Bad News Travels Fast

My ingestion of Hurricane Charleys (vodka, mint leaves, some blue stuff, some green stuff) was rudely interrupted around 7:30 EDT last night by the first phone calls from home bringing news of the 35W bridge collapse.

Within the first hour of coverage the familiar patterns of tragedy-reporting, both good and bad, were playing … incessantly.

The good:

The pictures. Chopper coverage via Twin Cities affiliates on CNN, MSNBC, and CNN Headline provided the visual basics, which pretty much amounted to one extended, “Holy shit!” This is the essential value of TV news. As in, “Let me see what has happened and I’ll figure out half the story all by myself.”

But within the first hour the repetition — always necessary for viewers tuning in late — produced the usual unintentionally iconic images — like the big, bald, shirtless guy with a bandaged abdomen being led — apparently back and forth by first responders. Footage of the guy ran so often on cable you’d be forgiven for thinking he was the single most important survivor. (A corollary was footage of a very beefy Virginia cop running across a lawn after the Virginia Tech shootings. It ran every three minutes for hours in the early reporting.)

With all the footage pouring in from their local “partners” you wonder why the cable channels re-re-re-run loops of the same rather more mundane stuff?

More to that point, with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams, anchoring non-stop coverage, the cable news bible says the anchors must maintain high levels of screen time, even if, in the interest of getting a fuller first impression of the event they might be better off parceling more time to the affiliates.

The bad:

The inability of phone-in witnesses and experts to answer a basic question. Never mind the mistake of saying the bridge “Connects Minneapolis to St. Paul,” which CNN had up way past the point somebody could have told them otherwise. How about local news types’ inability to even offer a reasonable guesstimate of the river’s depth, a question likely on every viewer’s mind. My guess was 25-30 feet. I’ve since read a 9′ minimum channel is maintained. But when asked on CNN, one local news man instead wandered off into the design of the damn thing, about which he also knew nothing.

Blitzer, who can flail to fill as badly as anyone, also allowed himself to be held captive by a caller who admitted he had driven over the thing 10 MINUTES before it collapsed and was buying a sandwich when it actually dropped. Who vets those calls? Why was he even on the air? Didn’t WCCO or KARE have anything fresher than that?

One shining light of news basics was my good buddy, Jim Leinfelder, an MSNBC freelancer working the story. Jim maintained enough presence of mind to give Olbermann direct, succinct answers to questions. Thank you, my man.

Being out of town I can’t say much about local coverage, although early e-mail and phone flow this morning is giving KSTP, Channel 5, the nod for best coverage, never mind being largely shut out from the CNN-MSNBC coverage. (KSTP’s ratings problems have never had much to do with their reporting performance.)

Despite attempts by the usual nutballs to insinuate some kind of terror meme, the cable(rs) accepted the word of local officials that it was what it appeared to be, a structural failure. (My curiosity: What has been the effect of 40 years of de-icing chemicals on the support girders?)