TV REVIEWS : Fragmented View of Riot Aftermath

Close the shades. Turn off the lights. Make sure the kids are off the street. They’re coming.

It’s . . . the drive-by network journalists.

Last week, Ted Koppel tore into town, reporting direct from South-Central for two nights’ worth of “Nightline” special reports on the aftermath of the April unrest.

Tonight, Dan Rather and the crew from “48 Hours” pull up to the corner of Florence and Normandie, where it all began, for their own aftermath assessment, ominously titled “L.A. Ground Zero” (10 p.m. on CBS, Channels 2 and 8).

Now with the truce between the Bloods and the Crips, the only wild shooting in South-Central seems to be from camera crews and reporters trying to cover more than they can squeeze into an hour. But while Koppel stuck to a theme--how the “rebuilding process” appears to be more rhetoric than reality--Rather and company try to blanket the L.A. basin with a multitude of mini-reports on everything from stress suffered by cops on the beat to Simi Valley housewives battling white supremacists.

The breadth is perhaps a tribute to the city’s own breadth, its huge tapestry of cultures, concerns and agendas. But Rather’s approach is scattershot, missing altogether any reporting, for instance, on the Webster Commission’s critique of the city’s and police department’s unpreparedness for the fallout from the Rodney G. King trial verdict. At times in “L.A. Ground Zero,” it is as if an L.A. city government doesn’t exist (then again, that is exactly what a lot of people in South-Central told Koppel).

Instead of casting a harsh light on the ongoing failings of our local politicians, the “48 Hours” crew goes after the personal stories: Reginald O. Denny, remarkably healed, talking and forgiving of his assailants; Ethel Davis, grieving at the senseless loss of her grandchild; Karen Bass, organizing to ensure that destroyed liquor stores aren’t rebuilt; “Dennis,” an LAPD cop using biofeedback to combat post-traumatic stress disorder; Angela Boyd and LaRhonda Brewer, good students futilely looking for after-school work.

There are a million stories in the Naked City, and these are a few of them, but what they add up to is a fragmented picture of pain and fine intentions. And many prominent fragments are missing, from Daryl Gates to the inexplicably ignored Latinos of South-Central, from Peter Ueberroth and his Rebuild L.A. effort to the lack of an American urban policy. The small dilemma of Korean-American business interests intent on re-opening the very liquor stores that Bass considers a cancer on the community is indicative of the larger unsolved problems facing the city. But for Rather and his drive-by squad, it’s all micro and no macro.