The danger of breaking away from regular daytime programming to provide news coverage of an event like Wednesday morning’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is that you might have to go back to it.
This was underscored on Chicago’s WMAQ-Ch. 5 Wednesday when NBC ended 3 1/4 hours of continuous, relatively intelligent coverage, only to be followed immediately by a talk show guest mid anecdote. “My time of the month” were the first words out of her mouth. “Yes, I did perform oral sex on him” came next.
It was a quick trip from one of the best ways television serves us, through earnest and immediate efforts at interpretation of a tragedy, to one of the worst, in one more appeal to prurience.
Demonstrating a unity of vision they had not shown the night before, when only CBS chose to air President Clinton’s prime-time news conference, all three networks took hours out of their daytime schedules for coverage of Oklahoma City.
It hardly compared to CNN’s typically aggressive effort, but it was still an impressive commitment in an age of tightened budgets. It certainly afforded more than enough time to get across the scant hard information that was available and to help communicate the horror of what appeared to be the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
For viewers who stayed with the coverage all afternoon, it afforded an education in the newsgathering process, a sloppy beast that nonetheless often slobbers its way to truth. It also gave viewers, like no other medium can, an emotional tie to the tragedy by providing unfiltered testimony from survivors.
All three networks were first on the air before the bombing was anhour old, ABC at 9:56, CBS at 9:43 and NBC at 9:51. Continuous coverage for ABC stretched from 10:30 to 12:58 p.m., for CBS from 10:21 to 1:02 p.m. and for NBC from 10:13 to 1:29 p.m.
CNN, of course, was on the air from Oklahoma City first and stayed longer, starting at 9:30 a.m. and still going strong at this column’s 6:30 p.m. deadline. There wasn’t always much to say but in a situation like this there is comfort even in repetition.
But this was really the local affiliates’ show. Their footage, their anchors and their reporters showed up across the national broadcast spectrum, sometimes unfiltered, as when Chicago’s CLTV cable channel ran nearly an hour from Oklahoma City’s KWTV, sometimes in blended form, as when CNN edited several stations’ interviews with survivors into a powerful package.
“They had to put my ear back on,” said an unforgettable woman, smoking a cigarette as she sat in a wheelchair. Unaccounted for, she said, were her husband and two daughters, ages three and four.
Even if their efforts at extracting testimony of turmoil were sometimes painfully aggressive, local reporters and anchors showed surprising facility.
“You’ve got to keep in mind, these people cover disasters all the time,” said Earl Casey, CNN managing editor. “You take somebody that covers the White House, he might be lost out there. You take somebody that covered last night’s fatal car wreck, he might be able to pull something out of the air.”
Interviewed in the CNN newsroom, which sounded over the phone like a trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Casey explained the philosophy behind such coverage, which has become his network’s trademark.
“What we’re doing is putting up a real time information flow to the public,” he said. “We’re building a story live on the air, and the public realizes that story may change.
“One of the things that’s a little bit different on this is that the primary sources for information, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, they’re all in the building that got blown up,” Casey said. “We’re really having to do a lot of rumor triage here.”
Indeed, viewers got their most solid information that early single-digit death tolls were dramatically low during interviews with Oklahoma City medical workers, who told of scores of bodies.
Among Chicago’s TV stations, the network affiliates put reporters on planes but mostly yielded to network coverage until their regular late afternoon newscasts.
WFLD-Ch. 32, the Fox affiliate, offered no coverage during the day, said a spokeswoman. WGN-Ch. 9 confined its daytime coverage to the noon news. And all-news CLTV was likewise unaggressive, making Oklahoma City part of its regular newscasts but not going wall-to-wall until it did an hour of Oklahoma City feed at 1 p.m.
The station’s mission, officials explained, is to cover Chicago news. “We really have to think what the local angle is going to be,” said assignment editor Paul Murphy.
Perhaps, but it still seemed odd to have an all-news channel not offering an intense focus on such a profound story.
