COVERING DISASTER WITH SECONDHAND SOURCES

“What’s the mood in Kiev?”

It was a classic TV question that “Today” host Bryant Gumbel posed on the telephone to the Soviet Union Wednesday, asking one person to speak for a city of more than two million.

This time, however, the person on the other end of the line wasn’t a network correspondent.

Instead, it was American college professor Karen Black, who happened to be in the Ukrainian city with a group of students during the recent accident at a Soviet nuclear plant in nearby Chernobyl.

That made her a hotly recruited, primary second-hand source.

Quoting an Intourist official, Black told Gumbel on NBC that casualties from the Chernobyl accident had reached at least 300, far greater than the Soviets were acknowledging.

A powerful TV network getting its scoop about a possible cataclysmic global disaster . . . from a tourist ? A disaster that seemed to be spewing radiation across Europe that could ultimately reach the United States?

NBC wasn’t alone. Black, who teaches at Bates College, was also quoted on CBS and ABC.

Her sudden prominence illustrated the enormous difficulty that the United States and other Western media were having in covering the accident at Chernobyl, 80 miles north of Kiev. It was there that an apparent meltdown and ensuing fire at a nuclear reactor resulted in either two deaths or 2,000 to 3,000 deaths, depending on whether you believed them or us .

The Soviets depicted the United States as a panicky Chicken Little shouting about the sky falling in.

“Where is the truth?” Ted Koppel asked Wednesday night on ABC’s “Nightline.” No one in the United States seemed to know. The highly secretive Soviets had created a media meltdown by banning Western press from both Kiev and the accident site, increasing suspicions and decreasing information.

Once again, TV had no pictures.

You couldn’t help being struck by the visual contrast between the enigma of Chernobyl and Tuesday’s Los Angeles Central Library fire, whose shooting flames filled the screen on local newscasts and illustrated the great loss.

Media-wise, there were striking similarities between Chernobyl and the United States air strike against Libya last month. Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi’s government restricted the movement of Western media there, making it nearly impossible to accurately assess casualties and damage. When not being led on tightly controlled and orchestrated tours by Libyans, video-minded TV had to tell the story as best it could by falling back on radio techniques.

At least the networks had personnel in Tripoli, even if they were initially reduced to thrusting mikes out their hotel windows to bring battle sounds closer to home. There were no media accounts on Chernobyl. No pictures, no voices.

Oh, there were TV pictures from Austria, Poland, Finland and Sweden. There were satellite photos of Chernobyl provided by the U.S. There were graphics and simulations showing viewers what may have happened. But there was nothing showing America what did happen.

So viewers instead got Karen Black. They also got “CBS Morning News” reporting “second-hand information gleaned from Japanese tourists.” They got CNN quoting “a New York man’s brother in Kiev.” They got chunks of data picked up from a variety of sources, including even Soviet ham radio operators.

There were the usual revolving talking heads, last month’s terrorist and Libyan experts having been ousted by this week’s nuclear and Soviet experts.

What’s more, a new breed of nuclear experts--TV weathercasters--was born out of a desire to inform America about the direction of winds blowing fallout from Chernobyl. It remained to be seen if viewers were reassured by Johnny Mountain’s promise on Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” that they had nothing to fear.

We’ve so taken for granted TV’s futuristic technology and capacity to deliver the world instantaneously that its failure to come through this week is almost a jolt. Helpless to penetrate this latest media lockout, TV has become a sort of Maginot Line behind a Berlin Wall.

“What we do know is that information is confusing and conflicting,” CNN’s Mary Alice Williams correctly noted.

How confusing and conflicting?

Even before a first meltdown was confirmed, the networks showed satellite photos that U.S. “intelligence sources” said confirmed a second meltdown. Later, viewers were told those sources were unsure about a second meltdown. Later, viewers were told those sources indicated that there may have been a second meltdown.

About those reports of fatalities, ranging from two to 3,000, meanwhile, NBC’s Steve Hurst Wednesday quoted a Communist Party source estimating the dead “at closer to 100.” On several newscasts, Soviet ham operators were heard putting “casualties”--which would include nonfatalities--at several hundred. Also quoting Soviet ham operators, however, KTTV Wednesday declared that hundreds had “perished.”

On local newscasts, there was the usual confusion about how to identify the Soviets. Too often, the Soviet Union was referred to as “Russia,” as if this were pre-revolution Russia. In reality, today’s Russia is merely the largest and most influential of the country’s 15 republics. Kiev and Chernobyl are in the separate Ukrainian republic.

There was also a curious media reaction to the Soviet secrecy, as if they had believed their own hocus-pocus about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev being different from his old-style predecessors merely because he was more charming and had a stylish wife.

Meanwhile, TV life went on. The second-generation Osmonds showed up on “Good Morning America” Thursday. And “The CBS Morning News” showed an exhibit of paintings that had arrived in the U.S. from the Soviet Union. They were not the stuff of socialist realism, but classics from the 19th Century, recalling a time when mankind was less self-destructive. What a paradox, these twin “gifts” from across the seas.

First art, then radiation.