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Value of News:
It's a trademark of TV news, especially in Los Angeles: high-speed pursuits. It's almost guaranteed to boost ratings and it is not uncommon for TV stations to interrupt normal news coverage to make way for a live chase, but is it ethical to lure viewers with something that may have little or no actual news value?
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Zavala [host]: Jeff Wald of KTLA, I'm going to go to you on this because you have been --
Wald: -- I had a feeling. I'm the poster boy on police chases, so go right ahead.
Zavala: The famous case of KTLA and other stations broadcasting live a high-speed chase that ended in a very tragic and traumatic suicide, the person, the driver --
Wald: -- seen live.
Zavala: Seen live, catching on fire and then shooting himself, and yet we continue to do this. Why?
Wald: We don't continue to do this. Some stations have adopted policies. We're one of those stations that adopted a policy after that very event. We had not only a meeting in the newsroom, we had a meeting with the entire television station because we felt that this type of thing that happened we did not want to see repeated.
Zavala: So what is your policy now to prevent --
Wald: We've put in a number of safeguards. We literally have a breaking news policy that we put together. As a list of criteria, we first ask the question, are we in children's programming, who's the audience at that particular time, and that sort of thing, so it's that type of checklist that you go through. not that we needed to write it all down, but I think we all felt better after we put this together, that there were going to be some safeguards, that we weren't going to have an incident like this take place.
The bottom line is, each one of these incidents needs to be judged on an individual basis and how many people are being affected by the story? We also went through the soul-searching of could we have done a better job of cutting away quicker and not allow that to appear on our air? I mean, there were so many questions that we had after that happened. As a result of that, I can tell you that we've pretty much gotten away from breaking into programming unless the chase is something that is affecting a lot of people at a particular time. Again, I think that's really the case.
Zavala: But then there's the larger question outside of something terrible like a suicide happening. Are high-speed chases news?
Boyarsky: Well, I think it depends on the chase. I mean, the day that this terrible chase happened, as I was watching it on television, I mean, it started out as no news and then it started to be a "B3" traffic story and then it edged its way up to "B1" in my mind. Pretty soon we were sending people out right away and lining up everything because it was clearly a page one story. I mean, myself, we didn't have the problem that television has. We had all night to decide what to do. But I didn't think of the ethics of it. All you think about at a moment like that is getting a lot of people out, the best people at the right place.
Muller: And the great pantheon of ethical questions, this one doesn't disturb me deeply and I have to confess that I'm part of the problem here. I watch them. I mean, I can hardly tear myself away.
Sauter: A lot of people watch them.
Muller: On something like the one you're talking about, let's keep that out of the question for a minute because that's a whole different kind of question. But it depends also on what it interrupts. If you're interrupting Sally jesse Raphael, I don't see that it's a terrible loss to the country or any of the other afternoon shows.
Marlow [host]: But you're in the middle of the newscast and, once you start covering that story, the audience will not let you break away from it. If you do, they leave you.
Muller: I don't think interrupting the middle of a newscast is a good idea.
Marlow: And that's generally what we're seeing.
Muller: But there was a great story about a guy who was watching intent one afternoon. He had to go to work and it was just killing him not to see the end of it. So he slipped in a videotape and he got in his car and was driving to work and got caught up in the middle of the thing by accident. The guy mugged him, took him out of his car and threw him on the freeway and took off in the man's car and he had it on his home videotape. The whole thing. I thought that was sort of a wonderful L.A. story, you know. There you go.
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