to task if he breaks his latest pledge: not to have sex before the April 9 general election."