Riot Coverage, Plus & Minus

Since Watts, television stations have learned that the presence of lights, cam eras and reporters often inflame riot ers; and overdramatic coverage attracts more rioters to the scene. This summer the networks instructed their news staffs to be as unobtrusive as possible in riot areas, to travel in unmarked cars, to avoid the use of lights, and to cap their lenses when it was obvious that people were performing for the cam era. The Justice Department asked for cooperation in withholding news until violence was under control (TIME, July 14). Broadcasters were also told to check out rumors carefully before putting them on the air.

How did it work? In some cities, TV newsmen closely followed these guidelines and won praise from police and public officials alike. In New York, the stations balanced shots of East Harlem rioting with interviews with Puerto Rican moderates and Spanish-speaking police. In Detroit, TV held off reporting violence for twelve hours; only when it became obvious that the situation was out of control did the news go out. Reporters went out of their way to interview bewildered, law-abiding Negroes whose homes and property had been destroyed. The three TV stations in Cincinnati agreed not to interrupt regular programs with alarmist bulletins. "We did not put on television anything which we felt would inflame an incident," says Sam Johnston, general manager of WKRC-TV. "We gave no vocal platform to any of the agitators."

Squelching Rumors. TV coverage in Milwaukee was exemplary. The three stations made a pact to withhold news of the riot overnight in order to give it a chance to cool down. When CORE Leader Cecil Brown Jr. called a press conference during which he spread a false rumor that an innocent Negro had been shot to death by police, the stations covered the speech but did not run it. "All that screaming is a lot more provocative than just quoting someone," says Carl Zimmermann, news director of WITI-TV. But like enterprising newsmen, the stations do not plan to waste all the riot footage. "Some of the stuff is hair-raising," says Zimmermann, "but I think the community should witness it. So we plan to do a documentary on Voices of the Inner

City and balance it with interviews with moderates."

Elsewhere, however, TV coverage was just as riotous as the ghettos. Anyone who stood on a street corner of Newark and screamed loudly enough was sure to get on the air. "Television seems to have the knack of picking people off the street who were the most volatile and leading them into making the most violent kind of statements," complains Newark Police Director Dominick A. Spina. The stations made no attempt to sort out the various agitators they put on-camera or assess their importance. "They picked on every black face who proclaimed himself a leader," says Donald Malafronte, administrative assistant to Mayor Addonizio. "Casuals who had never raised a voice in community affairs all of a sudden were spokesmen on television." TV newsmen disobeyed instructions to stay behind police lines. On one occasion, a policeman chasing a looter tripped over a television cable. "We're lucky his gun didn't go off," says Spina.

Similarly, in Plainfield, N.J., officials contended that TV coverage egged on the rioters. "They gave the impression that the whole town was going up in flames," says Mayor George F. Hetfield. "Soon we had busloads of people coming in from Philadelphia and Newark who were professional manipulators." In turn, TV interviewed the newcomers as if they were experts on Plainfield. A Negro identified by NBC as the pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church claimed that the police were prolonging the riots in order to beat more Negroes. Plainfield clergymen complained to NBC that the man was a recent arrival in the city who was merely assisting in Bible study at Shiloh.

Emergency Code. Among others in Congress, Pennsylvania's Republican Senator Hugh Scott was upset enough by the TV coverage to ask the networks to adopt a code of "emergency procedure" for riots. There had been too much concentration, he wrote, on "sensational aspects and appeals to riot by extremists." Denying that his network had overplayed the extremists, CBS President Frank Stanton flatly turned down any code. It would amount to "censorship by voluntary agreement," he said. "We are not going to make subjective value judgments that the American people are capable of hearing and evaluating some spokesmen for some points of view and that others are unsafe or too dangerous for them to hear."

Bad as it was, the coverage of Plainfield helped make Stanton's point. TV newsmen were not content to accept the word of Negroes who told them that a white policeman had been stomped to death because he had shot and killed a seven-year-old Negro boy. The TV crews lugged their equipment to the city hospital where they got assurances from the staff that it was not a child but a 22-year-old man who had been shot--and he was only wounded.

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