A Splitting Headache Over TV Coverage

Lights, cameras, goose bumps.

“It’s going to be very busy,” anchor Mike Schneider said on the Fox News Channel. “It is going to be an interesting juggling call,” said Ann Martin on KCBS-TV Channel 2, where reporter Harvey Levin called the evening “a great, interesting, societal, journalistic issue.” Then Martin joked about splitting the screen.

No joke.

Television’s worst nightmare: President Clinton’s State of the Union address and the O.J. Simpson civil verdict colliding head-on.

Well . . . it almost happened.

A bigger nightmare: The defense appeals the anti-Simpson verdict, the verdict is overturned, there is a retrial and this story--with the media attached to it like an umbilical cord--enters the 21st century.

Stay tuned.

But for now, Tuesday was tense enough, with newscasters facing a horrific choice that they hoped they wouldn’t have to make, one that would earn them criticism no matter which option they selected.

Some of the second-guessing is justified, as in KNBC-TV Channel 4 inexcusably clipping off the end of the president’s speech merely to hold viewers by alerting them that the reading of the verdict was imminent.

For the record, KCBS-TV Channel 2 (CBS), KNBC-TV Channel 4 (NBC), KABC-TV Channel 7 (ABC), CNN, the Fox News Channel and, of course, PBS and C-SPAN carried the president’s speech live. Meanwhile, cable’s MSNBC and broadcast stations KTLA-TV Channel 5, KCAL-TV Channel 9, KTTV-TV Channel 11 and KCOP-TV Channel 13 instead aired live chopper coverage of Simpson’s Suburban heading toward the Santa Monica Courthouse, then shots of milling schmoozers outside the courthouse.

As evidence of TV’s two minds, though, Channels 2 and 7 briefly split the screen for a shot of Simpson arriving at the courthouse as the president addressed the nation on the other half of the screen.

When it came to popularity with much of TV, Clinton, for all his telegenic charisma, was going to find Simpson a more formidable foe than Bob Dole. So when the president began his speech by saying, “Thank you, thank you,” he might have been addressing the Brown family, then plodding through freeway traffic en route to the courthouse from Orange County--and taking enough time to ensure that the reading of the verdict would not directly conflict with the president’s address. In TV terms, Clinton became a lead-in for the verdict.

If not for that fissure of separation, O.J. vs. the Prez might have been a landslide for Simpson. And the Republican TV response from Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts? Blotto!

Earlier in the evening, when it looked like the speech and reading of the verdict would arrive simultaneously, Channel 2 announced that anchorwoman Linda Alvarez would monitor Clinton “and bring you coverage of what the president has to say after the speech.” In any case, anchor Michael Tuck added later, Channel 2 would telecast as much of the speech “as we can” before switching to the verdict.

Channel 7 anchor Harold Greene announced, “I can assure you, with no disrespect to the president of the United States, we will bring you the verdict as it is read.”

And NBC anchor Tom Brokaw declared that NBC would go with the president, and that MSNBC, the cable news channel that NBC operates with Microsoft, would go with Simpson. Then, as if he were some kind of news impresario, he added this remarkable inducement: “We invite you to switch back and forth . . . depending on what your interests are.”

Whether America’s interests coincided with TV’s Tuesday night remained to be seen. On the one hand, Clinton’s policies are destined to have a more lasting resonance than this verdict. Yet it was the verdict reading, an event swollen by the media into an obese, thundering behemoth, that surely resonated loudest with a large chunk of the United States.

This divide was symbolized by some of the split-screen oddities leading to the speech. On Channel 7: On the right, Vice President Al Gore and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in front of an American flag; on the left, footage of the gate at Simpson’s Brentwood estate. On Channel 2: On the left, the House greeting First Lady Hilary Clinton; on the right, a chopper shot of the Times Square-sized throng gathered outside the courthouse.

There was also split focus at times, with Channel 4 anchor Colleen Williams working in this bulletin: “Kato Kaelin’s people have issued a statement tonight saying he will not be watching the verdict, that he has basketball practice.” And do great minds dwell on similar topics or not? As Clinton was mentioning a balanced budget during his speech, Channel 9 was discussing Simpson’s financial assets.

When it came to lawyerly pundits and other wagging tongues, it almost seemed that there had been no passage of time between the Simpson criminal and civil trial verdicts. Out they came like chalky apparitions of the night, as if bagged in plastic and hung on hooks in a storage closet all this time, waiting to be unzipped and brought out for this extravaganza, mouths still working, completing sentences that had been interrupted months ago.

And they were needed, given the more than two hours that stations had to fill, with virtually nothing to report, while going live after 4 p.m. when tipped off that the verdict announcement was coming. “There are more pundits now than cars in Southern California,” cracked Channel 4 anchor Paul Moyer. As Alan Dershowitz, a member of Simpson’s criminal defense team, noted on the Fox News Channel: “There’s so much to speculate about.”

As in attorney Luke McKissack wrongly theorizing on Channel 11 prior to the verdict announcement that Simpson “may have fallen into a mud pile and come up with a gold watch.”

Or ice cream. Here was Channel 11 anchor John Beard narrating a live shot from a chopper hovering over a food establishment while trailing Simpson’s Suburban following the verdict: “Apparently, O.J. Simpson has stopped at a deli on his way home, either to have something on the way or when he gets back to the house.” The big question: Chocolate or pistachio?

A bigger one: Was this at last the finale? “The end of this case is not going to be the end of this story,” writer and lifetime Simpson commentator Dominick Dunne told a TV interviewer Tuesday. A chilling thought for bedtime.