big story, small screen

Never before have journalists had the technical resources to transmit the actual sight and sound of life instantaneously around the planet. And yet, the "reality" television news viewers get is frequently cropped and garbled.

Much of this degradation is due to rush or human fallibility, but a large part stems from television's defining qualities:

¥ It's a small screen, and it doesn't take much to fill it.

¥ It's the most mass of mass media, and communicates with its vast audience in a conventional language that can be as confusing as it is efficient.

These limitations hurt most when reality is at its most unconventional -- and thus its most newsworthy. Then, television's conventional coverage holds up a mask, not a mirror, to reality.

The extraordinary "mo-ment of silence" observed the afternoon of Sunday, April 23, for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing is a recent example of TV coverage breaking through to the viewer. But CNN had to get past its own conventions first.

CNN was live as an unnatural quiet fell across America. Except for anchors Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer. Even after viewers could see an exterior shot of a church in Oklahoma City's devastated downtown, and sense, surrounding it, the halt of normal noise and bustle, the anchors kept anchoring.

Shaw and Blitzer seemed to be awaiting some formal announcement that the silence had begun, and then, half a minute later, as they noticed that it had, the impulse to narrate overpowered the impulse to listen.

"A hush has fallen over the eleven to twelve thousand people gathered here in this arena," noted Shaw, who twenty seconds later was still saying, "If you could have virtual silence in a room with twelve thousand people . . . ," and again, "I've never heard this before," without letting us hear it. Only after Blitzer had chimed in that there was "not a peep coming out of this audience," only after a minute of conventional play-by-play obscured what it might have revealed, did the announcers cease.

The next ninety seconds were unlike almost anything ever broadcast on television. Silence. Silence and silence and silence over pictures of silent thousands in the hall, and the chimeless belltower outside, and the motionless workmen at the Murrah Fed-eral Building. Silence spoke.

When the orchestra in the hall resumed, pianissimo, in the background, Shaw and Blitzer resumed, as well: "That, a moment of silence . . . ."

And the show went on. What had been transcendent reality became just television and television went back to its familiar pictures and familiar texts -- clutched teddy bears, weeping faces, joined hands. Moving, no doubt, but moving TV.

In the same way that conventional coverage almost denied viewers the reality of that Oklahoma Sunday, the old familiar words-and-pictures hurricane formula failed spectacularly to communicate the literal, visual, actual "storm of the century," Hurricane Andrew.

The TV code for hurricane is familiar: palm trees bending to the gale, surf splashing over the humbled shore, missing roofs, homeless people showing up in local gyms. You see it once or twice most years.

Then, along comes Andrew in 1992 and the pictures are the same, and so is the response. Even in a well-wired White House, with independent additional sources of information, it was days before it dawned that people in Florida were afraid and angry because they knew what had hit them but no one in authority seemed aware. Even though they could see it on television.

What I remember best, but probably communicated worst, about this amazing event was the sound. As Andrew unfolded over Morgan City, Louisiana, where I happened to be stationed for Nightline, I heard a buildup of windscreech that swelled in volume and tone like the exhalation of a jungle cat. This sound could no more be compressed into a blip of "natural sound" than a Mozart melody.

Notwithstanding long hours of coverage, TV (including my reports for Nightline and World News Now) never found time to let the storm speak in its own full voice. The long listen to Andrew's wind was not done, not because it couldn't be done, but simply because it isn't done.

Then came Rwanda. If ever reality ranged out of the ordinary it was there. The reportage that awed me conspicuously trashed the conventions of TV news.

"There are some stories that can never be told. This is one of them." So began my colleague Jim Wooten's brief voice-over narration of videotape he'd gathered in Goma, Zaire, for the July 26, 1994, Nightline. The crowd of refugees was too vast for the eye, much less the camera, to comprehend. Their terror, stench, need, could not be seen. "Not with these pictures, nor these pictures, or a million more," Wooten's narration confessed.

And then, speaking directly to the camera, Wooten countered the camera's potential for framing things in ways you may too quickly think you understand.

"It is not like the famine in Somalia. It is not like the flight of the Iraqi Kurds into the mountains of Iran and Turkey. It is not like the siege of Sarajevo." And as he spoke this, we saw no Somalians, Kurds, or Sarajevans, just Wooten, and a look in his eyes that underscored his prose: "It is not like anything I've seen in thirty years as a reporter."

Three nights later, the next Nightline report from Goma eschewed pictures and conventional coverage even more completely, focusing in on debriefing the witnesses -- Wooten, his producers Rick Wilkinson and Leroy Sievers, cameraman Fletcher Johnson, and sound recordist Trevor Barker. As they told what they'd seen, felt, smelt, they communicated it better than pictures could, in part because the lack of pictures said, "Listen closely."

Their words, their devastated faces, better mirrored Rwanda than any image a picture-hardened public could see.

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