I worry that our measuring stick is warped, if not broken, in determining how we cover stories of this nature. Yes, this is a news story that deserves coverage. However, it's very questionable that this story deserved the intense, continuous live coverage that MSNBC and CNN devoted for hours throughout Tuesday afternoon and into the evening. It is a story of local significance in the Los Angeles area, and it is a story that has national implications given the continuing series of school and workplace shootings around the country. However, news organizations must apply appropriate measures of degree and tone to coverage. I worry that technological capacity is driving editorial decision-making. This shooting story, because it happened in the big-media city of L.A. where the stations have very sophisticated reporting tools, immediately became a national story as the local stations there covered it in continuous, breaking news style. If this same story occurred in small-town South Dakota or rural Vermont, it would have been treated with much less intensity by CNN and MSNBC. This is an example of how story importance is warped by the factors of technology and geography.

I also worry about how coverage of these shootings impacts coverage of other local stories. It's a matter of opportunity costs. If local stations drop reporting on virtually everything else to cover a story of this nature, then many other important stories in a community about education, race relations, business, religion, government, and environment issues get pushed off the air, at least temporarily and sometimes forever. The propensity of local television stations to drop everything to cover "breaking news" does set an agenda. In the case of crime and violence coverage, that agenda can warp reality and disserve the public.

Lillian Dunlap
Visiting faculty from the University of Missouri

Going live puts tremendous pressure on the anchors and reporters who must get bits of information, make sense of them, and then relay them to viewers. They must rely on what they know and can sense, if they are on the scene, and then describe their perceptions in ways that people can understand. But the hard part about covering a live shooting or hostage situation is that anchors and reporters think they have to fill every second not taken up with soundbites from whomever they can find. They think they are in competition with other stations covering the situation wall-to-wall.

Journalists must know something to say or they will simply voice their unchecked biases and opinions, neither of which do the viewers much good.

The early description of the suspect was a male Hispanic, later a male white teenager in black and gray, and still later a balding white male in his 40's dressed in green. Considering the demographics of California, the first description pointed the finger at too many people. Sure they have to report what they know, but reporting requires more than passing on information of unknown or unchecked origin.

Television carries drama better than any other news medium we have and this will not change. But anchors and reporters can become better at presenting information. Managers can become better at deciding when wall-to-wall coverage is needed and more conscientious about training people to do it well.

Jill Geisler
Leadership & Management Group Leader

Let me be clear. I love TV news: love it enough to have made it my life's work. Heck, I'd even choose a lousy TV newscast over most TV entertainment. But lately, even this news junkie feels she has overdosed. While I can't help but watch when "breaking news" is seducing me, I can't help but wish the coverage were better. Can't help but worry that breaking news is becoming infotainment.

The L.A. Community Center shooting was an important local story with national implications. It was not necessarily a national story. But because Los Angeles is the helicopter/live technology /if-it-moves -it's-news capital of the world, the live local coverage was there for the cable news outlets to distribute worldwide. All of it. As it happened. Including inaccurate information that was reported, then revised. Including every single question: smart, dumb, insenstive, or duplicative in a news briefing. Including speculation from on-air talent who had to talk to fill the time. We're not talking about an editorial judgment process or the important gatekeeping function of the journalist. The gate is up. We're doing news play-by-play.

Accuracy, sensitivity, and context are often the first victims of wall-to-wall live coverage.

We can get it to you immediately--just don't expect it to be live and accurate at the same time. But it will be on as long as it is dramatic. You can join us as though it is a parlor game. Why is that lady running down the street? Where are the police cars headed?

Look at the weapons on that SWAT team guy. We're showing their positions as they approach the building. Hope the suspect isn't inside watching TV. That could get someone killed, couldn't it?

While we're wall-to-wall we'll drop our commercials, out of respect to the seriousness of the story (and to keep you from channel changing.) But we'll make up the revenue in another way. When this exciting story is history, we'll go back to our usual modus operandi. We'll spend a lot of time on our cable news networks recycling old news product, and we'll get lots of people to talk about the news, but we'll skimp on original news coverage of important issues.

