TELEVISION’S MARCH THROUGH ATLANTAGATE

WARNING: The following is a docu-column based on certain facts surrounding the murder and disappearance of reality on CBS between 8 p.m. Sunday and 11 p.m. Tuesday.

Some of the events and characters are fictionalized for dramatic sales purposes. However, some of the events and characters have not been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Some of the fiction has been dramatized, and some of the drama has been fictionalized. Every event and character not fictionalized is true. In other words, this docu-column is absolutely factual.

Possibly.

Certain paragraphs may be disturbing to readers who get disturbed by paragraphs that disturb them. Discretion is advised.

The preceding paragraph is false unless it is true.

This docu-column relates to the furor over truth-tampering and unidentified composite characters and pseudonyms in docudrama, a furor that has startled a nation’s TV viewers. And now . . .

“The Atlanta Fact Murders.”

It was Friday night on ABC’s “Nightline” with substitute anchor Charles Gibson. The guests--Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young; Abby Mann, writer and co-executive producer of “The Atlanta Child Murders” on CBS, and Time magazine Associate Editor William Henry III--sought to reach a level of intelligence in discussing the pros and cons of television docudrama.

They never got there.

Mann defended “The Atlanta Child Murders” against mounting charges that he bent facts in his zeal to depict Wayne Williams as being falsely convicted of the deaths of two adults and blamed for the mass child slayings that terrorized Atlanta’s black community from 1979 to 1981.

“There’s not a comma in the (Williams trial) transcript that’s been changed,” Mann assured Gibson. “I put on the screen the trial.”

It appeared that Mann, in speaking to Gibson, was fictionalizing for dramatic purposes. If he had depicted the entire trial, “The Atlanta Child Murders” would have run throughout 1985.

Out of necessity, he portrayed only a tiny portion of the trial. The question is whether his mass omissions distorted the actual trial and whether actors playing witnesses compounded that distortion by placing their own interpretations on their characters in the drama.

Mann said he “talked to hundreds of people” before writing his script. Reader discretion is advised here because Mann, in challenging the result of an important trial, did not list or reveal his sources on the screen.

Mann asked Young on “Night-line” if it were true that Atlanta authorities had denied Williams’ attorneys the opportunity to determine if the murders had stopped after their client was arrested. Young said he didn’t know. If Mann had contrary evidence, he should have cited it in his drama instead of implying so in a “Night-line” segment seen by only a fraction of the audience that watched “The Atlanta Child Murders.”

CBS has taken great pains to note that “The Atlanta Child Murders” was a docudrama, not a documentary. Unfortunately, though, viewers sometimes blur the distinction.

“The problem is that people look to television for news and they look to television for entertainment,” Time’s Henry said. “They get journalism in print. They get fiction in print. But they don’t get it from the same institution.”

Henry was right about that. But what he added was so uncharacteristically flip that I’m convinced he was not the real William Henry III, but instead a composite “Nightline” guest who was fictionalized for dramatic purposes.

“I don’t think. . . , “ Henry said, “that you can exclude art . . . from dealing with historical material just because some people who are too lazy to find out more about the subject are gonna be misled by it.”

Henry, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a TV critic for the Boston Globe, seemed to be saying that if viewers were misled by “The Atlanta Child Murders,” it was their own fault for being too apathetic to investigate the crimes themselves.

Maybe he had a point. Viewers should have flown to Atlanta to check out the facts.

Now flash forward to Monday morning when “The CBS Morning News” designated the docudrama controversy its “cover story.”

Anchor Bill Kurtis and new CBS media critic Peter Boyer welcomed guests Linda Yellin, producer of TV movies about the Nazi Holocaust and the courtship of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and Stan Margulies, producer of the “Roots” mini-sagas and an upcoming docudrama about Gloria Steinem’s days as a Playboy bunny.

Yellin said she thought audiences were bright enough to distinguish truth from fiction. She was saying, apparently, that viewers would know which scenes and characters in “The Atlanta Child Murders” were fiction. Displaying her sense of humor, moreover, Yellin asserted that CBS has a “very stringent standards and practices department” to ensure truth.

Margulies said that “most viewers are going to regard what’s on television as history.”

Everyone tiptoed around the issue, rarely even mentioning that they would not be discussing docudrama if not for “The Atlanta Child Murders.” The “cover story” was so soft and bland that I wish that “The CBS Morning News” had fictionalized it for dramatic purposes.

The End.

Postscript: Abby Mann is a composite character whose real name is Abby Mann/Spelling/Wolper. And the name above this docu-column--Howard Rosenberg--is not my real name either. It’s my pseudonym. I’d elaborate, but this material is so sensitive that, for my own protection, even I haven’t been told who I am.