Networks struggle to capture meaning

June 12, 2001|By Steve Johnson, Tribune media critic.

Amid the mawkishness during Monday's television coverage of Timothy McVeigh's execution--CBS had a lone piano plinking mournfully as it flashed photographs of his 168 victims--TV news outlets did find moments that were more about the day's meaning than its raw emotion.

Struggling to strike this balance were all manner of media, from the cable news channels that had a whole day of airtime to fill to a number of daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and New York Post, that rushed out special "extra" editions Monday.

Complicating matters was the lack of video; the closest TV cameras could come was a broad open field away from the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison where the execution took place.

The live event that everybody covered, then, was not the 7 a.m. scheduled death--CNN, at that moment, was telling viewers the population of Terre Haute (60,000)--but the warden announcing that, at 7:14 a.m., McVeigh was pronounced dead.

ABC and National Public Radio briefly lost audio feeds during the statement. But the day's biggest glitch came when an ABC on-screen graphic attributed to McVeigh incendiary last words he did not utter.

"The final tally has been, in the crudest of terms, 168 to one," said a part of the graphic, which ABC later said had been prepared in advance on a tip and allowed to air mistakenly. The network quickly apologized.

Television producers during the morning gave opponents of state-sanctioned killing a more full and fair hearing than they likely would have received even three years ago.

At least two TV correspondents noted that McVeigh's cause of death would be listed as "homicide." After his execution, however, it was revealed that the cause of death was listed as "lethal injection."

NBC gave a lengthy airing to McVeigh lawyer Robert Nigh's postexecution statement, an impassioned argument against the death penalty. "There is a reasonable way to deal with crime that doesn't involve killing another human being," Nigh said, before the network cut to a victim's family member who disagreed.

And on ABC, "Good Morning America's" Diane Sawyer in New York led a substantial discussion of the death penalty.

"This is not blood lust," legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said. "We are a sensitive and decent people."

But that view is not held worldwide. CNN's Christiane Amanpour reminded viewers from London that U.S. support for the death penalty--highlighted by this first federal execution in almost four decades--is "harming its moral standing in the rest of the world."

When other opportunities to deepen coverage presented themselves, they were not seized. McVeigh's actual last words, the day's only real suspense, turned out to be a handwritten version of the 19th Century poem "Invictus." Yet no news outlets during a morning of steady channel hopping appeared interested in a closer examination of the poem.

A number of the victims and victims' relatives called on the media Monday to stop focusing on McVeigh and turn the spotlight back to the victims. It was encouragement hardly needed.

Like CBS, ABC elected to spend the approximate moments of the execution displaying all the victims.

On NBC, instead of exploring bombing survivor Susan Orbach's decision not to watch the execution via the government's video feed to Oklahoma City, "Today" co-host Katie Couric went straight for the emotional jugular.

"Whose shoulder will you cry on today?" she asked presumptively.