On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper: Fear and the Media

Chapter 2: Continuous Coverage

TWO Continuous Coverage At the height of the events related to the snipers, there seemingly were more journalists reporting on the events than there were police personnel investigating them. And the reporters, their editors, and their photographers turned out an inexhaustible supply of words, images, and sounds to explain what was occurring. In doing so, these media representatives constructed a contemporaneous narrative of the events. This narrative both contained and embellished a growing sense of mystery and wariness. In many regards, this was axiomatic, given that the identity or identities of the shooter or shooters were not known and what could be reported was limited to the additional deaths and woundings that occurred and what the police were discovering as events occurred. An important way to analyze this constructed narrative is through the continuous, or wall-to-wall, coverage that was at times available on television. By identifying broadcasts of two hours or more of breaking news, we gain the best vantage point from which to comprehend the narrative of the developing story. In most other sorts of coverage, minutes , hours, or even days elapse between events and publication, and this lends a degree of historical reflection to stories. Continuous coverage , on the other hand, creates a plotline that accompanies the viewer through some sort of chronological span of time. Literally, one feels time pass as reported events occur. In other media venues, however, time usually collapses into a series of complex stories, or something akin to a Bruegel painting. Chronology does not disappear, but its overall impact is reduced, since the reader is required to expend greater effort to link the episodes and create the narrative suggested by them. In addition to creating the sensation of time ticking away, continuous coverage, when repeated over several periods, as it was in October continuous coverage ∂∑ ≤≠≠≤, also made the sniper event more whole. In other words, presenting a plethora of information developing moment by moment presented the killings much more clearly as an unfolding narrative. It also increased the personal agony and involvement, and permitted a more profound—indeed a more stark—type of memory. Continuous television coverage in particular doubtless created much more of the metanarrative than did reporting by the other media. By studying these periods of continuous television coverage, we can see the story developing and deepening its themes. Furthermore, the intensity of this reporting allows us to understand better than any other way how this news appeared to and impacted upon its contemporary observers. This continuous coverage also demands attention because it is a significant factor in analyzing what makes the coverage of the sniper different from the reporting of other, equally serious, prior events. While television previously had turned its cameras on other stories for long periods of time, only in the preceding couple of decades had this kind of saturation been so compelling and so frequent, enabled in large part by the emergence of ≤∂-hour news channels. Further analysis probably could place coverage of this event among its peers, in terms of length of broadcasts and numbers of viewers, but at the very least, the coverage of the sniper events must be included in any consideration of a substantial vaulting up in this kind of media blitz. One more advantage of considering continuous, or wall-to-wall, coverage is the analytical novelty. While students of television have for some time been able to study the medium, only quite recently has technology made it possible to see television as it actually existed, commercials and all, at the time of broadcast. Earlier, much of the spontaneous coverage that had gone on was completely inaccessible to scholars. Although networks and even local stations have preserved increasing amounts of programming, accessing this material has been very difficult and/or prohibitively expensive. The emergence of Shadow TV, which at this moment records and then makes available to subscribers much of the programming over a significant period in major markets, including several cable channels as they existed in New York City, has changed this situation. To analyze coverage of the sniper events, I focused on the main sources of continuous coverage—Washington’s major broadcasting channels (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) and cable news channels (CNN, FOX National, and MSNBC). Unfortunately, Shadow TV was a less stable medium in October ≤≠≠≤, when it was in its infancy, than it ∂∏ on the trail of the d.c. sniper...