In Praise of ‘Hard Copy’ (Sortof)

Nadas, the Oregon dog whose death sentence for chasing a neighboring horse has been commuted to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, has a friend in “Hard Copy.” As do all animals.

The plight of Nadas has resonated in media just about everywhere, including a recent front page story in The Times. However, the syndicated “Hard Copy” has been the loudest and most persistent crusader regarding this cause, airing a spate of tough, persuasive, lump-in-the-throat stories on behalf of the 3-year-old collie-malamute mix, who had been scheduled to die Tuesday under an Oregon law that mandated capital punishment for dogs that kill, injure or, in the case of Nadas, merely chase livestock.

Wilting to growing pressure and widespread ridicule, Oregon’s Jackson County Board of Commissioners on Thursday adopted an emergency ordinance under which the dog’s life will be spared. Not that the farce ends here with Nadas being returned to his owner, 21-year-old Sean Roach.

Hardly, for Nadas is now to be transported (not in shackles, one hopes) from a kennel--where he has been detained since the 1996 chasing incident--to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah, where he is to remain the rest of his natural life without the possibility of being adopted by a family and without contact with Roach. Sort of the way Mary Kay Letourneau and the 14-year-old father of her son have been forbidden to have contact.

The insanity of the Nadas episode speaks for itself, as does its surreal resolution. If this surfaced in a TV or movie script, you’d immediately label it too ludicrous to be credible.

At least Nadas is being allowed to live, however, a better-than-the-alternative outcome in which publicity generated by animal-supporting “Hard Copy” surely played a pivotal role.

Tabloids are not known for consistency, which is a glass half full or half empty, depending on your outlook.

Half empty: They are not always sensible.

Half full: They are not always absurd.

Far from it, in fact; one of the biggest chinks in the foolishness of “Extra,” “Inside Edition,” “Hard Copy” and even that print bad actor, the Enquirer, is their consistently brawny coverage of animal abuse. The link is logical, given the stirring nature of the material and the extent to which tabloids nourish and thrive on emotionalism.

In this case, it’s not adrenaline squandered on the titillating adventures of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, happily, but emotionalism for a righteous cause.

A trio of segments on animal cruelty that aired in 1997, for example, has earned “Hard Copy” a third Genesis Award from the Ark Trust, a media-watching animal rights group in Los Angeles. “Hard Copy” and other Genesis winners will receive their awards in ceremonies on March 28.

One of the cited “Hard Copy” stories involved the continued slaughter of African elephants for their ivory. Another included devastating footage of suffering rodeo animals (“A terrified little calf has her sensitive tail raked over a post so she’ll burst out. . . .”).

The third, and most powerful, featured gruesomely graphic undercover videotape of a kind rarely aired on TV. It showed Montana mink farmers strenuously wringing the necks of the struggling, biting animals, then tossing them into a bucket where they continued to writhe for a couple of minutes, seemingly still alive and suffering. “And we’re not even airing the screams of these little creatures,” a reporter added about the minks, whose grisly demise was juxtaposed with footage of glamorous models wearing fur on a runway. No one ever accused “Hard Copy” of taking any prisoners.

It’s in 1998, however, that “Hard Copy” may have scored most indelibly on behalf of animals by aggressively leading the charge this month for Nadas, largely in collaboration with Chris DeRose of Last Chance for Animals, all the while deploying manipulative music and some of the other tools typical of tabloid journalism.

The glass-half-empty crowd would call it unfairly stacking the deck, the half-full crowd advocacy journalism in service of a noble end.

“Oregon can be the cruelest place on Earth if you have four legs and wag your tail,” Doug Bruckner reported in the initial “Hard Copy” piece on Nadas. Featured in another story last week was Buster, a livestock-chasing Oregon dog whose owner, “Hard Copy” said, sprang him from death row and then fled with him. “In order to kill my dog, they’d have to kill me first,” said the man when interviewed at his “mystery location” by Ed Miller.

“Hard Copy” is not being seen by its usual audience in Los Angeles, where KCBS-TV Channel 2 recently juggled some of its lineup to accommodate Winter Olympics coverage, thereby bumping “Hard Copy” to 3:30 p.m. weekdays from its usual 7:30 p.m. slot. Even with a reduced audience in the nation’s second-largest TV market, though, the show reports getting roughly 500,000 hits on its Web site in support of Nadas, plus thousands of positive e-mail messages and an average of 500 supportive phone calls after each of its Nadas pieces. That’s more than five times the show’s usual phone response.

Not surprisingly, “Hard Copy” vows to keep on the story even after Nadas arrives in Utah, this being one of those times when good works and good business coincide.