After all, issues aren't exciting. And they're so hard to see from a helicopter.

Al Tompkins
Producing for Broadcast
and Online Group Leader

I am not as ready as my colleagues are to shoot the messenger this time. This was big news of national proportions. I will explain why I am glad it is big news.

Thursday morning, the day after the shooting, my 6-year-old daughter asked me to explain the picture on the front of the St. Petersburg Times, the picture of the police officers holding hands with small children, leading them to safety. I tried to tell her that police were saving the children from a mean person who was trying to hurt the children. She wanted to know if the mean man was dead. She wanted to know if she should be worried about her own safety. A part of me wanted to be honest and admit I was more worried about her safety than I have ever been, even though the entire continent separates us from the shooting. The TV coverage places the fear right there at my kitchen table next to my daughter’s bowl of Cheerios.

If I had been calling the shots at a local TV station in Los Angeles. I would have gone after it live. A man with a bunch of guns and a track record of shooting kids was running for his life through L.A. Cops were everywhere and had called a SWAT emergency. That is news. Big news. It was news on its face, but it is news of a national interest because it comes so closely with mass shootings in Atlanta and Littleton. The story at the core of these tragedies is not about a shooting, it is about the people caught in the vortex of violence. This cumulative outrage that I believe is building over crime and violence will have political, judicial and legislative ramifications. The next President will have to speak to how he/she will do something about violence and guns. Some cities have begun prosecuting crime involving guns with federal crime laws that demand mandatory prison time. People are fed up. These shootings are sending us over the edge.

The biggest fear I have is that we skew the public’s sense of safety through non-stop coverage. In fact at least one network (NBC) followed its nightly news report with a nice perspective piece showing how violent school crime is declining. I was glad to know that information. I cited it to my young daughter, but I could see it didn’t reduce her fears. She kept staring at the photo of the children and the police, hand in hand, moving toward an uneasy safety. My wife and I had a conversation later that morning wondering how safe her school will be when it opens in a couple of weeks. It was hard to remember that the chances of a child being hurt at school are less than their being hurt at home or being hurt in a traffic accident on the way to school. Non-stop crime coverage erases rational thinking. It can scare people into inaction or prompt them into over-reaction.

Still, I worry about the day when a daycare shooting is NOT national news. It will signal to me that it has become too common to capture the national concern.

How would news networks explain that when a Jewish daycare is shot up it is not national news, but when other mass shooting occurs it IS news?

One definition of news is that it is about something that is interesting. This was interesting, in the worst, most horrific way. It was interesting inasmuch as I wanted to know everything I could know, and I wanted to know it now. I didn’t want to wait until the 6 o’clock news when the scene was cleared and all of the details were tidied up and nailed down. Give it to me dirty and live, but give it to me. I watched. I watched coverage for hours and wished I could watch more. The first question I wanted answered when I awoke the next morning was "did they find the guy." The first answer I wanted when I got out of a Wednesday afternoon meeting was "did they find the guy yet?" Isn’t this what we want TV to be, more than 90 second snippets of soundbites? Isn’t this the benefit of technology, that we can, if we choose, experience the story as it unfolds?

Reporters covering these kinds of stories should tell us what they know, how they know it, what they don’t know and let viewers filter and sort information as the story unfolds. TV that does not cover a story like this wall to wall will open the doors to other mediums who will give the information. We are in an age of instant information. We need to get better at making our instant information accurate and responsible, but the day is over when we can ask the viewer to wait for a few hours while we figure this messy story out.

Let’s don’t stop covering the hard part of this story now that the shooting is over and a suspect has surrendered. Let’s do some real reporting about how our justice system works, or doesn’t. Let’s look at our prison system, school system, at parenting and child rearing. Let’s ditch the quick fix ideas that politicians suggest the day after one of these shootings and get to the hard stuff that requires some reporting. Let’s look at why people hate and how they learn not to hate. Let’s not get frozen by fear. Let’s not fear to know what is going on.