Coverage Is Grim Deja Vu as Smoke Rises Over New York

New York to the rest of us: Mayday!

In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray finds himself trapped repeatedly in the same replay of the same 24 hours. That came to mind while watching TV Monday morning after American Airlines Flight 587 crashed after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Sept. 11 nightmare again?

“How much can this city take?” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked on a morning when the major networks and 24-hour news channels were on point before 6:20 a.m. with live coverage of another New York calamity. Thoughts of new terrorism were naturally on their minds, as was the grim prospect, surely, of taking another financial hit should this story require them to hemorrhage revenue by staying on the air continuously without commercials, as they did after the terrorism at the World Trade Center.

It didn’t, and by midmorning the three major networks more or less had resumed their regular programming.

Here was the deja vu from TV: Columns of dark gray smoke again rose ominously in New York, but this time from a distant, peach horizon. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani again stood amid rescue workers while speaking to cameras about an air disaster, but this time in the Rockaway section of Queens.

“Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed CNN anchor Paula Zahn, stunned by footage of a firefighter crouching beside what appeared to be the smoking engine of the downed airliner. Resting on the pavement, it looked like a beached whale.

Up in smoke, too, perhaps, was the Giuliani-pushed TV advertising campaign to attract visitors back to his city. Now that it was again linked to death and tumult--with fears of domestic terror still resonating--would New York again be the apple of any traveler’s eye? At least in the near future?

Newscasters, who earned deserved praise for their calmness in the aftermath of Sept. 11, were as restrained in their emotions Monday, as a consensus began forming against foul play and in favor of mechanical failure as causing the crash. Stiff upper lips greeted this challenging moment. No panic attacks or hyperventilating talking heads. Just reporting of facts.

And inevitably, non-facts.

There was a time when reporters would gather information, sort it out and not report until much of the dust had settled. These days the process of reporting a big, breaking story--the equivalent of notes scribbled in a notebook--has become the bottom line. As soon as newscasters hear something, they immediately pass it on to viewers raw, hoping these erroneous shards can be corrected later.

The jet that crashed was a Boeing 767? Not true, it turned out. It was an Airbus A300. The plane was nearing JFK airport when it crashed? Instead, it had departed JFK for Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

On came the eyewitnesses, meanwhile, some giving vivid accounts that appeared credible, some conflicting. One man told CNN that he saw an explosion on the right side of the aircraft, another reported seeing an explosion on the left side. Another eyewitness told CBS of hearing “several explosions a couple of seconds apart.”

On came, also, the hypotheticals based on tenuous testimony. One eyewitness sighting, for example, had ABC’s Charles Gibson wondering “about some kind of explosion in the baggage department.”

Questions to eyewitnesses were not always credible. “Did it look like the pilot was struggling?” someone on MSNBC asked a woman, as if she had telescopic vision.

As always in such stories, the crash account hit a wall later in the day, with space and energy exceeding information. Time to speculate or troll for human interest.

“So sad to watch, so painful to watch,” said CNN anchor Aaron Brown, narrating footage of a man who had come to the Santo Domingo airport to meet Flight 587, only to collapse and sob uncontrollably when learning of the crash. “Dreadfully difficult to watch,” Brown added.

And a dreadful, unwarranted invasion of the man’s space. Instead of allowing him to mourn privately, the camera granted strangers a front seat to his grief. Haven’t there been enough victims without media adding to the list?