When Personal Tragedy Becomes Public Spectacle

I was out of town during last week’s funeral service for Samantha Runnion.

But thanks to television, I watched from afar those wreath-adorned tributes at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, and noted that cable’s news channels had again reduced tragedy primarily to Hollywood-style entertainment.

It’s what you might expect, especially from movie-minded CNN, which this week assigned its sober graybeard, Wolf Blitzer, to shamelessly promote “Austin Powers in Goldmember,” a movie from New Line Cinema, which is a unit of the news channel’s parent company, AOL Time Warner. Or did anchor-reporter Blitzer’s cozy interviews with cast members, on separate nights, come under the category of news instead of smarmy cross-promotion?

At least the Samantha telecasts mingled glitz with heartfelt dignity.

I heard the chiming bells, the musical performances and the eulogy from her mother, saw the brown casket covered by pink roses and caught the slide show of Samantha’s artwork accompanied by music from “Peter Pan.”

Those watching with me in Kansas City, Mo., were transfixed and, of course, as moved as everyone else by this nationally televised memorial for Samantha, observed by an estimated 3,000 inside the Crystal Cathedral, with another 2,000 reportedly listening outside via loudspeakers.

It was a five-star farewell for a 5-year-old from Stanton whose widely reported abduction, sexual assault and slaying outraged the multitudes, and whose memory touched deeply the many Americans who had met her posthumously through blanket media coverage.

A level of coverage denied most other young victims.

All of this got me thinking again about the camera as a time machine that transports us across galaxies of human experience. And about the Rolodex of visual history that defines us at specific moments in time. No, not Wolf dutifully chatting up “Goldmember” little person Verne Troyer.

More famous pictures come to mind:

The somber face of the Great Depression in Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother in 1936.

Joe Rosenthal’s triumphant Iwo Jima flag-raising shot in 1945.

The same year’s V-J Day euphoria in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of a sailor’s back-bending smooch of a nurse he’d grabbed in Times Square.

The ugly mask of bigotry in Bill Reed’s tobacco-chewing Neshoba County Sheriff and his deputy, grinning defiantly in court with their redneck cronies when arraigned in 1964 for the Mississippi murders of three civil rights workers.

Robert Jackson’s historic picture of Jack Ruby gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.

The nation’s screaming Vietnam agony caught in John Filo’s 1970 photo of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling beside a slain Kent State student.

The LAPD raging out of control in George Holliday’s amateur footage of white cops brutally clobbering African American Rodney King in 1991.

Wall-to-wall TV of O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco staying just ahead of pursuing squad cars in 1994.

Which of this generation’s signature freeze frames will memorialize the tiny blip of time we occupy early in the 21st century? Surely the most powerful will be an airliner slamming into one of New York’s Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

Will Samantha Runnion’s memorial service be another, the children’s choirs, video biography and big-screen pictures of her beautiful, smiling face becoming metaphors for missing Elizabeth Smart and slain Polly Klass, JonBenet Ramsey and Danielle van Dam?

Note the omission of Cassandra Williamson, age 6. Few will recall her memorial service at the Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church in Valley Park, Mo., even though it was public.

Cassandra was snatched from her father’s home and killed, her own funeral coming not long after Samantha’s. The Associated Press reported that Cassandra’s white casket was open to show her clutching a stuffed animal and family picture, and that her mother leaned over and kissed her daughter’s cheek.

No national TV for that, however. It was aired live only in St. Louis.

You could make a strong case, with no rebuttal from me, that such intimate moments should never be beamed to the nation, even when the public and media are invited in. You may argue that TV is already too much the Big Brotherly eternal witness of all things, that ... enough already with the voyeuristic hidden cameras and “caught on tape” mania now extended to “reality show” charades whose participants pretend to be unaware of the cameras driving their behavior.

Here’s the question, however: Why do media--especially TV cameras--make arbitrary choices that appear to value one life over another? Children go missing and are murdered all the time. And each of these cases is newsworthy. Yet why is coverage lavished on one and not another?

I have insisted repeatedly that TV dwelt obsessively on the unsolved slaying of JonBenet Ramsey because she was white, her parents were rich and there was footage of her as a rouged-up cowgirl that would be replayed endlessly. White and wealthy also apply to Elizabeth Smart.

Why Samantha and not Cassandra, however? Two tragic victims about the same age, and both white.

“Samantha Runnion was a national story right away because the news networks started covering it, and they set the agenda,” said one reporter I know. “Her case had a full 24-hour life, in a sense, because we didn’t know she was dead until the next morning. The other case [Cassandra’s] was over almost as soon as it began. Perhaps if she hadn’t been found for two or three days, it would have been different.”

A “big market/smaller market thing” also came into play, this reporter theorized. Samantha was slain in the L.A. area, Cassandra in St. Louis, and there’s more national interest in stories here than in smaller cities. “Also, there are more news resources here than in St. Louis,” he added.

And another thing, he said. When it came to news coverage, Cassandra’s death competed with the ongoing plight of the trapped Pennsylvania miners. In other words, a story’s coverage is determined by what else is breaking at the same time.

Nonetheless, the reporter believes that national coverage of Samantha’s killing probably went too far. “Was it a sad story? Yes. Was it a story that tugged at your heart? Yes. But is that what should determine news value?”

As I’m writing this, by the way, L.A. stations and CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC are live with news of the abduction of two teenage girls in Lancaster who were taken at gunpoint from their dates about 1 a.m. Thursday by a man described as Latino.

The girls were later found safe in Kern County. But speculation zoomed even before police held their first morning news conference. Someone on Fox faulted their investigation, and another sage believed the suspect was a fugitive who wanted the girls as a “bargaining chip.” A retired police detective weighed in too.

“Tijuana is a good place to check,” he said.

“And they could be there by now,” a Fox anchor said. On MSNBC, a former FBI profiler also felt the suspect was “on the run.”

And perhaps careening wildly, like much of TV.

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