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HARD NEWS
Tragedy is the stuff that great journalists are made of. Over the past year, Canadians Ashleigh Banfield and Lyse Doucet have proven that - in completely different ways.

Text: BRUCE GRIERSON

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, ANYONE CONNECTED WITH BROADCAST news was scissored by powerfully conflicting emotions. What was unfolding was an unimaginable tragedy. It was also the biggest story in a generation. Fears within the industry about the demise of network news were, for the moment at least, irrelevant. Because right now, everyone was glued to their set.

Many reporters responded to the disaster with the best work of their lives. But as the days wore on, two compelling voices began to distinguish themselves. Not American or British voices, but Canadian. Not greying fixtures in what writer Kurt Anderson calls the "gerontocracy" of network news, but reporters young enough not to remember the Sputnik launch or the Kennedy assassination. Not men, but women.

In London, veteran foreign correspondent Lyse Doucet, who had immediately been summoned to anchor a three-hour radio special for BBC World Service, then cabbed across town and switched mediums. At the BBC Television Centre, she stepped in at the helm of BBC World’s round-the-clock coverage of the disaster, co-ordinating live reports from a dozen correspondents, trying to refract the event through a global geopolitical prism. Perhaps the most widely heard journalist in the world, Doucet had the ear of vast swaths of the world’s English-speaking population – at least those who wanted an alternative to CNN.

Meanwhile, Ashleigh Banfield of the American cable-news station MSNBC was literally in the thick of things. She was one of the first journalists on the scene that morning, having run there from her lower Manhattan apartment. When the north tower collapsed, Banfield was almost underneath it. She narrowly missed being overcome by the debris cloud and then hung tough for six straight days, practically seizing passing firefighters and bystanders by the lapels for comment. She became part of the event itself, a survivor, and soon other journalists were interviewing her.

If history anoints either Doucet or Banfield as the voice of the War on Terror, it will have elevated a somewhat unlikely actor into the company of Murrow, Cronkite, Rather, Amanpour and Kent. More significantly, it will shed light on the great difference between two leading news-gathering systems, with Doucet and Banfield representing alternative visions of the way TV news might go.

West London, 11 a.m. It’s a minute or two before airtime at BBC News, the network’s international flagship show, which will soon beam this hour’s installment of a scrupulously objective news package into the living rooms of some 200 million people worldwide. At the mighty Beeb, like all big news agencies, there are sock-puppet anchors, as far removed from actual news gathering as a hot dog vender is from the abattoir. But Lyse Doucet is not one of them. Since arriving today, she has been consulted on the correct pronunciation of the slain Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn ("fore-town"); on whether a pope can actually resign ("There is precedent for it," she says); and on what to name the injured eagle being nursed to health at the BBC field station in Kandahar. ("Is it a Pashtun bird or a Tajik bird?" is the crucial question.) She has taken a red pen to the copy she has been given to read: "Now they have the responsibility to somehow form a government" sounded just a bit too Brady Bunch. She has jawed with the mad and brilliant features man, the ex-British military officer who protects her in war zones, the booking wizard who can always get her on the next plane to Kabul. And she hasn’t yet been in the office an hour.

Doucet, 43, was born in Bathurst, N.B., in the heart of Acadie, which helps explain an accent so distinctive she has been recognized in public after merely saying "Excuse me." Today she is presenting, but more often than not she is out in the field, reporting live from Tehran or Islamabad or Jerusalem. Over a career spanning two decades and three mediums (radio, TV and print), she has quietly built a reputation as one of the most nuanced and trustworthy correspondents in the business, heir to the mantle of BBC veteran Kate Adie. Indeed, when the BBC won the George Polk Award this spring for its post-September 11 coverage, Doucet was asked to accept it.

She has covered Afghanistan since the Soviet occupation, living there for 18 months during some of the worst fighting in the late 1980s. Those deep ties with the country paid off a dozen years later, when the world’s interest in the country spectacularly rekindled. "The people I knew who were consul generals or deputies back then were suddenly ministers or deputy ministers or generals or envoys for the U.S.," she says. "History had moved on. The players were the same, but the titles were different. We just picked up the script." Her contacts translated to great access for the BBC, as when the returning Afghan king, Mohammad Shah, ensconced in his compound surrounded by a sea of reporters, summoned Doucet alone inside for his first interview.

