COMMENTARY : TV Reportage: It Wasn’t Pretty

Television is the Great Diversion. But there are times like these when you want to know what’s happening--precisely and exactly what’s happening.

Forget the swirling, splashy graphics. Forget nice lighting and lovely faces. You didn’t care if Dan Rather was sitting or standing. He took off his jacket and wasn’t wearing any sweater and the nation lurched onward anyway.

You have a mother and a brother and other relatives and pals in San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and even at this writing, 18 hours beyond the earthquake, you still don’t know all their fates and you don’t want to know from newscasters saying that “word has it,” “I think” and “I believe.”

Several newscasters kept asking why wasn’t there more damage, why weren’t more people dead.

Someone asked, “Was this The Big One?”

The sinking feeling kept sinking through the night. First no confirmed dead. Then one, then two. Now seven, nine, 40, 53 . . . “200 plus.”

Word came that San Jose exploded. Did we hear that right? The Berkeley library was burning up. . . . Sorry, no, that was an auto body shop instead.

“Gas lines are snapping all over San Francisco and fires are breaking out!” But all we could see was the one block on fire in the Marina District.

You had seen shots of the snapped segment of the Bay Bridge--so you weren’t horrified when Kelly Lange on KNBC-TV Channel 4 blurted that “The Bay Bridge collapsed!”

You hear about panic buying at gas stations. You hear “word” about looting.

Reporter Ross Becker of KCBS-TV Channel 2 sped out to Caltech in Pasadena for the requisite rounds with the people who watch the Richter needles and scrolls. They blathered on about the earthquake numbers, trying to fill some crazy need in us to quantify everything. Forget the stupid numbers!

You sit quietly panicked, watching, waiting for some intrepid reporter to interview this familiar woman. Why, it’s Mom! She speaks directly to us: “I’m OK but you owe me a letter.”

(At one point, we got word from a relative that Mom is fine. Just lost some glass doodads.)

In desperation, you jump channel to channel trying to find someone who knows something. You realize the incredible difficulties of gathering precise information in anarchy--but you need to know.

You finally settle on KCBS, which is snatching the coverage from KPIX, its sister CBS station in San Francisco. It’s a great comfort to watch Dave McElhatton, the veteran anchor who obviously has gone through a few of these disasters and knows how to communicate what he and his crews know and don’t know.

He spotted one of his reporters “glistening” off camera. He had just run in, sweating. He ran the unedited tape of downtown damage.

Then Dan Rather took charge. However he reads his nightly newses, good or bad, this is his calling--hard, unfolding news. He cautioned us about disaster rumors. He would try to relate only what he and his field reporters knew and could verify; he instructed us not to call the Bay (but we did anyway); he warned us that the holocaust film we were seeing was the Marina fire and the only fire he could confirm. San Francisco was not ablaze. Pictures can deceive.

One of his allies in the CBS studio was Dr. Chris Scholz, a Columbia geology professor. He isn’t the usual stuff of television. Soft-spoken, casual, dour, wearing Levi’s, he was sniffing and snorting with a cold coming on or going.

At one point, Rather grabbed a map that Scholz scribbled for himself. Rather held it up for inspection and Scholz explained the apparent movement of the quake, although for about a minute the news director couldn’t get a camera in position so that we could see it.

It wasn’t all pretty and, as the night unfolded, Rather lost his perky and needed makeup. But it didn’t matter.

Pretty you could get another time, another channel. CNN was occupied with a Cream of Wheat commercial. On KTLA Channel 5, Cheryl Ladd was doing “Grace Kelly” against all odds. KCOP Channel 13 was running “Saturday Night Fever,” proving that disco isn’t dead and that TV and life go on.