"The Pope's Been Shot!"

By Janice Castro.

The lesson learned from the Reagan shooting: caution

"The Pope has apparently been shot. We don't know what his condition is. It was just at the beginning of the general audience in St. Peter's Square ... The Pope was seen to waver, to fall back into the arms of his secretary after four, or five, or six shots were fired."

Broadcast over some 1,700 ABC radio stations at 11:30:24 a.m. (E.D.T.) last Wednesday, that first word in the U.S. of the assassination attempt struck like a hammer. Once again, routines of everyday life were ruptured as millions of U.S. radio listeners, and an estimated 400 million TV viewers around the world, strained for further news from Rome. In the minutes that followed the first bulletin, CBS-TV, then ABC and NBC interrupted soap operas and game shows with special reports that echoed painfully in the memory. Journalists were dismayed by the similarity with the shooting of President Reagan just six weeks earlier. Said ABC-TV Anchorman Ted Koppel: "We have all too much experience with this kind of story."

News of the attack dominated front pages from Boston to Bangkok. JEAN PAUL II: THE WORLD APPALLED read the 1 1/2-in. headline in Paris' daily Le Figaro. In Johannesburg, an afternoon Star editorial bemoaned the violence "that seems to pervade the whole world." The New York Times devoted its first seven pages to the story and upped its pressrun by 180,000, to 1.16 million. The Los Angeles Times hit the streets two hours earlier than usual with a rare extra edition; the Washington Star printed two extra editions within hours of the shooting. In Vatican City, staffers at L'Osservatore Romano, the church daily, worked through the night to turn out the first early-morning extra edition in its 120-year history. The headline: HOURS OF HOPE AND PRAYER FOR THE HEALTH OF THE HOLY FATHER.

In Warsaw, John Paul's countrymen first heard a mournful radio report that began, "We have sad news for you." In the hours that followed, as they gathered on street corners and prayed for the Pope's survival, Poland's state-controlled radio and television stations carried an unprecedented torrent of live news reports fed by satellite from the West.

ABC's Washington-based Anchorman Frank Reynolds was in Manhattan to attend his son's graduation from the Columbia School of Journalism. He heard the news as he arrived at the Park Lane Hotel: "A total stranger ran up to me and said, 'Don't get out of the car! Go to work! The Pope's been shot!' " CBS Anchorman Dan Rather was attending a breakfast meeting with network affiliates in Los Angeles when Senior Executive Producer Burton Benjamin tapped him on the shoulder. Rather raced to the nearby CBS bureau, where a satellite link with New York was hastily arranged so that he could anchor the day's reporting from Los Angeles. NBC'S John Chancellor delivered a series of news bulletins throughout the day from his New York anchor desk.

As the three networks scrambled to report the story, caution was the byword. No one wanted to repeat the gross reporting errors that were made the day President Reagan was attacked, most egregiously the reports that Press Secretary James Brady had died. Says ABC World News Tonight Executive Producer Jeff Gralnick: "All of us learned a lesson with James Brady." The networks also had the problem of reporting live on a story that was unfolding in Rome while most of their foreign crews were concentrated in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Early medical bulletins on the Pontiff swung wildly between Vatican reports that he was "serene and conscious" and hospital characterizations of his condition as "grave." Says NBC News Senior Executive Producer Les Crystal: "There was the problem of getting accurate and complete information. It's hard enough in your own country, but it was compounded by the language barrier."

One result was that ABC and CBS did not shift to continuous coverage until some two hours after the shooting; NBC kept airing soap operas, which it interrupted with news updates and longer accounts. Rather and Reynolds bracketed every report with cautionary qualifiers and apologetic explanations to viewers about the difficulties in getting the story. Said Rather: "There will be some conflicting information. We do our best to sort it out." By midafternoon, as John Paul underwent 5 1/2 hr. of surgery, medical information grew sparse and anchormen were often hard-pressed for something useful to say. Soon even Rather was showing the strain, delivering long asides on the historical courage of the Polish people and at one uneasy point inviting viewers to join him in a moment of silent meditation. ABC's team, led by Reynolds, emerged as the coolest under pressure.

Despite the extraordinary care taken to ensure accuracy, mistakes were made, though none of the Brady magnitude. Ted Turner's scrappy Atlanta-based Cable News Network beat its broad-shouldered network competition with the first satellite video feed from Rome, but made several errors. More than once, CNN spoke of the Pope in the past tense, and later stated -- along with CBS -- that the operation had taken only 30 min. ABC Correspondent Bill Blakemore reported at 12:36 (E.D.T.) that the alleged assassin was an Arab. A CBS medical expert, using a text book illustration to explain the Pope's injuries, inadvertently showed a diagram of the female anatomy. There were some lapses in taste as well, though the most flagrant came from the public. Like sitcom and sports fans in earlier news crises, hundreds of viewers jammed TV station switchboards across the country to complain that their afternoon soap operas were interrupted. --By Janice Castro. Reported by Peter Ainslie and Robert Celine/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Peter Ainslie, Robert Celine

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