Real time coverage

For the rest of the world, CNN has become the first “go-to” source for news of crisis in the US. The Boston Marathon had been news even before the bombing, an iconic event that draws unfailing global interest. The run is among the oldest of the kind and the city that hosts it is among the greatest of urban capitals in the world. I spent a spring semester in a program in Cambridge and felt compelled to watch.

CNN’s coverage of the bombing and the chase for suspects in Cambridge and Watertown has sustained my reservations and misgivings about continuous live coverage of this kind of breaking news.

To CNN’s credit, correspondents followed instructions from law enforcement officers who took charge of what could be described as the scene of the crime and the hunt for suspects. The media readily backed off from perimeter lines set by the police and told the audience that they had been instructed not to reveal circumstances that could jeopardize operational safety and endanger safety. At the height of the search, CNN also went on the five-second delay to be able to halt coverage in case something broke out that should not be seen by the public.

My doubts were on another level.

Joan Wickersham expressed it more pointedly when she wrote: “There’s nothing new to report, but we can’t seem to turn it off. We want information, insight, words that will help make sense of something frightening and mysterious. Words are being thrown around, but the more they are used, the more layered and elusive their meanings become.”

She may not have been watching CNN. But I shared the same state of feeling “hostaged” by the coverage, forcing attention on nothing happening but persistently reported in repetitive cycles. I could not turn it off as I know too well I should’ve.

All that watching occasioned a review of the wisdom of continuous live coverage of crisis as breaking news. I question the editorial judgment of CNN when it focused solely on what was happening in Boston and its surroundings when there other news deserved global attention. CNN International seems stuck in the objective of providing news for Americans only even as it claims the interest of a global audience.

To get back to Wickersham’s point, continuous live coverage forces the audience to take on more information and collateral detail than the public care or need to hear or know. Surely, there should be a difference between the purpose of real time coverage and reality TV.

I wondered why there was so little mapping of the bombing site, of Boylston Center and the finish line in relation to the rest of the city center, the Commons, the historic sites associated with the city’s history as well as other details that make the Boston Marathon such an event.

Real time coverage is about hard news that is unfolding, reported as it happens. For much of the time given between the bombing on April 15 and the search for the younger suspect in the Boston suburb of Watertown, there was little hard news to give to the viewers, as even authorities and those in charge of police operations and other law-enforcement bodies could say much about what they did know.

What would we have missed if the roving correspondents had not been called on to give frequent updates about their surroundings, or to speak to ordinary people who had been evacuated from their homes for their safety and operational efficiency? We listened and gained little in terms in real information and insight that Wickersham and her family felt they needed.

Assigned to talk to the audience or to each other in the absence of experts and other persons of authority, correspondents and anchors tend to talk a lot to fill up air time. Such circumstances make it difficult not to fall into pointless repetition.

Wickersham felt that as she listened to TV news during the crisis, she felt that she no longer really understood the words that were uttered repeatedly: “terror”, “lockdown”, and “healing;” even as she felt some words gaining different layers of meaning: “bravery” and “marathon.”

I was first annoyed and then upset when CNN correspondents and anchors began to describe the second brother’s options to include either “going in a blaze of glory” or quietly surrendering to authorities. The first option obviously refers to the desperate actions that a person with few options might resort to, usually causing harm to himself and also probably to others, such as possibly switching on explosives attached to his body or similar suicidal acts. Why use the phrase “blaze of glory” – which suggests some admiration, connoting memorability, something that will never be forgotten for its drama.

It was almost as though they were egging him to end this all “in a blaze of glory.”

But this is what happens when coverage can do little else. It fills up hot air with speculation, hearsay, personal remembrances and accounts that leave strong impressions which may be misleading about reality of the suspect’s lives.

CNN did not find anyone who seemed to have really known the suspects. Maybe, no one really knew them, which when pondered away from television and its white noise would have brought us closer to the mystery and the frightening reality of it all.