Simulation and Cold Reality: The Twain Meet in TV News : Re-Creations: When Are They Justified?

This is a re-creation:

Anchors Maria Shriver, Mary Alice Williams and Chuck Scarborough were in the screening room, watching footage of themselves from the premiere of the new NBC News program, “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow.” And they were euphoric.

Scarborough: “God, I’m a commanding figure. Notice how I speak deeply and earnestly, my granite chin thrust toward the camera just so, implying strength and authority. My eyes have never sparkled like this before. And I’m having such a good hair day I can hardly stand it.”

Williams: “And just look at me in my jeans outfit with those people from the Woodstock generation. I look so rebellious and free-spirited. I think I really fit in. They were all so impressed when I told them how much I adore Barry Manilow.”

Shriver: “See how compassionate I am. You can tell those couples in the story really admire me. When I’m on a story I’m one of them, one of the people. I love to pass for middle class. It makes me feel like I’m living on the edge. And you want to know my terrible secret? The red dress I’m wearing? I had it designed just for the show, so it looks like I bought it off the rack. I feel absolutely evil.”

Scarborough: “Journalism is so exciting. I just love what I’m saying about finger painting.”

Shriver: “Isn’t your story about fingerprinting?”

Scarborough: “Oh.”

All right, I wasn’t present when Shriver, Williams and Scarborough screened tonight’s premiere of “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow.” So I’m only speculating wildly. But when you’re writing a column about one of today’s hottest TV topics--news re-creations--it helps to emphasize the point by starting off with a re-creation pertaining to a news show that uses re-creations.

Television news should search for new and better ways to tell a story. As a general rule, news re-creations or simulations are a terrible idea because they tend to alter reality.

Highlights and footlights merging into a kind of news theater? Simulations of news and history are hardly a new phenomenon, dating back at least to Walter Cronkite’s old “You Are There” series in the early 1950s. And today, such news-like shows as the syndicated “A Current Affair,” NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries” and Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” are pumping new adrenaline into the old form, seamlessly joining reality and fantasy.

Also getting on the bandwagon are CBS’ new “West 57th,” now titled “Saturday Night With Connie Chung,” and NBC’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” which tonight re-creates scenes from two murders.

The debate over news re-creations intensified when a recent story on ABC’s “World News Tonight” about American diplomat Felix S. Bloch’s alleged spying for the Soviet Union included a black-and-white photo of a man as bald as Bloch handing over a briefcase to another man. Along with the picture came this voice-over from correspondent John McWethy: “It was not until earlier this year that Bloch was videotaped handing over a briefcase to a known Soviet agent on the streets of a European capital.”

One problem: ABC had not seen the alleged videotape. The photo was an unidentified simulation, so authentic looking that it fooled even some ABC News staffers who were unaware that it was fake. ABC added “simulation” to the photo on a subsequent news feed to a smaller area of the nation, and said the omission had been inadvertent.

Perhaps so. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is this: It’s extremely difficult to justify simulations on a newscast, identified or not. What’s more, “World News Tonight” was not simulating news, it was simulating an allegation, in effect airing an untruth about an unknown.

It was compelling TV. And it was irresponsible TV.

You learn never to say never, and there may be valid rationales for responsibly rendered news re-creations in some instances. But they don’t include the two most frequently cited:

--A news re - creation is akin to a courtroom drawing. Wrong. Even courtroom artists are sometimes accused of putting their own spins on trial participants. Unlike a simulation, however, a courtroom drawing is at least prepared by a witness to an event.

--A news re-creation is akin to a reporter describing a scene for a newspaper story. Wrong again, for the newspaper reporter is describing or writing about something he has seen personally. Yes, even the best journalists have built-in biases that affect their reporting. However, it’s specious to compare that level of potential distortion with whipping up minidramas for news programs, simulations that may imply truth when they’re merely someone’s version of truth.

Proponents of properly identified news re-creations argue that viewers are capable of distinguishing between acting and reality. Perhaps at a given point in time they are. When recalling the news days later, however, will they remember which of it was real and which re-creation?

News re-creations join docudrama in the field of speculative drama. The news dramatists are in a bind: make the re-creation believable, but not so believable that viewers will be fooled, even with proper labeling. No matter how judiciously prepared or how good the actors, moreover, the simulated event cannot match the real thing.

Approximation may be good enough for entertainment programs, but it shouldn’t be for newscasts.

TV news is already enough of a performance medium without the added intrusion of little news playlets to enhance stories. When news became a big profit center, the encroachment of entertainment was a foregone conclusion. These days we not only have newscasters whose professional images are cast in bronze, but also those who appear as actors in their own news promos. And one day last May, KABC-TV Channel 7 devoted huge chunks of its newscasts to a simulated earthquake whose cast of hundreds included its own anchors and reporters.

Which brings us to the scripted drama of tonight’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” whose summer trial continues for the next two weeks . . . and whose title and opening credits bring to mind a daytime soap opera.

The show will “faithfully re-create events,” Williams promises viewers, “carefully documenting every important detail and always clearly identifying every re-creation. Scenes in stories not identified as re-creations are real.”

It sounds so simple and clear-cut. Except that the opening story with Scarborough--a fingerprinting history and status report that is by far the hour’s most watchable component--uses re-creations confusingly by using real law enforcement officers to play themselves. At least they appear to be playing themselves. Also, are those actual pictures of the murder victim, or phonied ones? And is that really Scarborough?

Meanwhile, Shriver’s story about “selective termination” in multiple births profiles two couples who were forced to confront this issue, but it fails to penetrate the surface or address the ethics issue. And Williams’ piece reuniting six friends for the first time since they were together at Woodstock in 1969 is relentlessly vapid.

There is no reason to care for these people or their “Woodstock values,” which no one bothered to define. Where are those re-creations when you need them?