News Directors: We Made the Right Call

Local TV news directors this week brushed aside criticism that unedited live pictures of assaults, looting and police inaction in the early hours of last week’s violence helped fuel the fires of rebellion.

“It’s another classic case of blaming the messenger,” Roger Bell, news director at KABC-TV Channel 7, said of the complaints from people who sat dismayed over the images of a city coming unglued.

“We have a responsibility to show what is happening in this city,” said Warren Cereghino, news director at KTLA Channel 5. “The actions of people who do something based on what they see is their responsibility, not ours. Television did not provoke this riot. You could turn off all the cameras, go into a news blackout, and you still would have had looting and burning and rioting. These people were not responding to the presence of television cameras. They were responding to the verdict and the conditions of their lives.”

The local stations have been criticized in some quarters for editorializing, stereotyping and a lack of whos, hows and whys to augment their ubiquitous helicopter shots of the wheres and the whats.

Hugh Hewitt, a conservative TV and radio talk-show host, accused local television of acting irresponsibly by presenting helicopter footage of the looting and brutality at the intersection of Florence and Normandie in the first moments of the unrest. Those “pictures from South-Central conveyed a single, powerful image: The police are not responding and probably can’t respond. Those inclined to loot or set fires got the message: ‘Nothing will stop you tonight, so go ahead, make your day.’ ”

Hewitt contended that what television should have done instead was show live feeds of various leaders calling for calm at a meeting at the First A.M.E. Church and then of anchors reading emergency information about areas to avoid and where to turn for help. Footage of the actual rioting could have been shown in edited form later, he said, but should not have been shown live. He was not sure that pictures of the looting should have been broadcast at all.

“Instead of reasoned, mature news judgment,” he charged, “it became an indiscriminate showing of that which was most electrifying. It was not news but images, and it acted as an invitation to others to join in.”

Jeff Wald, news director at KCOP Channel 13, which presented the most dramatic helicopter shots of the assaults at Florence and Normandie, strongly disagreed. Wald said that he had no doubts about showing those pictures live, both to inform the police about what was happening and to warn the public not to venture inadvertently into the intersection.

All five news directors interviewed for this story insisted that their job is to show what is happening. It is the job of police, they said, to respond to crime scenes. They said that they had no way of knowing that the police could not or would not respond. Had the police arrived, that too would have been shown live, they said.

Nancy Valenta, news director at KNBC Channel 4, added that the TV pictures from that intersection actually helped save lives when the police could not. Two good Samaritans saw the brutality at the intersection on television and rushed there to help save one of the beaten motorists.

But the news directors acknowledged some concern initially that their pictures and their presence possessed the potential to aggravate the situation.

John Lippman, news director at KCBS-TV Channel 2, said that he initially pulled back his helicopter because he did not want the noise of the chopper to attract more attention to the location. KABC’s Bell said that he initially did not permit pictures from his station’s helicopter to go out on the air because he did not want “to inflame the situation in any way.”

“At the time, we did not know if anything further would happen around the city, and we did not want to contribute to anything else,” Bell said. “When we saw the situation get so out of hand and it was clear that events were not being controlled by television but by the people in the streets, it became obvious that we had to cover it.”

From that point on for the next two days, most television stations covered the unrest unceasingly, jumping from one fire to another, one looting incident to the next. The question of whether these images incited others to join in the riots is difficult to answer definitively.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Dept. said that the department did not yet have a position on television’s role in the rioting.

The department was upset, however, that some stations showed the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King following the verdicts for the four policemen on trial, and called each station a few hours later requesting that they stop showing the tape for two days. “It seemed to be exacerbating the situation,” said Cmdr. Robert Gil.

All of the news directors complied with the request, primarily because by then they had so much else to show.

Channel 2 played the tape as the verdict was being read to remind viewers what the case was about, Lippman said. Cereghino called KCBS’ decision “stupid television,” saying there was no need to run the tape at that point.

“God forbid that we just see someone talking on TV. These days, they have to put action footage over everything,” said Irwin Safchik, a former news director at Channel 4. “It’s getting worse and worse.”

When it came to the looting, some people said that they were witness to firsthand evidence that watching it on television prompted some viewers to join in.

