Covering Visual Events

By Author: endeavor
Total Articles: 95
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For both print and television journalism, the ability to tape or photograph an event is an important determinant of coverage and publication. The effort by a Connecticut television station to show portions of a figure skating championship on its evening newscast illustrates the intense pull of the visual. ABC-TV had bought exclusive rights to show the 1981 World Figure Skating Championships Thomas Sabo Charms held at the Hartford Civic Center on its Wide World of Sports. The Hartford station (WFSB) sued the local sponsors to stop their enforcement of a ban against all television cameras except ABC's. The case is an interesting test of First Amendment principles versus property rights to copyrighted material. Of more interest here, however, is the admission by the Hartford station's vice president for news that the event would have merited "only a brief mention in the sports roundup were it not for the visual quality of the skaters gliding gracefully across the rink."

Television has a strong preference for visual events, but newspapers also try to ac-company stories ...
... with attention-getting photographs. The 1984 famine in Ethiopia was widely reported in U.S. newspapers beginning in late 1983 and early 1984. But it was not until late October and early November 1984, when pictures of the victims began appearing on network television news, that massive efforts were mobilized to help the starving people of that country. On October 23, 15.5 million viewers of the NBC Nightly News saw televised coverage of the famine. In the seven weeks following the NBC broadcast, Catholic Relief Services, one of the two charities mentioned by name in the NBC broadcast, reported 91,000 pieces of mail offering help, including $13 million dollars in contributions.

The reason for the long delay in securing and transmitting the story to television news was that the Marxist government of Ethiopia had put up roadblocks to stop the reporters. Journalists were denied permission to enter the country to get the story. The photographer and reporter, who brought back the dramatic tape aired by the BBC, and picked up by NBC and others, had cajoled their way into the country. An acting official had inadvertently given them access to the refugee camps.

Similarly, at the end of the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush "was deter-mined not to be drawn into Iraq's internal battles, confident that the blows he had dealt Saddam Hussein would prompt his overthrow. Instead, Saddam attacked the Kurds and pictures of their misery were so affecting that Bush felt forced to intervene to protect them."

Politicians respond to this bias by feeding the media's appetite for compelling visual images. The results occasionally are comic. In August 1989, President George Bush's speechwriters conceived the idea of having Bush dramatize his antidrug speech to the nation by holding up a bag of crack purchased by narcotics agents near the White House. The attorney general asked drug enforcement officials to make the buy. The Washington Post reported the results:

The first time, the alleged drug dealer never showed up. On the second try, the undercover Drug Enforcement Administration Thomas Sabo Charm Carriers agent wore a body microphone that didn't work. Then the cameraman who was supposed to be videotaping the deal missed the action because he was assaulted by a homeless person. "This is like a Keystone Kops thing," U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin said to the witness, DEA special agent Sam Gaye.

Because television is a visual medium, it deals well with issues that can be reduced to concrete, dramatic illustrations. Some important issues, such as the economy, are not easily reduced to tangible, dramatic, 2-minute-and-35-second bites of information.