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Television's coverage of fires no more than a numbers game

By Carl Heintze

I don't know about you, but I found the television coverage of the recent California fires less than satisfactory.

We saw a lot of flames and a lot of ruins, but we didn't see much else. I had a hard time finding out from television where the fires were. To listen to the various newscasters, one would think that all of San Diego was ablaze and that the fires were going to burn all the way to the sea coast.

I voice this criticism realizing that I am an old print media man who would hardly know one end of a camera from another and who would find it exceedingly cumbersome to have to deal with an onsite producer and an onsite cameraman.

Television news has always been more or less show business and it has never been what television people like to call "in depth."

Most television news is divided into segments, most of which are 30 seconds or less in length, hardly enough to give the viewer more than a glimpse of what is happening.

And that's about what we got from most television news about the fires--glimpses of flames racing up or down hillsides, firemen in yellow coats spraying water on burning houses and devastated homeowners coming back to what had been their houses to find a pile of smoking ruins.

It wasn't until after a week or so of smoke and flames that it was possible to get some idea of where specifically the fires were and where they were headed, or for television reporters to discover that a lot of the houses that burned had been built in places where it was likely that was going to happen.

That was the bigger story, I think, and one which is going to be with us for a long time to come.

I suppose we ought not to expect much more from television news.

Most local television news programs have a maximum of six or seven reporters, not including their "anchors." Most networks these days can only assign one or two reporters to a large breaking story such as the fires.

What's more, the 24-hour news channels, Fox and CNN in particular, exist on a series of news cycles. Every hour or so they have to come up with some kind of new angle on the stories they are covering, even if there isn't one. Newspapers don't do this. It's not physically, financially or logistically possible.

Television news also has to be visual. Looking at a so-called talking head explaining what's been happening or is about to happen is neither eye-catching nor interesting to most viewers.

That's why we saw so many flames and so little else during the fires. Flames catch one's eye when they are on the screen (boy, do they ever!) but they don't tell you anything except that there is a fire somewhere.

Still another game the television news people play (and one which newspapers are guilty of, too) is what I call the statistics game. It's a little like keeping score in a baseball game. So many houses have been destroyed, so many people have been evacuated (or are about to be evacuated), so many firemen are fighting the fires.

This gives a sort of order of magnitude to the story, but it really doesn't tell you anything. Television and newspapers played the same game in the Katrina flood disaster in New Orleans, and it was a long time before we really found out what was happening to whom and where it was taking place.

The truth is, I think, that television news is ill prepared to handle such stories as the Katrina floods or the Southern California fires. It is, on the other hand, well equipped for stories like the Kennedy assassination, events in which there is a time sequence, when the cameras can't wander off into so-called related byways. Then television is without competition simply because it is doing what it does best, recording what is happening in one place.

For events like the Southland fires, however, we don't have an adequate way of telling the world what is going on. Television seems unable to get a circle around this kind of a story, perhaps because such stories are too big to be grasped in a sound bite or even in a half hour.

It's too bad. I think, given the proper circumstances, planning and training, television reporting could do much better. If the 24-hour news operations, for instance, could in the event of a major story such as the fires somehow pause, regroup and concentrate, we would be immensely in their debt.

It's difficult to see how small local news operations could extend their coverage, but it has, on occasion, happened. And it could happen again, given the right circumstances.

It need not be a major disaster. It could even be a political event.

Whatever the story, if it happened, we would all be immensely in television's debt.