Last week marked the 60th anniversary of commercial television. Tuesday's massacre at Columbine ligh School in Littleton, Colo., shows how far we've come toward using that torch. Americans have come to expect TV to be there when Big News occurs. The bigger the news, the bigger and more immediate the presence.
People expect to see events unfold before their eyes.
Littleton and other stories like it show how television newsrooms are caught up in the technology of immediate coverage and in the profits that coverage can bring at the cost of good judgment. There is no question that a crisis can produce good ratings, at least temporarily. CNN averaged more than 2 million viewers for that Tuesday afternoon, nearly triple its viewership of the Tuesday before, according to preliminary statistics from Nielsen Media Research. One characteristic of coverage like this, whether network or local, is that all coverage comes from feeds provided by affiliates and it is put on the air live without benefit of fact-checking or editing. Even NBC and CBS network news carried live and unedited coverage of the event at different times during the day.