Koppel vs. O'Neill: Nightline goes to Vietnam

I'm late in blogging about ABC News' "Nightline" segment this week on Kerry's Silver Star.  Despite helpful heads-ups from several emailers, I missed all but the tail end of the broadcast — Koppel's verbal firefight with John O'Neill — because I was watching the Astros lose.  However, I've read more than a dozen blog posts from both left- and right-leaning blogs — including Captain's Quarters, Tom Maguire, INDC Journal, Wizbang!, Patterico, PrestoPundit, Demosophia, Watcher of Weasels, Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, and Linkmeister —  and the ABC News websight's version and John O'Neill's statement on the SwiftVets' website.  (If someone has a link to the full video somewhere, I'd appreciate a link.)

I don't fault, but rather commend, ABC News for attempting to do some original investigative journalism "on the scene."  But at least two initial points about that need to be emphasized. 

• Most importantly, while ABC News invested a great deal of time and money going to Vietnam, they've failed to exhaust, plumb, or even scratch the surface of trying to do any investigative reporting here in the United States.  It's not only that they've failed to interview pro-SwiftVets eyewitnesses, but also that they've also failed to interview pro-Kerry eyewitnesses — and no one, from either side of the debate, can seriously defend their failure to do that.  Indeed, they failed to review, summarize, or even reference what others have reported — including, notably, the eyewitness account given by their fellow mainstream media source, Chicago Tribune editor William B. Rood — and that's simply inexcusably sloppy.
• Next, ABC News made only passing and oblique references to the fact that their reporting from Vietnam was done at the pleasure of, through cooperation with, and subject to deliberately injected bias from, the Vietnamese government — indeed, with a "watcher" on the scene from that government who had the power to reward or retaliate against the individuals whom they interviewed.  John O'Neill's protests to Ted Koppel that ABC News' interviews took place in a "closed society" were way too mild.  The totalitarian government of Vietnam has a direct stake in the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election:  Not only was John Kerry, their candidate of choice, the leading U.S. critic of America's participation in the war among all U.S. combat veterans, but he also has been, as a senator, the leading proponent of normalization and increased trade ties with Vietnam in the post-war era.  The North Vietnamese (with guidance from, and in cooperation with, the KGB) were incredibly clever at exploiting American anti-war sentiment — they got America out of Vietnam by using useful fools like John Kerry in the first place.  It's unfortunately not metaphoric to describe ABC News' interviewees — the supposedly disinterested peasants described so enthusiastically by Koppel — as "testifying at gunpoint."  That doesn't necessarily mean they were lying, but any remotely fairminded journalistic effort should have carefully considered that situation — and should have reported clearly on the bias it very likely injected into their efforts.

That noted, my main reaction to the ABC News reporting is one of continuing, mouth-foaming frustration.  ABC News made only the most clumsy efforts at doing what every lawyer is required to do for every single witness who testifies in court, and what every reporter should likewise do before reporting a purported witness' story:  laying a foundation to show personal knowledge.  ABC News' apparent standard:  If the government minder let them talk to someone who appeared to be ethnically Vietnamese and was within range of their cameras and microphones, then each such person's claim to have personal knowledge was accepted as gospel.  Yes, of course it's difficult — it requires persistence — to separately qualify each such witness.  But the facts that the events occurred long ago, that they took place during combat, that there are language barriers, that there is a government watcher present — all these factors counsel more careful qualification of the purported eyewitnesses, not less.

By every previous account — except the abbreviated ones in Kerry's Silver Star citation — there were two separate locations involved.  In the ABC News website version, there's but a single, fleeting reference to that critical fact.  At the initial, main ambush location, the Swift Boats offloaded dozens and dozens of Ruff Puff infantry to chase down and kill the enemy who were present, and the Swift Boats themselves expended an enormous amount of lethal ordnance.  That's where the enemy KIAs — other than Kerry's single prey — were reported.  It's extremely doubtful that even at that location, the American and South Vietnamese forces faced a numerically superior enemy or overwhelming incoming fire.  But unless every American eyewitness is lying through his teeth, at the second location — the only location where Kerry did anything arguably more valorous than what every man jack aboard every one of the (undecorated) officers and crew of the Swift Boats did — there were fewer enemy soldiers and considerably less enemy fire.  How many fewer enemy and how much less fire?  The ABC News reporting shed essentially no light on that subject because either through sloppy reporting or willful conflation, it didn't make the critical distinctions necessary to draw meaningful conclusions.

Andrew Sullivan calls this an "excellent reporting job."  Mr. Sullivan, other than the fact that it was done in a far-off country, can you point to a single aspect of this reporting that was "excellent," or even minimally competent?

Time-lines.  Maps and diagrams.  Lists of individual witnesses, thoroughly annotated to show their opportunities to observe, their qualifications to appreciate what was happening, and their possible biases.  Physical evidence (or reports thereof, like boat damage reports, ordnance expenditures).  If you're going to make any credible effort to "pierce the fog of war," that's how you have to go about it.  Compare, for example, the care and detail that's gone into reconstructions of what happened at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 — not just in the years since, but in the days after.  Compare, for that matter, the kind of investigation that Hollywood writers dream up for any average episode of "Dragnet" or "CSI: Miami" or "Law and Order."  By any serious or responsible standard — journalistic standards, much less courtroom standards — this bit of reporting was a shallow, ridiculous joke of an effort. 

It makes me nauseous to think that an American presidential election might be influenced by such ham-handed hackery.  Any principled and half-competent cub reporter, any first-year law student, any backcountry magistrate, would be ashamed to turn in such an effort.