TV Added More Heat Than Insight to King Saga : Reporting: Frequent showing of beating videotape seared the incident into the nation’s consciousness. But TV lagged behind newspapers in digging for stories.

What irony.

In 1951, “Dragnet” created an enduring, nationwide image of the Los Angeles Police Department as the epitome of professional law enforcement--honest, humane and efficient. In 1991, George Holliday’s home video shattered that image in 81 seconds--and replaced it with the image of the LAPD as a brutal, racist band of vigilantes.

Both images were exaggerated--distorted--of course, but what television giveth, television taketh away.

That is not the only irony.

The videotape of LAPD officers beating Rodney G. King was a made-for-television story--a made- by -television story. In much of the media, especially outside Los Angeles, the story became known not as “the Rodney King case” but as “the videotaped beating case.” Now, the beating of truck driver Reginald O. Denny in the riots has become known in some out-of-town media as the “videotaped riot beating.”

Nevertheless, in the almost 14 months between the King beating and the not guilty verdicts in the trial of the officers who beat him, television generally lagged behind newspapers in genuine enterprise reporting and in advancing public understanding of the underlying issues in the case and what the case said about the LAPD--and the city.

KTLA Channel 5 broke the King story by showing the videotape first, after paying $500 for it. CNN made it an international story overnight. For the next several days until television news directors realized that they had gone too far and pulled back--it seemed you could not turn on your TV in Los Angeles without seeing the tape within 10 minutes.

Many TV journalists now concede that the repetition was exploitative and irresponsible.

Others--including the Wall Street Journal editorial page--have complained that television misled viewers by showing only the beating portion of the videotape, not the “blurred earlier portions . . . (that) show Rodney King get up and run threateningly toward the police.” Broadcasting those first five or six seconds, as CNN did only once before the verdicts, “might have gone a way toward preparing the public for the possibility that the jurors might decide they had reasonable doubt,” the Journal said.

But Ed Turner, executive vice president in charge of the CNN news division, says the early footage was so blurry that it “did not, at least to our eyes, seem to mean anything . . . one way or the other. It wasn’t until it was translated, with the eye of a defense lawyer, that it took on significance, at least to the jury.”

Turner now concedes that the early portions of the tape “could have been (shown) . . . and should have been.” He says he wishes CNN had “taken the tape to a good attorney” and requested a “translation” for CNN.

But because the early portion of the tape is so brief and blurry, it is doubtful that it alone would have diminished the impact of seeing the beating that followed. Seeing that beating in your living room over and over again--not just one blow by one cop but 56 blows, by several cops, with still more cops standing by--is what gave the King story its impact--just as live television coverage would later give the riots their greatest impact.

Indeed, given the police reports filed by the officers--and the LAPD rebuff of King’s brother when he first tried to file a complaint--it seems reasonable to suggest that without the video, the King beating might have been brushed aside by the police and the media, as many other alleged brutality cases had been brushed aside over the years. It would have been just another case of a black man claiming to have been beaten and white police officers denying the charge.

Craig Turner, metropolitan editor of The Times, says he has often wondered in the past year what would have happened the night of the King beating if a Times reporter had been on the scene instead of George Holliday.

His answer:

“My suspicion is that (Police Chief) Daryl Gates would have stood up and said: ‘The Times is lying. They’re wrong as usual.’ ”

Gates, Turner says, would have cited the police reports on the beating--reports on which the officers allegedly understated the extent of King’s injuries (charges the jury acquitted them on)--and he would have dismissed the matter.

Turner says Gates would have accused The Times of “taking the word of this ex-con who was under the influence (of alcohol) over our officers.”

End of controversy.

End of case.

But television--the videotape--made such a brusque dismissal impossible.

So why did television offer relatively little enterprise reporting on a consistent basis on the LAPD in the year after the beating?

“TV stations have serious limitations on doing anything in-depth,” says Michael Singer, former news director at KCBS Channel 2 and now a producer for the CBS Evening News.

Mickey Kantor, an attorney and a member of the Christopher Commission appointed to investigate the LAPD, says local television simply “doesn’t put enough resources into coverage. They’re into too much crash and burn.”

In the course of more than 100 interviews conducted for this series of stories before the beating trial verdicts and the ensuing riots, not one person outside television--not one member of the Christopher Commission or its staff, the LAPD (past or present) or any police watchdog group or any print journalist--mentioned a story that television broadcast on King or related issues in the past year apart from the playing of the Holliday videotape.

Nor did anyone outside television mention television coverage in general, other than to say they saw nothing of significance.

In fact, local television journalists were unable to mention any specific stories done by any local stations other than their own--and even on their own stations, they had trouble thinking of more than one or two examples of enterprise reporting.

Nancy Valenta, news director at KNBC Channel 4, said she was sure her station had done good enterprise stories on the King affair and she promised to call a Times reporter as soon as she or someone on her staff could think of one. That was more than a month ago; she still has not called back with an example. (KNBC did do several good stories during and after the riots).

In contrast, many interviewees mentioned newspaper coverage, both specific and general--in the Daily News, The Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A. Weekly--and journalists on those papers cited several stories, done by their papers and their competitors. This is not to say that television produced nothing of value on King. Just by covering the unfolding story on a daily basis--jabbing microphones in Chief Gates’ face, shining lights on Mayor Tom Bradley, going into the community, asking questions of City Council members and police commissioners--television held the civic temperature at a steady boil in a way that newspapers do not.

The very presence of television--its immediacy, its intimacy, its sense of drama--helped keep the story alive, just as critics would later argue that television’s immediacy and sense of drama in covering the early stages of the riots may have helped keep the riots alive and may have contributed to the spreading explosiveness by showing hours of violence unchecked by the police.

From time to time during coverage of the King case, before the verdicts, one local channel or another did a good, important story. Early on, KCBS Channel 2 disclosed that an officer not involved in the King case had been fired for brutality four years earlier and was rehired and given a desk job in order to qualify for pension benefits. KCET Channel 28 broadcast a live, 90-minute program last May, “Policing the Police,” which tracked the history of police misconduct and accountability in Los Angeles. KTTV Channel 11--which did a couple of good early programs on the LAPD--provided live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial of the officers involved in the King beating.

Early last month, KTLA won a Peabody Award for distinguished broadcasting for having demonstrated the “highest standards of journalistic research, fairness and ethics” in its King coverage, most notably for showing the King beating tape “without sensationalizing the event or its aftermath.”

Perhaps the single most significant television story came two weeks after the King beating, when veteran news anchor Jerry Dunphy interviewed Mayor Tom Bradley on KCAL Channel 9 and induced the mayor, for the first time, to say that Gates should retire.

Bradley had previously said the decision was Gates’ alone; his statement to Dunphy instantly turned the Gates-Bradley behind-the-scenes maneuvering into a public feud--one that gave the story a new dimension.

But these stories were the exceptions that proved the rule.