Oklahoma Bomber's Final Hours Are Hardly Television News's Finest
   by Caryn James

Timothy J. McVeigh "made himself a name," the daughter of an Oklahoma
City bombing victim bitterly told Katie Couric yesterday. It was the right
answer to the wrong question: "Are you worried that he will be viewed as a
martyr?" It is not martyrdom but fame that the television coverage has helped
him achieve, turning him into a celebrity while pretending not to.

That glaring, disingenuous approach informed the coverage of the execution,
from the weeks of relentless run-up through yesterday's final letdown.
Reporters asked questions that were almost universally wrongheaded and coy.

The most inane may have come from Wolf Blitzer on CNN the day before the
execution. "What do you think is going through his mind right now?" he asked one
of Mr. McVeigh's lawyers, Chris Tritico, who common-sensically said he didn't know.

The very title of last night's MSNBC special, "Headliners and Legends: Timothy McVeigh,"
part of a series usually devoted to glitzy stars like Goldie Hawn, said everything about the
transformation of Mr. McVeigh into a celebrity, however vilified.

The networks and the 24-hour news channels seemed to assume that if they
focused on the victims' families, the coverage would not become a media
circus. But that simply made it a somber circus, even a mawkish one. Almost
every channel scrolled the victims' names and faces across the screen, often
silently, as if that justified the harrowing overload of attention to the details of
the unseen execution.

It was the networks' luck that the execution happened during their regular
morning programs, so they could turn those anchors and that time to it without
seeming to make much of a fuss. (The coverage appeared as special reports in
time zones where the programs were not yet on the air.)

On ABC's "Good Morning America," Charlie Gibson was at the victims' memorial
in Oklahoma City, while Diane Sawyer stayed in New York. On NBC's "Today,"
Ms. Couric was in Oklahoma City, and Matt Lauer in New York. Among the
major- network programs, only CBS's "Early Show" sent an anchor, Jane Clayson,
to the site of the execution, in Terre Haute, Ind.; Bryant Gumbel reported from
New York. But the location made no difference in the saturation coverage.

Reporters were literally in the field during the execution, standing on a patch of
green grass near the prison, offering details about the three injections they assumed
were being given at that moment. The tick- tock buildup and the hauntingly familiar
photographs of the empty execution room, with its green tiled walls and its table with
restraints just waiting, became excruciating. By the time the warden and the witnesses
described the death, the facts seemed almost anticlimactic.

A similar sense of anticlimax invaded the network coverage generally, because
so much of the advance hoopla had already run weeks ago, before the execution
was postponed. Barbara Walters had interviewed an executioner on "20/20," and
"60 Minutes" had repeated its year-old interview with Mr. McVeigh, intercut with
reactions from victims' families, some of them now recognizable as regulars on the
television interview circuit. (On Sunday, "60 Minutes" did something creepier,
replaying its tape of Jack Kevorkian helping a man die on camera.)

The cable channels ran slightly updated versions of programs they had already
shown, blithely assuming that Mr. McVeigh's actions could be explained and
neatly wrapped up. In the introduction to "Headliners and Legends," Mr. Lauer
asked, "What turned an all-American boy into America's worst nightmare?" as
the clichéd special went on to show smiling childhood pictures. CNN's profile
on its "People in the News" program said, "He could have been the boy next door."

And as they waited for the execution yesterday morning, the commentators
parsed the meaning of a letter, recently sent by Mr. McVeigh to a Buffalo
newspaper, that read, "I'm sorry these people had to lose their lives." Those
conversations seemed a desperate reach for reassurance, because they always
circled back to the day's most overused phrase: he has shown "no remorse."

As the witnesses to the execution spoke through the day, their jarringly
different descriptions offered a lucid but unexplored commentary about the
power of the camera. The two network journalists chosen by lottery to watch,
Byron Pitts of CBS and Shepard Smith of the Fox News Channel, were
careful not to read anything into Mr. McVeigh's expression. Mr. Smith was
especially nuanced in reporting that Mr. McVeigh's skin had turned yellow and
that he had seemed to die painlessly; yet Mr. Smith was rare in remaining so
astutely aware that each witness would read the event differently. As Paul
Howell, whose daughter died in the bombing and who was also a witness, said,
"We didn't get anything from his face."

But many family members who watched on closed circuit television in
Oklahoma City saw something else. After seeing images from a stationary
camera above Mr. McVeigh that stared into his face, they said things like "We
saw hatred" and "It was like I was looking at the face of evil."

That lesson about the camera seemed willfully lost on the commentators, even
when they noticed it. On the Fox News Channel, John Gibson rhetorically
jumped up and down after a woman who had watched on closed circuit said it
was "a slap in the face" when Mr. McVeigh turned his head away. Mr. Gibson,
inflammatory as usual, didn't spend time wondering whether the people
watching thousands of miles away were imposing ideas on an image they could
not truly come close to.

And as much as television pretended to explain Timothy McVeigh, its audience came
no closer.  He remains one more celebrity headline, on his way to becoming a legend.
 
 

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