TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/103089/10308900.050

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.3 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 47

Television in the Dark


Video technology shows its limits when the uplinks go down

By Walter Isaacson


    The omnipotence of television is so taken for granted these
days that viewers are no longer amazed when a crackdown in
Beijing or a hostage crisis in Beirut magically materializes in
their living room. Far more surprising, and a bit unnerving, was
the eerie sensation Tuesday night: the tidy coherence and
instant packaging that normally make television such a
reassuring national touchstone were replaced by the unusual
experience of watching as the medium was forced to grope in the
dark. "When you're used to being able to flick switches and have
things pop up on satellites, it's frustrating and even
terrifying to realize that you have no way of finding out the
dimensions of a disaster," says Robert Murphy, ABC's vice
president of news coverage. "You feel you've lost control of the
story."

    Immediate gratification has become a hallmark of the age of
mobile uplinks. "The new satellite technology is wonderful,"
says NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, "but it's made us hostage to our
expectations that information can be instantaneous." Tuesday
night was a reminder that there are limits to what even
television can do when electricity and telephones and highways
are knocked out. By the time most networks closed down for the
night after five or six hours of coverage, San Jose and Santa
Cruz were still disconcertingly cut off from contact, the scope
of the tragedy on Oakland's I-880 was unknown, and it had been
impossible for reporters to convey the full flavor of what life
was like for 6 million residents of the Bay Area on a night they
will never forget. "The instinct of journalists is to have it
tidy," says Brokaw. "In this case there were many loose ends
even at the end of the night."

    This is not to minimize the dazzling feats that the
networks and their affiliates were able to pull off. Howard
Stringer, the president of CBS Broadcast Group, was parking his
car at Candlestick Park when the earthquake hit, and he
subsequently spent hours searching for a working telephone or
open airport. "It's remarkable that television got satellite
feeds out at all, given that things weren't working even at a
lower level of technology," he says. San Francisco's two
dailies, also without power, had trouble making their deadlines
with abbreviated editions, and newspapers across the country
relied heavily on TV for their information.

    ABC turned in the most impressive performance. With 14
camera crews, the Goodyear blimp, and savvy sports commentator
Al Michaels on hand at Candlestick Park to cover the World
Series, its sports division alone could probably have beaten the
other networks' news divisions, as it did after the massacre at
the 1972 Munich Olympics. Anchoring from Washington, Ted Koppel
again proved that he is unsurpassed in the art of extracting
facts from chaos. While CBS's Dan Rather was still stressing the
"unconfirmed" nature of reports about the collapse of the Bay
Bridge, ABC (along with the ever enterprising CNN) had already
broadcast a shot of the fallen roadway.

    But the video pickings were by necessity slim and
disjointed. The night was dominated by repeated aerial views of
three scenes -- a fire in the Marina district, the broken
segment of the Bay Bridge, and the collapsed stretch of I-880
-- with comments from correspondents who had no way to get to
them. On ABC, Michaels tried to figure out from his monitor in
Candlestick Park where the fire was located; on NBC, Bob
Jamieson reported from his car telephone that he saw no
indications of the blaze as he described the "festive
atmosphere" at Embarcadero Center.

    "We kept showing pictures of the collapsed highway," says
Murphy, "but it was not for at least two hours that we realized
we were seeing two levels that had pancaked and crushed people."
Even more frustrating to Murphy was the impenetrable shroud
surrounding the South Bay. "We tried all night to get a signal
out of San Jose, but we had no satellite capability, the
microwaves weren't working and we could not even get them on the
phone. For all we knew, hundreds might be dead."

    The Tuesday-night turmoil showed how reliant networks have
become on the technology of affiliates. "Once upon a time, only
the networks had remote trucks and satellite capacity, but now
most local stations do," says Koppel, who repeatedly turned over
his show to a pickup of ABC's intrepid affiliate, KGO. NBC was
hobbled by the lack of a working generator at its affiliate
KRON, which ended up relying on wire-service reports telefaxed
from Los Angeles.

    Even in the best of circumstances, television is most
powerful when reporting a focused event with a clear-cut
emotional content. Because camera crews could not wander the
city broadcasting interviews, it was impossible to convey the
surreal array of emotions, running from grief to giddiness, or
to share the diverse experiences that formed the sprawling saga.
By the time the Minicams were back beaming the next day, the
story had shifted to one of rescue and recovery; the varied
tapestry of what happened during the earthquake was lost in the
dust.

    There was, nonetheless, something dramatic about the way
the viewers found themselves treated to the raw material that
is normally polished and packaged before broadcast. "One of the
things that make television so powerful is that on occasion we
end up groping for information together," says ABC's unflappable
Peter Jennings, who after co-anchoring with Koppel for a few
minutes decided to grab a plane west to be the first anchor on
the scene next morning. Jeff Greenfield, a media critic who
appears on ABC, notes that "the significance of the story was
heightened by scenes of local reporters holding flashlights in
generator-lit newsrooms that looked like broom closets."

    By Wednesday evening, all the images were brightly lighted
once again, and the anchors were presenting polished broadcasts
from San Francisco. The morning shows were there as well, along
with enough reporters from around the world to provide the
reassuring hint of journalistic overkill that serves as a sign
that the world is under control once again.