The Russian Roulette of Live News Coverage

“We apologize for what you saw,” KNBC-TV Channel 4 anchor Kelly Lange read from a TelePrompTer early Thursday evening. “That goes for the helicopter crew, too,” added Bob Pettee, the station’s man in the sky.

And later that evening, anchor Hal Fishman announced on KTLA-TV Channel 5: “KTLA shares with its viewers their distress.”

Oh sure.

They’ll never admit it--perhaps not even to themselves--but Thursday was the day Los Angeles television stations finally got what they wanted. In their heart of hearts, this was it. Oh, mama, was it ever. Not just another routine pursuit across freeways and a meek surrender. Not just some bumps and sideswipes. Not just another foot chase. Not just someone being pushed from a moving car like a sack of potatoes. Not just a child being abducted by a motorist on the lam.

Boring!

This time it was the full payoff, the big public splatter, the full shotgun-to-the-head kablooie. And you and your children, Southern California, were able to see it live. Plus, if you happened to be watching Channels 4 or 5--whose cameras were tightest on this insidious spectacle--you were able to see it real good.

That was doubly important because Channel 5 and KTTV-TV Channel 11 interrupted their afternoon children’s programming to cover what turned out to be a live suicide. And Channel 4 interrupted “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” a program popular with kids as well as adults.

“You can’t even trust [that] what they show you is all right for a 5-year-old at 4 in the afternoon,” Ruth Black of West Los Angeles complained bitterly by phone Thursday about Channel 4 preempting O’Donnell’s show. Black said she had been watching the program with her 5-year-old son, who loves it, when Channel 4 cut in.

“The guy was on fire,” she said about Daniel V. Jones, who later would end his life on TV. Black said she got her son out of the room before that happened.

But what about kids watching alone?

All viewers witnessing the climax in its entirety saw Jones flee his flaming truck, his body smoking, then later return for his shotgun. He carried it to the side of the freeway overpass, bent over, put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. It looked like he blasted half his head away and, as he lay dead on the pavement, that everything inside was pouring out.

Best of all, no one had to see it on tedious, musty old videotape. The suicide was live!

It was on the transition loop from the Harbor Freeway to the Century Freeway that Jones carried out his macabre media stunt. Of course, it was a media stunt. However poorly he was thinking otherwise, including allowing his poor dog to perish inside his fiery truck, Jones knew his media. He knew the TV choppers would be there. Why else would he have prepared a hand-scrawled banner that he rolled out on the pavement near his truck? The one reading, “HMO’s are in it for the money!! Live free, love safe or die.” He didn’t point that message toward the skies so that birds could see it.

And how did he know that the choppers would be there? Because it’s television, dummy. They’re always there--creating their own gridlock in the skies while beaming live pictures of freeway chases, however trivial or non-newsy, and often not knowing who the fleeing suspect is or what he is accused of. Flatten those brain waves. Movement and action are all that matter here. And of course, capturing it live.

This indeed may be the quintessential Southern California story, as some have reported. Even broader, though, it represents the ultimate horror of the kind of live coverage that is increasingly practiced everywhere. No safety nets. No editing process. No control, just a total abrogation of journalistic responsibility. Turn on the camera, and whatever happens zooms across the airwaves as wild and out of control as a Scud missile.

Such is news driven by technology, the human contribution here limited to flipping on the switch. In other words, you cover something not because it’s necessarily worth covering, but because you have the machinery to cover it. You do it live not because doing so makes journalistic sense, but because you have the technology at your command.

And with live come all the perils. What happened regarding Jones Thursday could have happened during any of the freeway chases that stations here love to gorge themselves on, for no reason other than they can. Someone could leave his car at any time and blast himself or someone else to oblivion. It could happen tomorrow or next week or next month.

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Live coverage of a volatile situation is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette. Sometimes you must play anyway because the story is potentially worth the risk, as when KCOP-TV Channel 13’s live chopper pictures probably saved Reginald Denny’s life by showing him getting savagely beaten during the Los Angeles riots. Or when the story is as mammoth as the North Hollywood bank shootout last year.

But this time, for a story that began as a massive traffic tie-up before it spun out of control?

“Today” co-host Katie Couric sounded skeptical herself Friday morning. “Why was it worthy of live coverage in your estimation?” she asked KCOP news director Steve Cohen. “A man on the freeway with a gun--I don’t think anyone can argue that isn’t newsworthy on the face,” he replied. Yes, but newsworthy to what extent? Hardly newsworthy enough, even on the face of it, for the kind of live coverage that would end so disastrously.

Couric said no one from Channel 4, NBC’s station here, would appear on “Today” to talk about the incident. KNBC officials said later that was company policy. If so, it’s a cowardly policy that enables the station to avoid being confronted publicly about its misdeeds.

It seemed to take only minutes after Jones’ suicide before it became grist for talk radio. A caller to one program argued Thursday evening on behalf of the TV coverage of the suicide: “It happened so fast, they couldn’t do anything.” Which is exactly the danger of live coverage.

Putting a stopwatch to a tape of Channel 5’s coverage shows that 11 seconds elapsed from when Jones removed his shotgun (“There he has his gun now,” veteran Stan Chambers reported) to the moment that he pulled the trigger. If that wasn’t time enough to pull back a chopper or cut back to the studio, the camera shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Or perhaps something else was happening. “Many of us became observers instead of journalists,” Channel 13’s Cohen said on Channel 5 Friday morning.

Even as protests against violence on TV appear to surge, our capacity to tolerate and even enjoy it seems to be growing still faster. Although many are outraged by Thursday’s coverage, probably just as many found it compelling, so riveting that they couldn’t turn away. If so, they are as much at fault as the stations that served it to them.

So how high does the bar go from here?

It was only a few years ago that a producer of a notorious Japanese game show known for subjecting contestants to extreme ridicule and humiliation was asked in an interview how he planned to meet the rising expectations of viewers. “Someday we might have to kill somebody,” he said without smiling.

Appetites do have to be fed. And so you wonder, in a U.S. society whose pop culture has already absorbed the likes of Jerry Springer and his daily slugfests, real or fake, what happens next? Will the televised suicide of Daniel V. Jones be a lesson learned by both media and viewers or will we swallow it and expect something more and even bigger next time?

As for those Channel 4 and Channel 5 apologies, the best one they could make--the only meaningful one--is to cease and desist.