But there is another component to reliability. In her London flat stands a big bookcase devoted to the Middle East; Palestine and Israel each get their own shelf, with a little cross-border migration. Combatants, she understands, see events from their own unique perspectives. "Perception is what [war] is about, not facts. In the Mideast conflict, I went through a phase of trying to understand: Why did both sides come to the conclusions they did? Because if I didn’t get to that point, if I didn’t try to get under their skin, I would never begin to understand what’s driving the politics."

New York City, 9:30 p.m. Ashleigh Banfield, still in her work clothes, is weaving through the Friday night traffic near Times Square, zipping north in a chauffeur-driven car. It’s a 20-minute ride from the MSNBC studio in New Jersey to the home of an old college pal she has already kept waiting an hour for dinner. Banfield has spent a 16-hour day meeting with colleagues, signing 100 headshots of herself for the promo people to send out, and writing cards to thank four months worth of guests for appearing on her show. In the past nine months, it is only the sixth day she has been in the office.

Of necessity – though it’s a necessity she has largely created for herself – Winnipeg-born Banfield, 34, is carrying a workload that makes Kofi Annan’s look like Bill Murray’s in Caddyshack. The conceit of her news show Ashleigh Banfield on Location is that the crew changes locales every night, following breaking national or international stories. It is broadcast news as extreme sport: Find a theatrical backdrop, wrangle guests, shoot raw, kinetic footage in the daylight and, come live air time (which was 4 a.m. in Afghanistan and the Middle East), improvise like mad, leaning often on the ur-question of American TV: "How did you feel?" Cable upstart MSNBC’s guerrilla approach – a roaming camera that follows Banfield up the girders of the Brooklyn Bridge; lots of input from viewers via e-mail – is chalk to the BBC’s cheese. And so are its resources. In the barren moonscape of Northern Afghanistan, the vastly endowed Beeb entrenched itself, building houses for its field crew. MSNBC’s little unit made do. They slept on the concrete floor of an unheated building, eating suspicious-looking food, for a month and a half.

Banfield’s health took a dive in Afghanistan. The particulate she’d inhaled at Ground Zero had created breathing problems that the Afghan dust now made worse, and strange stomach bugs showed up. In a way, red-lining the motor all day every day, American-style, may have been a kind of defence against the potentially more damaging psychological impact of 9/11. "I lost friends in the Trade Center, and I really haven’t had a chance to calm down and absorb the personal fallout around the city," she says as the car heads into Manhattan’s Upper West Side. "When I do get a chance to focus on what happened, it’s going to be pretty tough."

It would be inaccurate to say September 11 made Banfield’s career. She’d won a regional Emmy Award while anchoring at the Fox News affiliate in Dallas and drew notice for her coverage, for MSNBC, of the Florida ballot fiasco. But the New York disaster sent her profile to another plane. Leno had her on the show. People magazine ran her picture. Her trademarks – the blond hair, the geek-chic titanium frames, the cigars she smokes off-hours – got magnified into totems of character as she rode the media updraft to the planet of the news babes. Guys, not a few of them journalists, talked about her in bars. Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey nakedly spoofed her on "Weekend Update."

MSNBC promptly created a venue for her, one that would exploit her energy, her resourcefulness, her heat. It sent her to Islamabad, a "Region in Conflict"; and to blend in there, she cut and dyed her hair and lost the glasses, an almost Yentl-like transformation to bland androgyny. Of course, that too set off a new round of barbed comment. Syndicated humorist Andy Borowitz issued a release: "NATO agrees on interim hair colour for Ashleigh Banfield."

To MSNBC, this was all good. The five-year-old station owned by NBC and Microsoft is all about buzz and spin. High-octane opinion over hard news. Talk, but even more rock. (The raspy voice of the network – the guy who says "Ashleigh Banfield – wherever the story goes, she’s there" – is Dee Snider, former lead singer for the 1980s glam band Twisted Sister.) MSNBC wants the under-35 crowd. It exploits the Web like no other news show in America. And just to keep everyone guessing about its politics, it recently brought Phil Donahue, a big Nader supporter, back onto network TV. Hey, when you’re a distant third in the cable-news wars and you can feel the breath of shareholders who demand profits in the short term, you can’t afford not to behave like a hammer-down American entrepreneur.

