Tv News Goes Hollywood

By Richard Zoglin

The time is the late 1940s, the place Montgomery. James Earl Jones, portraying civil rights pioneer Vernon Johns, walks into an all-white diner, plops himself onto a stool and orders lunch. When the proprietor scornfully pours a Coke all over the counter, Jones erupts. "There's something inside of me," he growls, grabbing the man by the lapels, "that doesn't like to be pushed around!"

It is perhaps the archetypal scene of the early civil rights struggle. Yet this particular restaging of it was a breakthrough for a quite different reason. It appeared not in a TV movie or a PBS docudrama but on a network news show.

Dramatized "re-creations" of real-life events are suddenly everywhere. Tabloid shows like A Current Affair, Fox's America's Most Wanted and NBC's Unsolved Mysteries use them to re-enact just about everything from grisly murders to purported UFO sightings. Now the technique has entered a region some thought sacrosanct. It is the centerpiece of two network prime-time news shows: NBC's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (which drew good ratings in three outings in late summer and will return for three more this season) and the just-introduced Saturday Night with Connie Chung, on which Jones appeared.

As the real and only-looks-like-real are mixed with abandon, a viewer can get disoriented. Newscasters like Connie Chung and Mary Alice Williams introduce Hollywood-style mini-dramas one day, news stories from Warsaw and Capitol Hill the next. Real-life victims of brutal crimes return to the scene to act them out for the TV cameras. At least one actor from America's Most Wanted was turned in to authorities by a concerned viewer -- who mistook him for the fugitive he played in a re-enactment.

The confusion is shared by TV journalists, who are trying to locate their ethical bearings in this brave new world. At one extreme are the traditionalists, who insist that a staged scene of any kind is inappropriate on a news program, which depends for its credibility on presenting the truth and nothing but. On the other side are a new generation of TV news producers, under pressure from network bosses to come up with programs that will draw prime-time-size audiences. Re-enactments, the proponents argue, if carefully used and clearly labeled, can help impart information and expand the kinds of stories TV news can do.

Not all re-creations, of course, are created equal. ABC's World News Tonight last July aired a dramatization of alleged spy Felix Bloch passing a briefcase to a Soviet agent. The scene, visually enhanced to look like the real thing but inadvertently not labeled a simulation, was a mistake because it was misleading: it made an event that is alleged to have taken place appear to be a recorded fact. ABC apologized for not identifying the scene properly, and network newscasts have since steered clear of simulations.

Re-creations are less likely to cause confusion the further one gets from hard news -- and from the present day. The old CBS News series You Are There ^ used actors to dramatize historical events and did no permanent harm to the Republic. CBS's new series Rescue 911, which features re-enactments of hairbreadth rescue missions, is quite entertaining and probably harmless. In general, however, the technique's proliferation is fudging the line between news and entertainment, and news is the loser.

The two new network magazine shows highlight the problem. Both are treading gingerly with their re-creations. At the opening of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a correspondent notes, "When re-creations are used, we have carefully documented every important detail and have clearly identified the re-creations." The producers of Saturday Night with Connie Chung point out that their re-enactments must adhere to strict CBS News standards -- which means that all dialogue is taken from documented sources.

Yet the shows are troubling. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is both journalistically superfluous (the gimmick seems to be to repeat the words yesterday, today and tomorrow in each story as often as possible) and dramatically clumsy. A re-creation of the near crash of an American Airlines DC-10 in 1972 featured the original pilot and one flight attendant (now 17 years older) playing themselves, not very convincingly. Another story recounted the ordeal of a woman, nearly paralyzed with cystic fibrosis, who spent 16 years neglected in a mental institution. The piece was light on facts and heavy on sensationalism: the asylum scenes looked like outtakes from The Snake Pit.

Saturday Night with Connie Chung is at least less tacky. Its story on civil rights leader Johns glided smoothly between interviews with real-life colleagues and re-enacted scenes from his life. Forthcoming episodes will use re-creations to focus on such issues as AIDS, abortion and capital punishment. Chung has asserted that her show's re-creations stand apart from those on other programs. "Ours," she says, "will be of motion-picture quality."

Which is just the problem. The scenes with James Earl Jones were not just of motion-picture quality; they were virtually indistinguishable from a motion picture. TV news producers may well be capable of making docudramas as good as or better than Hollywood's; the question is whether they should. Journalists are in the business of conveying reality; re-enactments convert reality into something else -- something neater, more palatable, more conventionally "dramatic." Mental institutions are filled with raving loonies; murderers move in grainy, horrific slow motion; civil rights leaders look like James Earl Jones. There was no better drama on TV last week than the joint appearance on ABC's Nightline of Dr. Elizabeth Morgan and the ex-husband she has accused of molesting their daughter. No re-creation could possibly capture that. Let's hope no journalist tries.