Is It Proper for TV News to Use Video Shot by Amateurs? : Television: Home tapes now a staple but hoax footage of Chernobyl nuclear accident reveals the risks.

Home-video footage has become a key ingredient of popular entertainment programs such as ABC’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and Fox’s “Totally Hidden Video.” But it also is now a staple of television news, although some TV professionals worry about the propriety of using material shot by amateurs.

Home video is so much a part of news coverage at Cable News Network that the organization has set up a hot line for amateurs who may have footage, said Ed Turner, CNN’s executive vice president for news gathering.

The network solicits amateurs--whom it calls “Newshounds”--through a campaign of commercials and announcements on its news programs. Only spot news is accepted, and contributors are paid $150 and given CNN T-shirts and mugs.

“I would guess that we get, on a normal to slow day, 10 calls,” Turner said. “Sometimes when the moon is funny, we get hundreds. Out of those, I’d say we use something once a week, once every 10 days.”

There are an estimated 920,000 video cameras currently in use in U.S. households, and that number is expected to climb to 2.5 million next year, according to the American Electronics Industry Assn.

The most dramatic example of the role that home video can play in news coverage came during last October’s Northern California earthquake. Debbie and Thomas Kelly, tourists from Ringwood, Okla., were on the Bay Bridge facing Oakland when a span collapsed. They pulled out their camcorder just feet from the gaping crack--”because people in Oklahoma would never believe us,” Debbie Kelly said later in a telphone phone interview. Their stunning pictures of a red car careening off the broken edge of the bridge made all the networks.

Other images burned into television history that have come from amateurs include shots of East German pilot Matthias Rust landing unannounced in Moscow’s Red Square in 1987 and pictures of last year’s devastating explosion aboard the Battleship Iowa.

“Home video has become in the last couple of years a part of the news,” said Jack Reilly, executive producer of ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

But accepting--which in most cases means purchasing--news footage from non-professionals can pose serious risks to a news organization’s credibility.

After the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reaction in the Soviet Union in 1986, for example, ABC and NBC bought what was purported to be home-video footage of the blast. The pictures were later revealed to be of a cement factory fire in Italy.

“Somebody contacted our Rome bureau, saying, ‘I have pictures of the reactor showing some smoke,’ ” said Walter Porges, director of news practices for ABC News. “One of our people went to look at it, and from the pictures you really couldn’t tell whether it was or was not. There was not a sign that said Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor, but there was no reason to think that it was not what it was alleged to be.

“We found out because somebody else in Rome, somebody at the Italian network, said, ‘That’s not really the reactor--that’s from a cement plant,’ ” Porges said.

Michael Singer, news director of KCBS Channel 2 in Los Angeles, said he avoids the use of home video for fear that it might turn out to be phony like the Chernobyl footage.

“That’s the kind of thing I would worry about,” Singer said.

Television journalists, because of their deadlines, often have to make news decisions so quickly that it’s difficult to evaluate even professionally shot tape, Singer said.

“Every day we’re trying to avoid mistakes and, to introduce a lot of home video shot by people we don’t know and whose motives we don’t recognize, introduces a tremendous possibility of making mistakes.”

But even Singer has used home video on occasion, typically airing shots of weather- and sports-related spot news.

Most news organizations have some kind of guidelines when dealing with amateur video. NBC, for example, will not buy pictures that one of its producers has not seen, said Jack Chessnut, domestic news producer for “NBC Nightly News.” The network does not, like CNN, solicit amateurs, and will not accept footage from hidden cameras.

Besides veracity, one problem with using amateurs is that they’re starting to demand steep fees for their footage, Chessnut said.

“The ‘pro’ is you might get some really incredible footage of a big news event, and the ‘con’ to that is you’re potentially bidding, not only against two or three other networks here in the United States but, if it’s a big enough deal, you might be in competition with worldwide organizations,” Chessnut said.

In Los Angeles, KNBC Channel 4 has been soliciting home video for use on its nightly news programs for about four years. But most of that footage has been for entertainment purposes and is typically used by sports anchor Fred Roggin.

“No one had any concerns. We just tried it,” Roggin said. “In the context of what we do in sports, showing lots of video, it really fit that format.”

Parents and teachers, for example, have turned over footage of record-breaking games in high school sports, Roggin said.

“We’ve had great shots because parents are rolling cameras,” Roggin said.

KNBC, which is currently running a home-video contest for weather shots, does not pay contributors. Instead, they get an on-air thank you and a T-shirt.

Roggin, for one, is concerned about the boom in using home-video footage. “I think there’s a danger,” he said. “Once something works, everybody jumps on the bandwagon and it becomes oversaturated. It’s only funny if it’s done right and you don’t do it for too long. If you do it all the time, it’s not funny.”