D.C. Dispatch October 4, 2005

When there's a real disaster, celebrity journalists can distract needlessly from an urgent story.

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Nothing like a few hurricanes to bring the old media life into focus. Watching a single story for this long, you become intensely aware of your own habits and tastes.

Item: Outside Reagan National Airport a few weeks ago, up on the departure level, I see Ted Koppel climbing out of a car. First thought: Ted must be heading to New Orleans. Second thought: Just what we need, another celebrity journalist elbowing his way into Katrina.

Now this is grossly unfair of me, in a couple of ways. First, I have no idea where Koppel was headed that day. Second, the man's a fantastic journalist, one of those rare network stars whose fame never seems to compromise their work. I haven't seen a speck of his hurricane coverage, but I bet whatever he did was good.

Still, these dark anti-Koppel thoughts bubbled up in me spontaneously, as if from the subconscious. And when it comes to celebrity journalists generally, I don't think I'm alone.

Item: Clicking through the storm news last weekend, I happened on CNN's American Morning, with Miles O'Brien co-anchoring the Hurricane Rita coverage, live from the town of Lumberton, Texas. I've been watching O'Brien for years. He's no fabulous demigod of the Ted Koppel class, but then he never seems to be gunning for that status—or if he is, he's not getting traction. Instead, O'Brien comes across as a solid, reliable journeyman newshound. No frills, no nonsense, no glamour, no blazing insights—just the facts, more or less.

And for me, that's exactly the sort of coverage that worked best in the Gulf. This was a story where you didn't want some celebrity Bigfoot taking up the screen, distracting you with their own enormous presence. The story was plenty big all by itself.

So there was O'Brien in a baggy red CNN jacket that seemed a few sizes too large, a khaki baseball cap, and high rubber boots, standing in murky water a few inches deep on Lumberton's Main Street. On first inspection, he looked beleaguered and faintly preposterous. But as I watched, it hit me that he was suited perfectly to this assignment. As he interviewed his own correspondents around the Gulf, his questions were consistently direct and simple. How big was the storm surge? What was the situation in Port Arthur? Are there flood walls in Lafayette?

At one point, in a back-and-forth with colleague Soledad O'Brien, he surveyed the small-town wreckage around him and gave this report: "You'll see the Dairy Queen over there lost its signage.... There's a bunch of shingles off of the City Hall here as well. Take a look at this sign over here: 'Homecoming Parade, September 24, 9:00 a.m.' Soledad, I don't think there's going to be a parade today, just for the record. It's a Hawaiian theme, but I think we'll have to suspend the homecoming."

At his best, Miles O'Brien is rivetingly plain. More and more over the past few weeks, I've found myself drawn to the journeymen (and-women) like him, and away from the boldface names. When there's a real disaster and people are dying, I don't need NBC's Brian Williams, with his charisma and his alpha-journo authority and his palpable aspiration to be the next Cronkite. Here again, I'm picking unfairly on a very fine journalist, blaming him, in a way, for his own success.

But celebrity is a major force in journalism, and you can't pretend it doesn't influence your perceptions. Even rising stars can distract needlessly from an urgent story, by their very rising-ness. I've always liked CNN's Anderson Cooper, and still do. But the more famous and personally intriguing he becomes, and the closer he gets to real stardom, the more my brain grows weary of him.

Once, I could enjoy Cooper just for his thoughtful way with the news. Now, as I watch him report on a big story, I also have to contend with the Anderson Cooper story, because suddenly it's in all the magazines and newspapers, and it's hard to look at him without recalling all that. Cooper's celebrity has become inseparable from his own work, and, subtly but unmistakably, it undermines the effect of that work.

For much of an entire day this week, the Drudge Report ran as its main headline, "Media Made Mess of Storm News." Above it, Drudge posted large color photos of Brian Williams, Soledad O'Brien, Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey, and Fox's Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith. If you clicked on the headline, it linked you to a Los Angeles Times story about "media inaccuracies" in the Gulf. Funny thing, though, the Times story didn't even mention most of the celebrities pictured on Drudge's page—only Oprah's name appeared, and briefly at that.

On the same day, The New York Times ran an editor's note about a September 5 column by Alessandra Stanley, who wrote that while reporting on Katrina, Rivera had "nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety." After taking a lot of heat for this claim, which Rivera denied, The Times was conceding that no nudge was visible on the tape of the incident.

From Drudge to The New York Times to your own family room, the perception is the same: Scary news celebs are taking over the story! They're not, literally. But when they come bustling on, bigger than life, it sure feels like they are.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.