In the early weeks of the alliance counterstrike, Doucet and Banfield worked just a few metres apart on a hotel roof in Islamabad. In some other respects, too, they are closely aligned. Each is smart, with a great memory and nimble improvisational skills. Each can be tough when she needs to be: Banfield’s bird-dogging of evasive interviewees earned her the nickname "the Afghan Hound"; Doucet has a sort of shadow bulldog persona she invokes when guest-hosting the aggressive BBC program Hard Talk. (She has sometimes been moved, after the red light goes out, to apologize to the guest: "Nothing personal – it’s just the format of the show.") Each skipped journalism school and went straight into the field. Banfield, who holds a bachelor’s degree in political studies and French from Queen’s, started as a 19-year-old researcher and reporter at a TV station in Kenora, Ont., before arcing through Edmonton, Winnipeg, Calgary and Dallas. Doucet, who holds a master’s in political theory and international relations from the University of Toronto, was working for an aid agency on the Ivory Coast before selling stories to the BBC’s new West Africa bureau.

Each is cloaked in the aura of those whom the fates have spared. When the north tower collapsed on September 11, Banfield’s TV-producer-boyfriend saved her life by kicking in the glass door of a nearby building and pulling her into an air pocket. In Jerusalem in April, Doucet was about to leave for Kabul when, passing the vegetable market, she decided to pick up some apples for the trip. Then, for no real reason, she reconsidered and walked on by. One minute later, a suicide bomber turned the market into a morgue.

But for the most part, the two reporters are as antipodal as their employers. One sings in an R & B band (okay, not so much these days) and outlasted even the gossip columnist at the White House correspondents’ dinner afterparty in April. The other has chosen a contemplative life within what Michael Janeway, the former Boston Globe editor, called "the organized religion of journalism." The BBC created Doucet’s social network and shaped her ethics, and she has so absorbed its doctrine of objectivity that when she plays tennis, you expect her to keep switching the racquet from hand to hand.

Most nights, the difference shows on the air. An example: On April 11, the day of Colin Powell’s visit with Jordan’s King Abdullah, the BBC’s Doucet went live, putting this question to Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi and Palestinian economist Salah Abdul Shafi: "What is your country willing to do to make the peace process work?" A few hours earlier, on MSNBC, Banfield spoke to Dore Gold, senior adviser to Ariel Sharon, and Hasan Abdel Rahman, chief PLO representative in Washington. Her question was more or less the same, but the spin was pure Judge Judy: "Who is going to be the bigger man and sit at the peace table first?"

There’s no way you can be a public personality without making enemies – at least if you’re doing your job with some passion. Doucet, while never really losing the respect of her peers, has sometimes taken heat from viewers. Her obvious sympathies to the suffering of Palestinians has earned her the nickname "Lies and Deceit." But the backlash that followed Banfield’s rise was of another magnitude and says much about a system built on short attention spans.

"There’s a sort of imponderable attention to star quality in American TV journalism," says Kevin Newman, the Global National anchor who was himself thrust to the pinnacle as co-host of Good Morning America, given a preposterously short time to prove himself and then summarily canned. "I don’t pretend to understand it, but it seems to be falling in love with newness. And someone who comes along that seems original and fresh and new gets a certain sheen put on them. The danger, of course, is that can’t sustain itself."

What had been style points for Banfield were now affectations. What had been compelling media moments were now theatrics. (Banfield has caught as much flak for the glasses and dye job as novelist Martin Amis did for his new teeth, the implication being that serious craftsmen are above issues of vanity.) A spokesman at rival Fox called her "the Anna Kournikova of TV news."

The criticisms are at least partly misplaced. In truth, both Lyse Doucet and Ashleigh Banfield are great at what they’ve been asked to do; the quarrel really should be with the job. One is captain of a battleship commanding utter respect but requiring two hours and three levels of government clearance to turn around. The other is a midnight-rush bartender in a philosophers’ café, where the patrons are given big questions, if not the time to properly answer them. Neither journalist would transplant easily into the other’s milieu. But then, at a time when the future of network news is up for grabs, neither would necessarily want to.