“I did not hear that television inflamed passions, but what it did do, because of the stupendous inaction of the police, was enable people to say, ‘Hey, they’re getting away with it, I can get some of it too,’ ” said Joe Domanick, a local journalist currently writing a book on the LAPD. He interviewed looters at a Sav-On store at Western and Venice.

“The media did its job,” Domanick argued. “Their job is to cover the story. This is the biggest story in this city in 25 years. The police didn’t do their job and you can’t blame television for that. They were inflaming nothing. That is their business. It was compelling stuff.”

But in chasing the compelling footage, several critics said, television did not do its job in providing perspective on the events unfolding on the screen. They contended that after a while, the persistent presentation of one hot spot after another served to numb viewers into a stupor of despair and meaninglessness.

Sherrie Mazingo, chair of broadcast journalism at USC, said that television was unprepared to cover these events. It did not provide any historical context, she said, nor any information about the cause of the unrest, the huge unemployment rates in the affected areas, the changing demographics of the city, or about the anger and despair that has been simmering in black neighborhoods for years. It did not even present a definition of the boundaries of South-Central Los Angeles, she said.

Domanick added that though the “Watts riots” were continually evoked, there was nary a mention about what has occurred regarding police relations with the minority communities since the 1960s. And even when television brought in an expert who could provide such perspective, the comments were often heard over pictures of the latest fire, thereby pushing viewers to ignore what was being said, he maintained.

“In the competitive situation where stations are driven by ratings, television clearly never does enough of that,” Safchik said. “They are so driven by getting the exciting live shot that they abdicate the editing process. They don’t provide perspective, meaning and thoughtfulness (even) in normal times.”

Channel 2’s Lippman argued that his station did provide an outlet for thoughts and commentary both from so-called experts, leaders and celebrities and from average people out on the street. Other news directors boasted that while other stations may have dropped the ball, their anchors and reporters were skilled enough to provide the necessary perspective.

But what appalled critics of television coverage most of all was the constant off-the-cuff editorializing that worked to reinforce stereotypes of blacks and other minorities, labeling the looters and arsonists hoodlums and thugs while ignoring the questions of why they were doing it. A white anchor on one station called Latino looters “illegal aliens.” Another white anchor said that the violence seemed to be “encroaching” on Beverly Hills and the Westside, implying that it was not so bad if it was contained within the black community.

“That kind of tagging of these people as ‘hoodlums’ and ‘no-goods’ and animals who are less than human can only serve to reinforce existing prejudicial attitudes as well as develop new negative attitudes for people who were neutral or more liberal on racial issues,” USC’s Mazingo said. “It’s inflammatory. It does a great deal of damage, and contributes nothing to the understanding of this situation or the question of race relations in society as a whole.”

“Some upper-middle-class, white-bread white anchors had no understanding of the rage and despair mixed up in this situation,” Domanick agreed. “All they did was reinforce what it is we want to believe. For Simi Valley whites, ‘My God, look at those people, it’s like they are from another planet.’ For young blacks angered by the verdict, it just reinforced their feeling that whites are against them, that the cops are against them, that the courts are against them, that the media is against them. That they can’t get a fair shake anywhere.”

News directors shrugged off this criticism. Some said that it was Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley who first used the words hoodlums and thugs to describe the looters. Others said that their reporters were cautioned to be careful not to inflame or aggravate their viewers and that they did a good job in the heat of a difficult, dangerous and fast-moving situation.

The news directors agreed that now is the time for adding the perspective and meaning they might not have had the time for in the heat of the coverage.

“What newscasts need to do in the future is not only parrot what goes on in the world today, but to do stories that get to the problems of this country,” KCOP’s Wald said. “We all have to wake up. You hardly have seen reports on the problems and frustrations of the inner city. All we do is read statistics about unemployment and murder rates. We never talk about the why. It is incumbent upon all of us to do that now.”

But USC’s Mazingo said that she is not optimistic that the local stations will learn from this experience, in part because there are few people of color in decision-making positions. There is no minority news director at any of the seven major commercial TV stations, and most of the primary anchors are Anglo as well.