TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/103089/10308900.050

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 6KB | 113 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.