Too Many Eyes In The Sky?

By Howard Chua-Eoan

The TV camera pulls back for a moment for an aerial view of an expanse of freeway, bereft of cars for some distance before it is clogged in unmoving afternoon traffic, waiting for a drama to conclude. And it does, quickly and bloodily. As hundreds wait and thousands watch at home, connected to the scene by Los Angeles' ubiquitous TV newschoppers, Daniel Jones, 40, a Long Beach maintenance worker, acts out his made-for-TV theatrics. He has spread out a banner for the helicopters to see: HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY!! LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. And then, retreating to his pickup truck, he pets his dog, leaves it in the cab and sets the vehicle on fire. Partly aflame, Jones runs into the highway he has commandeered. Pulling off his burning pants, he picks up a shotgun, places its butt against a wall, bends his head to the barrel and pulls the trigger. Live from L.A. The dog dies too.

Jones' complaints about HMOs, reportedly concerning bureaucratic red tape having to do with his HIV-positive status, were immediately obscured by complaints about what had just been shown. Local stations were inundated with phone calls; station managers, already aghast at what their cameras had captured, broadcast apologies and toll-free numbers for viewers to call for psychological counseling. Says Larry Perret, news director for KCBS-TV, which pulled away just before the fatal shot was fired: "With all due respect to my competitors, you couldn't have anticipated this. This was a legitimate news story. You got a guy on the freeway closing two of L.A.'s most populated interchanges."

In the past, the public has rewarded stations for pursuing just this kind of story, though typically less bloody ones. "Usually the ratings shoot sky-high, and the viewers use their remote controls and zap from station to station. They watch them," says Perret. Explains Manhattan psychologist Steven Fishman: "A lot of people have pent-up emotions, so it's cathartic for them to observe such violent action." But, says Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Harvard: "That just shows that the lines between news and entertainment have become very blurred." Former TV news producer Derwin Johnson, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, is appalled. "It's a classic case of technology running the beast instead of a clear editorial process. I don't think there was any reason to go live with this."

The market pressure is intense. Most L.A. TV stations have traffic and news helicopters, each costing an average of $1 million a year to lease. Says Kerry Brock of the Media Studies Center in New York City: "Every 15-minute block in which they attract more viewers than the other stations is a bigger sell to advertisers, a bigger pitch and a lead-in to their next newscast at 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock. They're trying to grab and hold on to the channel surfer." And, she adds, "if you're a television station and don't have a helicopter ready to go, you're not in the game."

Even severe critics see the remedy as editorial self-control. No one wants regulation. However, says Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press at Harvard, "what frightens me is the prospect that one day either Congress or a state legislature may feel the need to vote restrictions against the press as one way of containing the excesses of local news."

--By Howard Chua-Eoan. Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York