Witnesses to an execution via the small, surreal screen

Watching cable TV, you quickly came to memorize the B-roll of Stanley Tookie Williams: The tape of him being led into an interview room, the shot of him being led across the grounds of San Quentin by two guards. The photos of him -- those massive arms, the implacable stare -- and of the death chamber where he would meet his end.

Taken together, it probably added up to no more than 20 seconds, but these images ran on cable all day and night without context -- for all that the anchors talked I never once heard any of them place these images in time. They just threw the imagery up there as an endless loop, until you were nauseous from them. Nauseated and/or numb.

Here again was the photo of Tookie in a do-rag, looking fierce; here was another photo from his younger days in which his afro was huge. And here, finally, was a more recent picture, Tookie with spectacles and a beard that was graying, the image of an African-American-threat-to-society who had become older and wiser.

Was he the thug in the do-rag or the older guy, the other guy, who if allowed to live would help keep kids out of gangs? Did it matter? If you watch 24-hour news too long it bludgeons you with its neat arguments. The televised death of Tookie Williams turned out to be a lot more and a lot less than you might have wanted -- in the end, more surreal than real.

Executions, having become fairly routine around America, aren’t normally televised as audience-participation events, but this one had all the trimmings -- particularly celebrity. And celebrity from all angles -- the actor-governor who wouldn’t, finally, grant Williams clemency, the actor-activists (Mike Farrell) who joined the crowd gathering outside San Quentin, the celebrity spiritual advisors (the Rev. Jessie Jackson).

Radio has been even more of a flash point for the kind of hectoring, back-and-forth discussion that played out on cable TV. A couple of Los Angeles-based radio shows in San Quentin were chased off by protesters several hours before the execution. Talk show hosts John Ziegler of KFI-AM (640) and Al Rantel of KABC-AM (790), both of whom have been vocal in their support of Williams’ execution, had to relocate their original broadcast points farther away from the prison because scores of pro-Tookie supporters were shouting down their live broadcasts.

John Kobylt, co-host of KFI’s “John and Ken Show,” who had been devoting the 5 o’clock hour of their 3-to-7 p.m. show to “Tookie Must Die for Murdering Four Innocent People,” broadcast live from outside San Quentin as well. He was interviewed by local television stations as one of the few pro-death penalty forces who turned out for the execution. On the hard news side, KNX-AM (1070) reporters Ron Kilgore and Michael Linder gave continuous coverage of the execution, with Linder serving as a media witness (and a very human one at that, admitting on air the next morning that the experience left him woozy).

The man in the middle of it all refused a final meal and so denied the anchors, who had to fill all that time with something else: Would L.A. break out in riots?

By midnight, the hour in which Williams was to be strapped to the chair, Fox News Channel and CNN were live outside San Quentin (ABC’s “Nightline” was live on the West Coast covering the event, then went to “Jimmy Kimmel Live” at 12:05 a.m.).

Things got stranger from there. On Fox, as the execution was presumably taking place, legal analyst Jim Hammer had some trouble with a bystander holding up a sign that said “Fox lies,” while anchor Bob Sellers and reporter Claudia Cowan cast clouds over the Nobel Peace Prize nominations Williams had received in recent years.

“If my reading is correct,” Sellers said, “Adolf Hitler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 -- and then it was withdrawn a month or two later. So, as you’re saying, it’s not that difficult to get nominated.”

It was ending, fittingly, with the media talking to the media. Cowan got word of the execution on camera and announced it at 12:37 a.m. Then the network kept cutting away from the only thing to show -- the press conference with media witnesses to the execution (their reporter wasn’t among the first batch of attendees led into the press room).

“I was struck by what a personal process it was,” said ABC News’ Brian Rooney, describing how one guard was touching Williams’ upper arm, “I think in an effort to comfort him.”

Fox News’ Adam Housley would later say Williams stared at the media gathering (17 in all) in an intimidating way. Eyewitnesses said the actual execution took longer than expected, Williams shaking his head repeatedly, perhaps frustrated at the time it was taking to insert the needle into his vein.

Several of Williams’ supporters gave him raised-fist, black-power salutes, noted San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, and later shouted as they left the viewing room: “The state of California just killed an innocent man.” Lora Owens, stepmother of one of the murder victims, then began to cry, he said.

You were, finally, a little closer to a complex proceeding that rarely gets held up to the black-and-white scrutiny of a media swarm. This mix of wrenching and almost banal details would be replaced the following morning by news of the Golden Globe nominations.

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Times staff writer Martin Miller contributed to this column.