Morrison: KNBC’s Man in Beijing

A few weeks ago, CBS’ Dan Rather and CNN’s Bernard Shaw were drawing praise for their personalized, on-the-spot reports on the extraordinary student protest calling for democratic reforms in China.

Now that these news heavyweights have returned home to resume their usual duties as network anchormen and the situation in China has erupted into bloodshed, a good-natured local anchorman, usually seen exchanging quips with his station’s weather and sports guys, has become Southern California’s most recognizable reporter amid the turmoil and violence in Beijing.

KNBC-TV’s Keith Morrison, who splits his time as anchorman of Channel 4’s 6 p.m. newscast and as one of NBC’s West Coast network news correspondents, volunteered two weeks ago to go to China to cover the pro-democracy protests in Tian An Men Square for both the network and his local station. Since he arrived in Beijing last week, Morrison has been phoning in live reports to his colleagues on all of KNBC’s local newscasts as well as reporting for NBC’s regular news shows and special China bulletins.

“I’ve lost count of how many reports I do each day,” Morrison said in a phone interview from his hotel at 4 a.m. Beijing time Tuesday. “This is such an amazing story, like nothing we’ve run across in years and years. And there’s something new every hour. In between the bursts of gunfire that you hear out the window, the story changes. It’s gone from a peaceful movement for democracy to a crackdown on student dissidents to military units fighting each other to rumors of military coups to fears of actual civil war. The country is literally descending into chaos.

“And with every jerk and twitch in the story, we get more requests for more reports. It’s quite remarkable to be here. The only thing is, you never get to go to sleep.”

Morrison’s eyewitness accounts of the events in China are themselves a small coup for KNBC because no other local station has its own reporter on the scene. A Channel 4 spokeswoman said that the station split the cost of sending Morrison to China with the network.

While Morrison said he includes essentially the same information in both his local and national reports, having Morrison on the phone chatting with Kelly Lange or John Beard about what he sees in Beijing enables Channel 4 to put its own personal stamp on the story. The station expanded its newscast Saturday afternoon to accommodate the exploding events in Beijing and led off all its newscasts last weekend and Monday with reports from Morrison in China.

KABC-TV Channel 7 and KCBS-TV Channel 2 have also reported heavily on China at the top of their newscasts. But they have been forced to use their own studio-anchor narration over network-supplied videotape and to conduct live phone interviews with network correspondents and producers in Beijing.

“He is ours and he is over there and it certainly is an advantage to have someone there that our audience knows rather than having to take reports from the pool of network reporters,” said Nancy Bauer, executive producer of KNBC news.

Morrison said that he and his three fellow NBC correspondents--George Lewis, Arthur Kent and Keith Miller--as well as the NBC team of producers and crew are, after the weekend massacre, “more restricted” on where they can go. But he said they still were venturing out to see what was going on in the area around their hotel and Tian An Men Square.

“You just can’t show any evidence of being a journalist,” Morrison said. “We’re not supposed to be covering this stuff, so we have to be reasonably cautious. There are live bullets flying around. But there are also 10 million people in this city still out doing what they normally do. It’s a few thousand who are going eyeball to eyeball with the military.”

Since the weekend, when a CBS correspondent and cameraman were arrested by Chinese authorities and an NBC crew was feared missing for a few hours, Morrison said that camera crews for the most part have been shooting tape from lookout posts on top of hotels and apartment buildings. He said security forces had come into the hotel room where NBC’s China operations are based and sealed the windows shut so the network couldn’t shoot pictures from them.

Though this is the kind of story-of-the-year assignment that journalists crave, Morrison, who worked as a correspondent covering national and world affairs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. before coming to KNBC in 1986, said it’s been profoundly troubling to witness Chinese soldiers shooting the Chinese people.

“It’s a terrible thing to see,” he said. “And it’s a job trying to filter out fact from fiction about how bad things are and how many people have been affected. You have a lot of what our bureau chief calls ‘Asia facts’--information that is hard to confirm but readily available. So you make as many calls as you can and try to hear it from as many good, reliable places as possible.”

Though he is reluctant to leave in the middle of the story, Morrison said his China stint will probably come to an end this week. His wife is in Los Angeles and about to give birth to the couple’s fifth child, and the anchorman plans to be on hand for that momentous event as well.

His likely replacement is Garrick Utley, the veteran NBC correspondent who now co-anchors “Sunday Today” and “Meet the Press.” Utley, who covered the Vietnam war, was dispatched to China on Monday. Mary Alice Williams will fill in for Utley on the two Sunday programs, the network said.