As a guy who has as much right as anyone to call himself the father of "live news", I am disgusted with the three cable news networks' 24-hour continuing live coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse. For all intents and purposes, that story ended early Thursday morning when the rescue teams went home and said that henceforth that their mission would be recovery rather than rescue. Everyone who could be saved was saved, all the rest were dead.
Early in 1980 I, along with Ted Turner, was interviewed by the New York Times editorial board. We had leased the first satellite truck and it was our intention to use it on big stories all over the United States. I think I used the phrase, "Live, live and more live." An assistant managing editor asked, "won't you wind up covering an awful lot of one-alarm fires?" "Until the fire is over," I replied, "the viewer won't know whether it's a one-alarmer or the fire that burned down Chicago."
Two weeks ago a steam pipe blew up in New York City. The explosion occurred just before 6pm. The local stations and the cable news networks went live from about 6pm and stayed with the story until about 8pm when the last geyser subsided. Until then we hadn't known whether it was one steam pipe or an eruption that might have brought down half of New York, so local broadcast and cable network ratings soared. Then the viewers went elsewhere.
Nothing was going to happen in Minneapolis after the last of the drivers and passengers got back to safety. From there on in it was pure voyeurism encouraged by the networks' search for witnesses who could supply pictures, relatives with tearful stories, local authorities and politicians at endless press conferences, and even a ferryboat captain who said that if he'd been ten minutes later, the bridge might have gotten his ferryboat. It was agonizing.
I'm not saying the story didn't deserve news coverage, but live? Twenty-five hours straight? A couple of well thought out packages, one about national infrastructure troubles and one an update on constantly changing casualty numbers would have been more than enough even for the 7am news shows. But nobody thought that way. The broadcast nets sent Charles and Brian and Katie right to the scene so they could show the bridge behind them and have them doing slightly more intelligent interviews than local reporters might have done. Even a good anchor/reporter like CNN's John Roberts couldn't find anything original to say about the story. By the time the anchors got there, there was no news to report.
As a sidebar to this story: never forget that media tend to exaggerate the number of casualties in any disaster. From my days at UPI, I recall the search for sources who would predict greater deaths than other sources. AP did the same thing since the story that had the most casualties was the one that would be carried by the most newspapers. A headline screaming "30 Missing in Bridge Disaster" sells more papers than "8 Missing in Bridge Disaster". (On the other hand, the number of battlefield casualties are often underestimated.)
As to the coverage itself, John Hillis, one of our original CNN producers, sent me this email yesterday:
"Watching the news nets on the bridge collapse tonight, I can't help but think we knew how to do it better way back then, with no-star talent. Puts me in mind of the K.C. Hyatt skywalk collapse, when Jane [Maxwell, CNN chief assignment editor] hollered for Rick [Brown, satellite editor] to book the AT&T line to Kansas City 'from now until the end of the world.' [We kept the line up for eight hours.]
Hillis adds, "God knows why (other than ego) they [the networks] don't just shut up and let the local feeds go."
In the '80's we specialized in letting major local stations do the actual reports, taking them right off their air. We scooped the world during the Falklands war by taking direct reports from the British network ITN. Our anchors introduced the other station's coverage and then let the guys on the scene tell the story. On the MGM Grand Hotel fire in 1980, with 84 deaths and nearly 700 injuries, a disaster far greater than Minneapolis, CNN carried the CBS Las Vegas affiliate around the world with Tokyo and Paris both carrying CNN live. Our anchor, Lou Waters, was smart enough to keep his mouth shut most of the time and knew exactly what to say to knit the story together. You've read above about the Kansas City Hyatt Hotel skywalk collapse in which 118 died, again beating others on the air.
In each of those cases we went live using local station feeds, but only while the stories were developing.
We knew enough to get out when the stories were over. At that point, we'd move on to other news and provide regular, updated summaries without interminable "experts" and baseless speculation, when the stories were over and the news was dead. Now, as John suggests, ego and posturing seems to require endless hours of air time while real news goes unreported. I hope next week's ratings reports show a sharp decline in viewership in the last dozen hours of Thursday's interminable chronicle.
Going live from a dead story to tear at emotional heartstrings insults the viewers and I hope viewers make the networks pay for it.
I know the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge was a big deal but even the London Bridge took only eleven verses to fall down.