Must-see TV: Rita edition

(Start @ 3:22 am edt) I want to tip my hat right now to the coverage provided by KPLC in Lake Charles this morning. The folks there moved out of their studios earlier today and went to their shelter-in-place location, the 5th floor of a hospital there (Krista St. Patrick? corner of South Ryan and Foster Street), and have been sitting around a tiny table in a hallway doing their damnedest to continue to provide local information.

The coverage, which I've been watching courtesy of this feed (it works in Windows Media Player in Windows, I don't know about other platforms), has been by far the most intense of the night.

As I'm writing this, they're sitting at their makeshift studio listening to people in the background watching the roof, since another building in this hospital complex has just gone through a partial collapse of some sort. No, check that... a conference room down the hall has just lost its part of the roof. No, just a window in that conference room blew out. The fog of war...

The whole thing is so raw, and so effective and so low-tech, compared to what else is on. CNN and Fox News have their glitz and glamour and their star personnel on the scene and their fancy-schmancy graphics and no soul. The blogs this evening are talking a bit about the Joel Kline memo about an arresting "Category 4" graphic. I wonder if Joel wonders as hard about the actual content of what they're getting on the air.

These folks at KPLC have reminded me, just by telling the story, stripping it free of all the crawls and the rest of the crap that have infested broadcast news, what a good, solid news story is. It also reminds me of a couple of other stellar broadcasts I've seen in my life.

The first really good one I saw myself was on January 16, 1991. David French was anchoring an interview on CNN when he interrupted the interview to say, "We need to go to Baghdad." He threw to Baghdad, and* a very nervous Bernard Shaw came on and said, "Something is happening outside." And for the next 17 hours or so, they were broadcasting live from Baghdad. In the wake of Gulf War II, that sort of thing seems a little provincial (no, there was no live video of the explosions, just the excited voices after feeling the bombs detonate near the hotel... very Murrow-esque). But it was the only link anyone from the West had to Baghdad. Dick Cheney, who was then Secretary of State, even joked (maybe only half-so) that everything he knew about the situation on the ground in Baghdad was coming from CNN. It was that remarkable.

There has been other good news coverage since then. But what broadcasters credit as the beginning of this Breaking News mindset, scrambling resources to cover the story as best you can, was the Kennedy assassination in 1963. In 1988, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the assassination, A&E ran a program they called "As It Happened". It was a brilliant program. It was nothing more and nothing less than the coverage, as it aired on NBC, of the assassination.

NBC News broke into their regular network programming about half an hour(!) after the shots rang out in Dealy Plaza to report that they were hearing that Governor Connally of Texas and the President were fired at, and there were conflicting reports, but it sounded like Governor Connally received the worst of it. The fog of war...

What made coverage of this story so peculiar, so compelling and so revolutionary was the immediacy of it. For the first time, television news was trying to cover a massive story as it was happening and not relying on passing on wire reports as their sole source of information. Frank McGee (the guy at far left in the picture above) was on the phone with their man in the hospital where Kennedy (who they later figured out had been grieveously wounded) was. He would listen to their reporter, who was on one of the hospital pay phones, and then recite, word-for-word, the "copy" the hospital reporter was dictating. Later, as the revolution in Breaking News coverage continued as people watched, Frank McGee was handed some kind of device that he attached to the earpiece of the handset, which he attached, then held the phone up to the mic and let the hospital reporter deliver his material directly.

The reason why I offer this history lesson, and why I'm geeking out about this tonight, is that the strategy KPLC appears to be using (or, at least, had been before their feed was interrupted) is similar. Stripped of the trappings of their studio, they had to rely on their journalistic talents alone. And the singular talent of a journalist, a good journalist, is the ability to tell the story. The way the KPLC anchors were telling the story was to contact their sources (NOAA folks, emergency folks, correspondent folks) by telephone, hold up the phone to the microphone, turn on the speakerphone feature, and let them deliver their reports. It was the struggle and the simplicity that makes for riveting television, and the best reporting on Rita I've seen tonight.

So, even though your transmitter has been knocked over, or your web server has lost power, or whatever has happened that I can no longer watch you this morning, folks at KPLC, bravo on everything you could do.

* At 3:49 am edt, the KPLC net feed just stopped. Switch to KHOU.