[Mb-civic] The Heroes Behind the Cameras - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Heroes Behind the Cameras

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, September 20, 2005; Page A23

You wouldn't think that the longest ovation at the Emmy Awards, an 
annual celebration of trendiness, would go to three such trend-averse 
men -- Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, who stood awkwardly on stage, and the 
late Peter Jennings, whose image appeared behind them on a giant 
monitor. But the audience rose and clapped in one of the dreary 
telecast's few moments of genuine electricity, and the tribute made 
sense coming so soon after the latest reminder of television's power not 
only to describe the world but to shape it as well.

I'm a print-media guy to the bone, but I have to give props to the way 
my colleagues in television have covered Hurricane Katrina and the 
devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. (Note to Tom and Dan: 
"Props" is a good thing.) Television rose to become a force for good 
instead of a force for the evil of happy-faced oversimplification, to 
which the medium so frequently succumbs.

The gold-star heroes were the men and women who operate the cameras, 
because they vaulted logistical hurdles that stymied hapless federal, 
state and local officials and found a way to do what only television 
can: Show us what's happening as it happens. Anchors and correspondents 
reported with urgency and emotion, abandoning the safe convention of an 
"on the other hand" qualifier for every declarative statement. They saw 
that there was no other hand in this story.

While officials were still issuing reports of minor flooding in New 
Orleans and patting themselves on the back for dodging a bullet, CNN's 
Jeanne Meserve made her way to a neighborhood near one of the breached 
floodwalls and told a completely different story. "This is Armageddon," 
she reported, struggling to find words for what she was seeing. That was 
the moment when I realized that this was a major disaster. It wasn't 
what she said, it was the quaver in her voice as she said it.

There are countless other examples of how television brought home the 
awful reality of what happened on the Gulf Coast. Even Fox, usually more 
interested in masticating and spinning the news, went out and did good, 
original reporting -- and showed passion in recounting how the people of 
New Orleans and the Gulf were so poorly served by officials at every level.

We tend to look to the past for the golden age of television news -- the 
reign of Huntley and Brinkley, the heyday of "60 Minutes," the critical 
coverage of Vietnam, even all the way back to Edward R. Murrow. We 
rightfully bemoan the fact that the network news divisions are shadows 
of their former selves, and we note that the audience for the evening 
news has been withering away.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901297.html?nav=hcmodule
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