Chasing After Innuendo and Runaway Cars

Local TV journalism in the ‘90s. . . .

In its 11 p.m. Tuesday newscast, KCBS-TV Channel 2, without offering any evidence or corroboration, all but accused a Laguna Beach physician of murdering his 31-year-old daughter in 1995 in a case that it announced had “striking parallels” to the JonBenet Ramsey slaying in Colorado.

“Nestled on a cliff above Laguna Beach is a secret no one here wants to talk about,” reported Drew Griffin in this heavily promoted news story. “Though police say they have no suspects in his daughter’s death,” Griffin added, “by their actions, police have focused on this man.” Cut to footage of the doctor, whose house, cars and medical offices had been searched by Laguna Beach cops, Griffin said.

“So why are the police continuing to investigate this case as a murder, and do they have any evidence that points to the victim’s own father?” Griffin asked. The answer, he said, may be in an unpublished “fictional murder-mystery” written by the doctor. Laguna Beach police have not located the entire manuscript and “don’t know if clues to the murder exist in its pages,” Griffin reported, but they’re “not ruling out connections. . . .” He said that the physician and police would not talk to Channel 2 but that the latter “continue to search for this manuscript, trying to find out if the secret of who killed [the daughter] was foretold in a novel.”

Brother!

Griffin is a good reporter, one of Channel 2’s best, affirming how bad newscasts suck even their finest talent into the suffocating quicksand of their banality. His story didn’t quite say that the doctor did it, but by its tone left a clear impression of guilt, just as media reports galore have implicated one or both of JonBenet’s parents through scattershot innuendo and speculation.

What’s more, Channel 2 juiced its own thin account with lots of tingly music as if this were a prime-time mystery movie instead of a news story. KCBS is owned by CBS, which in earlier times that now seem almost decadent, when its news division had nobler standards, would not have tolerated one of its stations deploying music or any other artificial stimuli in a news story. To say nothing of allowing stations to make indictments in stories without clear, visible cause.

Yet these are infinitely weirder times, when The Smear is operative all across the cratered lunarscape of TV news. That includes last year’s Olympic Park bombing and thumping of Richard Jewell, who not long ago reached financial settlements with NBC and CNN and on Thursday received an apology from U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno for the way the FBI handled its investigation of him. It also includes wacky, prematurely punitive John TV, where faces and names of men merely accused of soliciting prostitutes are shown to viewers of local access cable in Kansas City, Mo., in a spinoff of something tried on Boston TV several years ago.

And it includes, too, even the most routine crime stories, specifically those usually trivial freeway police pursuits that some local newscasts regularly gorge themselves on and regurgitate like bulimics all over the airwaves. “That may be the suspect,” Channel 2 anchor Linda Alvarez noted recently from her station’s live chopper footage of a man walking briskly, following reports that a motorist was fleeing on foot after leading police on a long chase.

Or it may not have been the suspect, for, as Alvarez pointed out, the guy on-screen appeared to be wearing different clothes than the one televised earlier in his vehicle. Well, what was the difference? He was on foot, he was an earthling, close enough.

Of course, that was almost quaint compared with the chase that Channel 2, KNBC-TV Channel 4 and KABC-TV Channel 7 transformed Wednesday into a marathon live-TV spectacle that was no less than boggling for its ceaseless blather and vacuity. It began the usual way, with Channels 4, 2 and 7, in that order, stopping what they were doing and instinctively throwing on live chopper footage without appearing to know for certain what they were showing.

“It’s unknown what he’s wanted for,” reported Channel 7 anchor Marc Brown about the driver of a red pickup that was to occupy the cross-hairs that afternoon.

The live coverage began about 4:30 p.m. When it ended with the peaceful surrender of the fugitive motorist who was carrying a reportedly stolen spear gun, Channel 4 newscasters had squandered more than 90 minutes on this surreal venture after finding scant time for the barest of stories about Wednesday’s lethal bombs that decimated a crowded Jerusalem market. To its credit, Channel 7 earlier had granted a sizable chunk of its 4 p.m. newscast to that story before later going berserk on the chase.

After joining the chase in mid-”Geraldo,” Channel 2 then bequeathed it its entire 5 p.m. newscast, giving new meaning to its slogan, “Bringing balance back to local news.” At 5:30 p.m., it temporarily abandoned the chase for “The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather.”

Otherwise, viewers of all three stations were treated to tedious live coverage of a truck traveling in an orderly fashion along freeways at 65 to 75 mph. When it broke down mechanically, next came 45 minutes of live pictures of it halted on the freeway with the driver remaining at the wheel as police waited him out behind their squad cars. Much later, he left the cab, backed up toward police, went to his knees and was handcuffed and taken away.

If this flushing away of air time delivered no news, it did yield plenty of words--too few of them cautionary--about the anonymous fugitive that police said had tried to run down an officer after stealing the spear gun.

Strange vibes about the suspect had reached “Captain” Ron Bodholdt in Channel 7’s chopper high above the scene. “I get the feeling that there’s something more happening with him, maybe something in the truck with him besides the spear.”

“People involved with the third strike,” added Channel 7 anchor Harold Greene, “will go to any extreme to avoid being captured.”

“We must remember that petty theft is just a misdemeanor,” Bodholdt came back, “but there might be something else on him, and this could be a third-strike situation.”

Or maybe it wasn’t. But who cares when there’s time to fill? Channel 2 anchor Larry Carroll asked a cop on the phone: “Do you usually catch the suspect before the gas runs out?” Certainly never before the babble runs out.

The wildest commentary about the driver came in the skies from Channel 4’s revved-up “Captain” Bob Pettee, whose mouth at times appeared to be in sync with his chopper blade. “This is the most serious of his crimes, when he used that vehicle as a weapon,” he gushed about the man accused of trying to ram a cop.

And later: “He’s already attempted to take the life of an officer.” And later: “You’ve got a man who is desperate, who is willing to take a life.”

The coverage was in-depth, too. Dispatched to the Newport Beach shop where the spear gun was allegedly stolen, Channel 2 reporter Dave Lopez spoke with a merchant who said the suspect swiped the weapon, claiming he was with the CIA and needed it for evidence.

When the merchant showed Lopez the same model spear gun said to be stolen, the veteran reporter wanted to know more. “Could you catch a small shark with it?” The merchant: “Uh-uh.” Lopez: “Not that powerful, huh?”

Then the camera moved in for a close-up of the spear tip. Or was that the head of the sage at Channel 2 who charted this coverage?

Almost as farcical was Channel 4 anchor Paul Moyer asking himself at one point: “Aren’t there other pressing events in the news we should know about?” His answer? “Yes, there are, [but] when something like this happens, it becomes important to everyone in Southern California.” If so, pity Southern California.

Meanwhile, John TV may be obsessed with the hooker trade, but the biggest prostitutes are doing business on the airwaves.