‘I Witness Video’ Keeps Eye on Reality

I’m videotaping this column as it’s being written in case someone wants to make a reality series about it.

Here is the motto for anyone with a camcorder in the ‘90s: If it moves, shoot it.

The skies over Los Angeles were crowded with news choppers late Tuesday afternoon as six of seven local commercial stations (KTTV Channel 11 being the lone absentee) gave extended live coverage to a would-be robber fleeing in a taxi he had commandeered in Kern County, west of Bakersfield. He was trying to escape from California Highway Patrol officers, leading them on a chase on I-5 at speeds of up to 100 m.p.h.

The taxi sped, patrol cars followed.

The taxi sped, patrol cars followed.

The taxi sped, patrol cars followed.

On and on they went. Finally, with the choppers somehow managing not to slam into each other while beaming back live pictures from above, the taxi left the freeway, eventually turned into a dead-end alley and the driver was arrested, peacefully.

That was the story.

The Times gave the story prominent coverage too. Without pictures, however, it might have gotten no more TV coverage than a couple of lines buried in the middle of a newscast. With pictures, it got enormous play.

Stations that last month had been unable to clear time to carry Gov. Pete Wilson’s State of the State speech instinctively rushed to carve chunks out of their regular newscasts or entertainment programs to carry the Los Angeles portion of this empty chase.

Some questions for the sages: Just why is it that live pictures of a chase in themselves are a big story? Why does the visceral experience of watching assume greater importance than what we’re watching? Why is the drawn-out means of capture--the process--deemed significant when the capture itself is not?

As the driver was arrested by deputies, you had the feeling that the choppers and their cameras may have been hovering in case there was a repeat of a Jan. 3 incident when a murder suspect was shot and killed by CHP officers after a car chase of more than 300 miles.

A live shootout. That would have been the ticket.

In its traditional emphasis of form over content, television has always elevated the process over everything else. On breaking news, for example, it’s the process of live, instantaneous reporting that takes precedence over whether such reporting is accurate or if there was even any journalistic need for live coverage in the first place.

In celebrity interviews, from world leaders to entertainment figures, it’s the process of securing the interview and getting it on the air, not whether it yields news or illumination, that becomes the headline.

Hence, it follows that the process of Tuesday’s CHP-and-robber chase--as if this were “Cops” or some similar “reality” series--would keep viewers in front of the set even though it produced nothing more than a routine arrest.

Don’t be surprised, therefore, to see the speeding cab and cops turning up some evening on “I Witness Video,” a new series of irregularly scheduled NBC News specials clasping the shirttails of the camcorder revolution.

The first one premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39, with hip young host Patrick VanHorn enthusiastically touting the “new reality” of camcorders, “a million different stories that are powerful, spontaneous and undeniably true.”

The program puts human faces on the kinds of sensational pictures that show up on newscasts these days, shaping narratives from actual footage interwoven with recollections of the participants.

Intersecting spectacular pictures with eyewitness accounts, one segment does convey the awesome, destructive fury of a devastatingly lethal tornado that hit Kansas in 1991. And “I Witness Video” has its own sky view of a police chase, highly reminiscent of the one here Tuesday, except that only a single Denver news chopper was on the scene. It records the fugitive abandoning his car and fleeing on foot. Later, after commandeering a truck and taking its driver hostage, he is shot dead by police. The barely audible popping sounds of the gunfire soften his death almost to an abstraction.

In the opening segment, a Texas constable’s demise, at the hands of three thugs he stopped on the highway, is captured by the camcorder he had mounted on his patrol car. A fellow constable, his own patrol car equipped with a camcorder, is able to tape a shootout in which one of the assailants is killed. The footage and supporting commentary affirm the dangers faced by police officers.

In contrast to the infamous Rodney King footage, however, which provided a window through which to observe the ugly, possibly criminal behavior of some police officers, these pictures have a surreal tone that desensitizes even while titillating. The pictures are presented as an end in themselves.

Another segment, relying on amateur camcorder footage, shows a pregnant woman surviving along with her unborn child after toppling from the third floor of a burning building onto a blanket being held for her on the ground. For emphasis, her fall is twice shown in slow motion.

There are two other segments, one on anti-shoplifting cameras mounted in mannequins, the other on cameras installed at highway toll booths. A man is accused of not paying his toll. He says he did pay it. We go to the videotape.

“A lot of times,” the accused says, “I make sure I actually go through the operator toll booths so I can actually hand them the money.” Yes, good thinking. And TV captured it all.

So what’s coming up next time, Patrick?

“Next time, be an eyewitness to the horror and heroism of the Oakland fire.”

And I videotape myself sharpening my pencils.