Live Coverage of Fatal Shooting Not So Golden

“Golden” looks almost like a UFO in a sentence about today’s television.

Yet this is the “Golden Age of Television,” not the overrated, oft-anointed ‘50s cited during Friday’s nostalgic program on KCET recalling that long-retired cultural series of those years, “Omnibus.” More about it shortly.

The ‘90s golden?

Easy to believe considering the corps of elite drama series bringing sparkle to today’s prime time, for example. Or the vaster universe delivered by cable that includes some original programs on HBO and Showtime that affirm, too, how much more prevalent good TV is now than in earlier times. But harder to believe, admittedly, given the present surge of prime-time quiz shows. And much more gruesomely, Friday morning’s disgusting live TV coverage of Michael Thayer getting blown away by police in the boonies of San Diego after a 200-mile chase across Southern California freeways.

Clearly, along with being the best of times for TV, these are also the worst.

In addition to a pair of San Diego stations, three in Los Angeles--KNBC, KTLA and KTTV--beamed live pictures of nearly the entire Thayer chase, which ended with the big bang that many in TV news adore, despite wringing their hands afterward in phony anguish. They lust after it. They get high on it. It’s the adrenaline rush they live for.

Here’s what happened Friday: Thayer’s car rolled to a stop on Interstate 805 with a tire punctured by a spike strip put down by the California Highway Patrol, after which he emerged with a pistol of some sort that he pointed at officers before being fatally shot.

On KNBC, which offered the closest view of Thayer (KTLA and KTTV wisely had pulled back for something longer range), the anchor response went like this:

“Oh, he has a gun,” said Kathy Vara.

“He’s . . . shot,” said Kent Shocknek.

“We want to apologize,” said Vara. Apologize? What hooey! What hypocrisy!

Apologize for what, stupidity? The station not giving a damn? Are we to believe that KNBC was inadvertently live on the chase for nearly three hours? With all that time for pondering, did no one in control consider what potentially could happen, that perhaps--just perhaps--the camera would needlessly show a man cut down without warning to viewers?

“We want to point out . . . it’s an unpredictable situation,” said Shocknek afterward. “We are following live. We have no way of knowing the outcome exactly with certainty.”

Duh! Talk about dense. When he said that, you looked for his lobotomy scars, for having “no way of knowing the outcome” was exactly the point. It was--and always is--the compelling argument against such live coverage. No safety net, no controls, just free-fall. It’s Russian roulette all over again.

Why not, as more responsible Los Angeles stations did, tape the shooting, think about it, and then decide whether to include it in a newscast, instead of instantly beaming it live?

An ongoing separate issue is whether live chopper coverage of such freeway chases is warranted, shooting or not. Nearly always, as in this case, the answer remains no. On the face, the coverage is ludicrous, serving a viewerdom that delivers a mixed message by watching the same TV mayhem that it so frequently protests. Call it the mayhem some of America loves to hate.

Once his station committed to covering the Thayer chase live, KTLA news director Jeff Wald said in a Times story Saturday, it had an obligation to show the outcome, no matter how violent.

“Otherwise,” he insisted, “we get into the position of censoring the news.”

Say what? As if he and other TV news executives don’t make decisions every day about what to cover and what not to cover? If they aren’t “censoring,” as he put it, they aren’t doing their jobs.

This did not occur in a vacuum. It was only last year that Los Angeles stations telecast live a suicidal, partially nude fugitive motorist pulling the trigger of a shotgun on a freeway overpass and leaving his brains on the pavement.

They anguished about that, too. So much so that some vowed to consider using a seven-second delay mechanism in future live coverage of volatile incidents. But that was last year, and Friday was Friday. Amnesia prevailed. No seven-second delay.

Not everyone was sorry. “We feel very good about the way we handled this,” KNBC news director Nancy Bauer Gonzales told The Times. Well, as long as she feels good.

As police swarmed over the downed Thayer, Shocknek (surely following orders), asked the KNBC chopper “to pull out your shot a little bit wider, if you can, please. We don’t need to see it quite that close.” But viewers did need to see the shooting “that close”?

On at least two occasions after the shooting, Shocknek (again surely heeding instructions), also issued warnings to parents, verbalizing KNBC’s public service mode. “If you’re a parent [and] if watching this is too intense for you,” said caring Uncle Kent, “you may want to leave the room if you’re watching with youngsters. We know you will act responsibly on their behalf as we show you live pictures of the final outcome of this chase.”

And a bit later: “If you are a parent with young children in the room, we know this is a school-off day because of the Thanksgiving holiday. You’re going to want to act responsibly for the kids’ sake. You know what is too intense for them to see and not to see. So please be a responsible viewer.”

KNBC--minutes after televising a man being shot by police on a morning schoolkids were home--was lecturing Los Angeles on responsibility? What cretinous, self-serving, patronizing arrogance!

How could the ‘50s not be more golden?

They were golden if you liked your TV monolithically white. They were golden if you liked your TV women spending their days baking cookies and dusting. They were golden if you approved of blacklisting anyone accused of being left leaning or a fellow traveler. They were golden if you liked sponsors having direct control of shows. They were golden if you liked 15-minute newscasts. They were golden if you liked quiz shows that were rigged. They were golden if you liked sitcoms that, in the main, were more idiotic than you can imagine. They were golden if you liked a technology so rudimentary that it often eclipsed the admirable work on those live anthology dramas the nostalgia crowd now recalls so affectionately.

Of course, there were exceptions, one being “Omnibus,” a weekly magazine (black and white and mostly live) whose diverse and classy menu of arts, literature, science, history and entertainment is unmatched by any single series today.

“Omnibus” was its own golden age. That comes across in Friday’s rewarding special, “Omnibus: Television’s Golden Age,” narrated by Hume Cronyn, who, with his late wife, Jessica Tandy, performed on “Omnibus,” whose sleek, urbane, informed, highly literate and involved host was a Brit named Alistair Cooke. His fame would grow later during years of speaking for “Masterpiece Theatre.”

Included in this retrospective are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Leonard Bernstein moving musicians like chess pieces in inventively dissecting Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, musings by Frank Lloyd Wright and amazing action X-rays of humans doing such things as eating and digesting food.

Created by Robert Saudek, “Omnibus” was on commercial television, incredibly, airing Sundays from 1952 to 1956 on CBS and ABC respectively, and irregularly on NBC from 1957 to 1961.

The series moved to the TV rhythms of an earlier era. If operating today, how would it approach last week’s live chase coverage? Perhaps by X-raying the brains of those responsible for it.

* “Omnibus: Television’s Golden Age” can be seen Friday at 9 p.m. on KCET.

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KNBC--minutes after televising a man being shot by police on a morning schoolkids were home--was lecturing Los Angeles on responsibility?

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.