Television in The

By WALTER ISAACSON

The omnipotence of television is so taken for granted these days that viewers are no longer amazed when a crackdown in Beijing or a hostage crisis in Beirut magically materializes in their living room. Far more surprising, and a bit unnerving, was the eerie sensation Tuesday night: the tidy coherence and instant packaging that normally make television such a reassuring national touchstone were replaced by the unusual experience of watching as the medium was forced to grope in the dark. "When you're used to being able to flick switches and have things pop up on satellites, it's frustrating and even terrifying to realize that you have no way of finding out the dimensions of a disaster," says Robert Murphy, ABC's vice president of news coverage. "You feel you've lost control of the story."

Immediate gratification has become a hallmark of the age of mobile uplinks. "The new satellite technology is wonderful," says NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, "but it's made us hostage to our expectations that information can be instantaneous." Tuesday night was a reminder that there are limits to what even television can do when electricity and telephones and highways are knocked out. By the time most networks closed down for the night after five or six hours of coverage, San Jose and Santa Cruz were still disconcertingly cut off from contact, the scope of the tragedy on Oakland's I-880 was unknown, and it had been impossible for reporters to convey the full flavor of what life was like for 6 million residents of the Bay Area on a night they will never forget. "The instinct of journalists is to have it tidy," says Brokaw. "In this case there were many loose ends even at the end of the night."

This is not to minimize the dazzling feats that the networks and their affiliates were able to pull off. Howard Stringer, the president of CBS Broadcast Group, was parking his car at Candlestick Park when the earthquake hit, and he subsequently spent hours searching for a working telephone or open airport. "It's remarkable that television got satellite feeds out at all, given that things weren't working even at a lower level of technology," he says. San Francisco's two dailies, also without power, had trouble making their deadlines with abbreviated editions, and newspapers across the country relied heavily on TV for their information.

ABC turned in the most impressive performance. With 14 camera crews, the Goodyear blimp, and savvy sports commentator Al Michaels on hand at Candlestick Park to cover the World Series, its sports division alone could probably have beaten the other networks' news divisions, as it did after the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Anchoring from Washington, Ted Koppel again proved that he is unsurpassed in the art of extracting facts from chaos. While CBS's Dan Rather was still stressing the "unconfirmed" nature of reports about the collapse of the Bay Bridge, ABC (along with the ever enterprising CNN) had already broadcast a shot of the fallen roadway.

But the video pickings were by necessity slim and disjointed. The night was dominated by repeated aerial views of three scenes -- a fire in the Marina district, the broken segment of the Bay Bridge, and the collapsed stretch of I-880 -- with comments from correspondents who had no way to get to them. On ABC, Michaels tried to figure out from his monitor in Candlestick Park where the fire was located; on NBC, Bob Jamieson reported from his car telephone that he saw no indications of the blaze as he described the "festive atmosphere" at Embarcadero Center.

"We kept showing pictures of the collapsed highway," says Murphy, "but it was not for at least two hours that we realized we were seeing two levels that had pancaked and crushed people." Even more frustrating to Murphy was the impenetrable shroud surrounding the South Bay. "We tried all night to get a signal out of San Jose, but we had no satellite capability, the microwaves weren't working and we could not even get them on the phone. For all we knew, hundreds might be dead."

The Tuesday-night turmoil showed how reliant networks have become on the technology of affiliates. "Once upon a time, only the networks had remote trucks and satellite capacity, but now most local stations do," says Koppel, who repeatedly turned over his show to a pickup of ABC's intrepid affiliate, KGO. NBC was hobbled by the lack of a working generator at its affiliate KRON, which ended up relying on wire-service reports telefaxed from Los Angeles.

Even in the best of circumstances, television is most powerful when reporting a focused event with a clear-cut emotional content. Because camera crews could not wander the city broadcasting interviews, it was impossible to convey the surreal array of emotions, running from grief to giddiness, or to share the diverse experiences that formed the sprawling saga. By the time the Minicams were back beaming the next day, the story had shifted to one of rescue and recovery; the varied tapestry of what happened during the earthquake was lost in the dust.

There was, nonetheless, something dramatic about the way the viewers found themselves treated to the raw material that is normally polished and packaged before broadcast. "One of the things that make television so powerful is that on occasion we end up groping for information together," says ABC's unflappable Peter Jennings, who after co-anchoring with Koppel for a few minutes decided to grab a plane west to be the first anchor on the scene next morning. Jeff Greenfield, a media critic who appears on ABC, notes that "the significance of the story was heightened by scenes of local reporters holding flashlights in generator-lit newsrooms that looked like broom closets."

By Wednesday evening, all the images were brightly lighted once again, and the anchors were presenting polished broadcasts from San Francisco. The morning shows were there as well, along with enough reporters from around the world to provide the reassuring hint of journalistic overkill that serves as a sign that the world is under control once again.