To Air Is Human, Especially When It’s Live

Living with “live” television can be perilous.

That applied in 1998 to widely telecast pictures in Los Angeles of a suicidal man checking out with a shotgun blast to the head on a freeway overpass.

Just as it applied to those controversial propaganda videos from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist apparatus beamed to the U.S. by the major networks and cable news channels as they were being shown to the Middle East on Al Jazeera, the Arabic TV operation based in tiny Qatar.

Obviously unrelated is the substance of these stories that are separated by three years. The direct connection is elsewhere--in how they were processed instantaneously for public consumption. They were sent to viewers unscreened. No safety nets. No editing process. No control.

The game--played ever more often in newscasts during the last two decades--is called Russian roulette. In other words, TV squeezes its trigger and hopes there’s no bullet in the chamber.

Why do experienced journalists telecast unscreened material in volatile situations? Because they can, and because they are driven by a powerful herd instinct, the one urging them to beat or at least keep astride of the competition and not be left behind. Just as their competitors heed the same urge in keeping pace with them.

Such is news on TV these days, increasingly driven by technology, the human contribution limited mainly to flipping on the switch. You cover something live not because you have knowledge that it’s worthy or safe to do so, but because you have the machinery. You habitually go live not because it necessarily makes journalistic sense, but because you have the right toys at your command.

TV news executives pledged across the board last week, however, that future Al Qaeda videos accessible to them will be highly edited or paraphrased, if aired at all. And indeed, a third Al Qaeda video, carried by Al Jazeera Saturday, was not aired live in the U.S., newscasters opting either to omit it or run pared-down portions later. Why the change of heart?

The epiphany was delivered by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, warning that taped statements from Bin Laden and his associates could contain coded calls to action or other messages intended for Al Qaeda terrorists possibly still operating in the U.S. Few of us thought of that when endorsing the TV statements being shown to U.S. viewers.

There are two issues here.

One relates to the high wire U.S. media always walk in wartime while at once seeking to report independently yet not endanger lives or compromise their nation’s military efforts. This tug of war between the need to know and the need to keep secret is bound to intensify as the present conflict drags on.

Journalists have an obligation to their nation, but also to a free flow of information, as much as that is possible during war. Americans have the right to see for themselves whom they are fighting, for example, and watching Bin Laden and others vow further violence provided at least a glimpse into the soul of terrorism.

The second issue relates to the rush to report. Given the obvious unknowns here, it was not essential or wise for TV to speed blindly around a hairpin curve and show these videos live.

Errors were inevitable. ABC News misspoke, for example, when introducing the initial video featuring Bin Laden, saying it was from the Taliban and giving the impression it was in response to the initial airstrikes against Afghanistan. Some minutes passed before anchor Peter Jennings corrected that, saying the source was Al Qaeda and the taping done apparently in advance of the air assault.

This new restraint on showing future Al Qaeda videos will not extend to other areas of war coverage, of course, live telecasting being too deeply ingrained in the culture for cutbacks at this late stage.

Take the close live TV monitoring of President Bush, most of it justified, some of it not.

It was one thing for TV to go live wall-to-wall for his prime-time press conference last Thursday, an important moment at which, incidentally, he showed his mastery of this format, with help from a largely subservient White House press corps, with only CNN’s John King managing to squeeze in a follow-up question.

It was quite another thing earlier that day, when the cable news channels pliantly trotted in their live cameras for a photo op at which the president was billed as speaking off the cuff to his cabinet. As if that would ever be possible.

On the battlefront abroad, meanwhile, here were other live camera moments:

“This appears to be ... “

“We’re not sure what this is.”

“This is raw footage that you’re watching, and we’re seeing it for the first time along with you.”

With the press still largely severed from the war and meaningful footage, moreover, expect more of what happened last week when MSNBC went to live night-scope coverage in northern Afghanistan. It was here where correspondent Kerry Sanders reported that he and his crew may have come under fire, from unknown sources, while covering the air assault from afar.

There he was low on a rooftop, in blurry green, telling anchor Rick Sanchez by videophone about a shot being “directed in this area.”

And there was Sanchez advising him to be careful. And when MSNBC reran the same report later, with added live night-scope footage of Sanders standing safely with two members of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Sanchez gave him this thumbs up: “You and I have been friends for a long time. You had me worried out there.”

There it was, live from the front (almost), the war (almost), tumult (almost) right up to the millisecond.

This is not in any way to diminish the real threat to reporters covering wars, only to point out that danger exists too in knee-jerk live coverage.

From Afghanistan to suicides on Los Angeles freeways.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.