It’s Time for More Heart, Less Heat on TV

Imagine a Don Juan frantically pulling on his pants and escaping through the bedroom window when his lover’s husband unexpectedly reappears. Thus it is with television.

When calm returns, TV hurriedly exits.

At least that’s the long history, which is why the weeklong pictures of chaos and violence in mostly the Los Angeles inner city reinforce stereotypes and deep prejudices. With little on TV to balance them, these images are the indelible ones.

They fill the screen, accompanied by the kind of shrill, militant dialogue that was aired this week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” “I hope everything said here will be taken into our hearts,” Winfrey said after Monday’s riot-themed program on KABC-TV Channel 7--a curious addendum to an hour featuring much heat and little heart.

Heat over heart: That’s what television is about.

Because local newscasts are madly driven toward conflict the way an addict is driven toward drugs, there is scant TV reporting of East Los Angeles or South-Central Los Angeles, for example, when their residents are peaceful and living the kind of routine lives that don’t make for combat footage.

The dramatic exception is TV’s traditional feel-good coverage when it encloses colorful Cinco de Mayo in a cocoon of cameras: Weathercasters delivering their forecasts in front of happy children and so forth. And then, after disposing of its annual “duty” toward Latinos, TV makes a screeching U-turn and speeds the other way.

Back to business as usual, back to following police calls, back to reporting only negative news about minority neighborhoods.

It’s no wonder, then, that the preponderance of Angelenos who don’t reside or work in these areas think of them only as boiling caldrons of lawlessness where “normal” people don’t live. Couldn’t live.

Let’s be clear that television is not to blame for the Riots of ’92. On the other hand, despite TV’s unrivaled potential for communication, it has done far more, through its coverage of news, to separate Los Angeles into war zones than to bring the city together. It’s a near shutout.

In recent days, news anchors have given viewers a lot of noble lip service about brotherhood and sisterhood. From their TV pulpits, they have preached to us about uniting. KCBS-TV Channel 2 has even found room in its riot-coverage news promo for Rodney G. King’s emotional plea for peace. Your heart just melts.

However. . . .

If Los Angeles television stations are really serious about unifying the city and supplanting ignorance with understanding, here is something they can do about it:

One day a week, each station should devote half an hour of highly watched prime-access time--between 7 and 8 p.m.--to informing viewers about a different community or neighborhood. Although simplicity would be the key, every imaginable format--from informally chatting with neighbors on a residential street to telecasting community events or such family outings as picnics--would work here. Surely television stations that are so creative at selling themselves to viewers can think of creative ways to sell Angelenos to each other.

Stations traditionally satisfy their required public service to minorities by producing low-budget talking-heads programs that are inevitably entombed in early-morning weekend time slots, ensuring their availability to the very few. The more imaginative community programs envisioned above would cost stations money, because they would preempt some of their most lucrative shows, presumably diminishing advertising revenue.

Their weekday preemption options would be “Wheel of Fortune” or “Jeopardy!” on Channel 2, “Entertainment Tonight” or “Hard Copy” on KNBC-TV Channel 4, reruns of either “Cheers” or “Full House” on KTLA-TV Channel 5, either “Inside Edition” or “Candid Camera” on KABC-TV Channel 7, either “Love Connection” or “Golden Girls” reruns on KCAL-TV Channel 9, either “Married . . . With Children” reruns or “A Current Affair” on KTTV-TV Channel 11 and “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on KCOP-TV Channel 13.

This generation is the one that needs attention.

This post-riot proposal--stations standing up and being counted by giving half an hour back to the community--did not originate in this column. It comes from Huell Howser, the man behind KCET-TV Channel 28’s populist “Videolog” and “California’s Gold.”

His own half-hour “Videolog Listens” special that aired Sunday night could be a prototype, sparked by a call he received the day before from a woman who works at a women’s clinic in the Crenshaw district inviting him to come down with a camera operator.

The low-key, healing result--coming from Howser spending “a couple of hours on a couple of blocks” of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard--produced no outrageous quotes or striking pictures. Yet it was quite wonderful--some quiet, meaningful conversation with merchants about the last few days and about their community.

“It’s a very rich neighborhood,” Howser was told as he walked along the street with several women and children. “Rich with wonderful people with wonderful backgrounds and cultures and passions and desires and aspirations.”

“I didn’t know this neighborhood was here,” Howser said.

“And here it is,” his host added, “right in your own back yard.”

And in dramatic contrast, there in Channel 7’s back yard Monday was Winfrey, in town for the first of two programs on the riots, a sincere but overmatched figure in this withering onslaught of anger and outrage, watching helplessly as her studio full of warring multicultural guests screamed sound bites at each other.

A black woman, justifying the riots: “We had to do something to get Oprah into Los Angeles, to get people talking.” If this is talking, bring back shouting.

“These kinds of shows do such good,” anchor Harold Greene said gravely on Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News.” Well, as they say in the business, it was “great TV,” a talk show equivalent of a burning building.

Thus it was not at all like Monday night’s smoldering but relatively gentle “Life & Times” special on KCET, in which a legion of Angelenos bearing the onus of being identified as community leaders spent 90 minutes discussing the city’s future. Yet “this magnificent convening,” as identified by the Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of the First A.M.E. Church, was so vividly Establishment that it wore the look of an exclusive club. Many of the faces were familiar.

The impression you get from TV these days is that of things coming together--not the citizens of Los Angeles but the TV programs and the talking heads. Is there a conveyor belt transporting them from station to station?

For some time now, Channel 2’s “Action News” has been doing its best to lead its 5 p.m. newscast with a manufactured story related to or about its 4 p.m. lead-in, “Geraldo.” That’s unethical enough. But on Monday, “Action News” became “Geraldo.”

Instead of “Geraldo” at 4 p.m., viewers saw a special “Action News” program co-anchored by Chris Conangla, Tritia Toyota--and Geraldo Rivera.

Rivera--”I’m not like a regular news guy,” he said, clearing up a big mystery for all of us--interviewed riot-related guests, seemed to be irritated by a Korean interviewee because she wasn’t angry enough, threw it to reporter Harvey Levin for a story in the field, and finally told viewers: “I have to run.” But before he did, he delivered an unlabeled commentary (“As long as we don’t have profound changes . . . “) that was somehow a perfect capper not only to “Action News Geraldo,” but also to a block of riot coverage by Channel 2 in which news ethics on occasion went up in smoke along with some of those buildings.

There, for example, was reporter Pat Lalama with two distraught Korean motorists who said they had been mugged at gunpoint. Now they were enduring their second mugging. Despite pleading emotionally not to be on TV, these distraught women were on camera live, with Lalama at one point seeming to adjust one of the women’s hair so that her wound be more visible.

After this exploitative spectacle, anchors Michael Tuck and Bree Walker uttered some apologetic words and Walker--whose body seemed to have been inhabited at times this past week by Mother Teresa--added to Lalama, her voice oozing with compassion: “Stay there and comfort her.”

Yes, a station with a heart. Plastic.

Exit Poll: NBC/Mutual radio reporter Steve Futterman was quizzing looters emerging from a store in the Crenshaw district.

“What did you take?” he asked one man.

“Nothing,” the man replied.

“What did you take?” he asked a second man.

The response was an angry expletive.

Not giving up, Futterman pursued a third man.

“I got some gospel music,” the looter replied. “I love Jesus.”