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essay
The Virtual Reporter
By Mike Hoyt
Mike Hoyt (mh151@columbia.edu) is CJR's
senior editor.
The estimable R. W. Apple Jr., veteran political reporter for The New York Times, has a minor confession to make about his January series on the impeachment trial of the president. Though the stories were prominently labeled with the running logo in the chamber, Apple did not set foot inside the Senate. He covered the trial off TV. "That’s correct," Apple says. "After a few days somebody said to me, ‘doesn’t that imply that you were in the chamber’? It did seem to me afterwards that it was somewhat two-faced. By that time it was a little late."
Truth in labeling aside, why cover the historic doings from the small screen when an excellent seat in the Senate press gallery is available? Apple reasoned that since his assignment was a just-the-facts kind of piece, color and analysis left to others, "I thought that, if I got in the midst of it, the temptation to have my story affected by the spinmeisters there would be very great." He wanted, he says, "to be as pure as I could."
Well, maybe. But for a reporter to distance himself from the event he is covering is to filter out large swaths of reality. "I’m sure I lost something," Apple concedes. The dynamics? A sense of the room? The little scenes outside the frame of the camera? Something. Yet in government and politics, in sports, and in courthouses all over the land, more reporters are choosing to distance themselves from what they are covering, and there’s a price to pay.
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Part of the reason for the increase in this phenomenon is that there are so many of us swarming all over big stories now. For a monster news event like the O.J. Simpson trial, of course, many reporters have no choice but to cover it off the screen. In Brooklyn this spring, at the trial of the cops accused of savaging Abner Louima, a "second site" was set up, a room with a large-screen TV and a live video feed. "A great many of the reporters actually preferred the second site," says Shirley Wilson, case manager for federal Judge Eugene Nickerson. "They could drink their coffee and talk to each other." By order of the judge, the camera focused only on the witnesses and the attorneys, and on sidebar conferences with the audio turned off.
The situation was similar at the "Nanny Trial" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1997, where more than 600 reporters came to watch Louise Woodward face a charge of infanticide. "Everybody who really wanted to get in and showed up at 9 a.m. got in," says the clerk for Superior Judge Hiller Zobel. "We had room for about forty. Most of them didn’t want to get in. They wanted to watch it on TV upstairs and chew gum and stuff."
Henry Goldman, a writer for Bloomberg News who is a lawyer and has covered many trials, is one who made sure he got in. As the camera focused on Woodward, "I saw how the jury was taking her testimony. There was no question in my mind that they weren’t buying it. I didn’t get any sense of empathy. She seemed too prepared. I’m not commenting on whether she was telling the truth, but to my mind it made her less credible as a witness." Later, covering another story in another city, Goldman watched the trial on television. "I was shocked at how much better she seemed to come across," he says. "She looked marvelous. On TV if you don’t hesitate, if you are well prepared, you come off well."
Aside from distortion, the video version offers tunnel vision. "If you are not in the courtroom you are missing things," Goldman says. "The arched eyebrow of the judge, the shrug of the opposing attorney, whatever." There are disadvantages of being there too, of course. "You can’t get up and leave freely, or read, or be on the Internet, or use the phone," notes Bill Dedman, who teaches computer-assisted reporting and writes on a part-time basis for The New York Times. "So we sit in the press room, where we watch the trial/show on closed-circuit TV, talk with our editors, get spun by advocates who wander in, stay online to read e-mail or check clips.
"It really is better," he says. "Except it’s worse."
Dedman got to cover a piece of last year’s home run derby between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, and he was struck by "how much information is available in the press box, and how little relevance it has to the event, how distancing it is." How you are drowned in statistics. He noticed how some sports reporters go "from car to elevator to press box to clubhouse to press box to elevator to car," never getting near the fans or the field of play.
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It is the fans who most matter, in the mind of Robert Lipsyte, the sports and city columnist for the Times. "The sportswriter’s worst isolation is from his or her own audience," he says. "It’s important to sit with the fans. You get an idea of what they’re thinking, what their images of the players are. The reporter who goes from car to pressbox and back down to car ends up writing for the other guys, the sportswriters who are doing the same thing."
Stadium press boxes have TVs, which can be extremely handy, between the instant replays and the sometimes-better view. But, notes Lipsyte, it is a sanitized view. We can be very good writers and producers, but if we sanitize our reporting, our stories fall short of the mark.
