Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict

Chapter Fifteen: Only Time Will Tell

166 Chapter Fifteen Only Time Will Tell Almost every summer ominous reports emerge from Texas telling of a swarm of deadly insects heading north. These creatures are portrayed as marauders who invade peaceful towns in the Lone Star State looking for helpless women, children, and old people to slaughter before moving on to other conquests farther north, the murderous insects spreading an ever-expanding swath of death that threatens the American population. These are the dreaded “killer bees,” like monsters from a horror movie. They help sell newspapers and lift ratings during the slow news period of late summer. They may be known as killer bees to journalists, but to scientists they are simply Africanized honey bees, and, while they will react aggressively if threatened, they don’t really look for victims to attack. In any given year, very few if any people die of their stings. The killer bees story is an example of a cliché, a news report that is done over and over again, assumed to be true without scrutiny, and based on a simplistic generalization and stereotype that ignores reality. (The words “cliché” and “stereotype”derive from French words having to do with printing,“stereotype” being a metal printing plate and “cliché” being the sound made when the plate is created. Both words refer to a device for repeating a preconceived concept.) Often these stories exploit assumptions, fears, archetypes, perhaps even the collective unconscious. They are similar to urban myths, and, like them, their claim to truth is no less powerful for being unproven and possibly spurious. One scorching August day in the 1990s during a nationwide heat wave my assignment in the CNN Washington bureau was to do a weather story. I knew that the standard opening scene for a TV news story about a heat wave was the sight and sound of little boys splashing in water, usually in a big-city fountain or fire hydrant. I resolved to come up with something different, something more original, to beat the cliché. A producer sent a memo to all CNN domestic bureaus to gather interesting, compelling shots of people coping with the hot weather. Meanwhile, one of the DC crews drove around in a van, looking for Only Time Will Tell 167 heat-wave shots. When the DC crew returned, and when the other CNN bureaus fed their video shots by satellite, I went through all the tapes, hoping to find something fresh. But there was only one shot that worked really well for telling this story.When my CNN report appeared on air, it began with a shot of boys splashing in the fountain on the west lawn of Capitol Hill. The cliché had won again. On a bitter cold Thanksgiving in Washington in 1995 I went with a camera crew to a homeless shelter. My assignment was to do a story about the feeding of turkey dinners to the homeless on Thanksgiving Day. None of us in the CNN Washington bureau stopped to question the premise of the story or to ask why we did it every year. It was a journalistic tradition to focus on the homeless at Thanksgiving. I suppose if anyone had asked us why we always did the same story we would have said it was so that viewers would feel kindness and compassion toward those “less fortunate,” or so that viewers would feel that they were not the only ones gorging themselves that day, or so that viewers would have a warm, patriotic feeling that on this very American holiday all of us were united in our eating of turkey, or perhaps so that viewers would be reminded that not everyone had something to be thankful for and so the viewers should realize how lucky they were. Whatever the reason, I was there in the dining room of the shelter, wearing my blue blazer and blue shirt and red tie and gray slacks, observing sullen souls as they chewed on food dished out by volunteers from among the ranks of Washington’s cheerfully altruistic middle-class women. Needing the inevitable sound bite, I asked one stubble-chinned old man in soiled shirt and jeans how was the food. His reply: “You’re CIA.” His comment created a dilemma. On the one hand, I was there to report the truth, and the truth is that he had really said that. On the other hand, I couldn’t use what he had said. He was clearly disoriented and possibly mentally...