Mastering the Art

In moments of national drama Americans stop their lives and turn on their televison sets. Last week, when President Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection, the network political experts were as flummoxed as the viewers. But four nights later, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated television was in total command. Clearly, TV newscasters are not yet up to snap punditry; but they have mastered the art of reflecting events when dramatic action breaks.

Even before King was pronounced dead, NBC and CBS deployed film crews to Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, where Duke Ellington was playing a benefit for a Mississippi Negro college. As it began, the producer announced the news and cameras caught the stunned and horror-stricken faces in the audience. From Cleveland, CBS carried a film of tear-streaked Mayor Carl Stokes Negro as his constituents sang America. No less eloquent was an interview with Ben Branch, a King aide who had been with him at the time of the assassination and who was still too be numbed to respond.

All the networks ran films showing the passionate rhetoric of King during the Washington march and at Mem his just a day before the killing. The most stirring commentary to follow those pictures ame from NBC's Chet Huntley, who tilted his head away from the camera, battled back tears and said: "Again we are made to look like a nation of killers. Restraint, gentleness and chanty, virtues we so desperately need, have had a dark day."

Balanced Footage. Back in Manhattan, secretaries and vice presidents and every newsman in town, including CBSs John Laurence, on home leave from Viet Nam, poured into the network headquarters. As ABC-TV News Veep Bill Sheehan put it,"a lot of union rules went out the window" as staffers fell to without regard for jurisdistional niceties. ABC's three-man orbituary unit hastily updated its canned footage on King, and CBS's Charles Kuralt narrated a 20-minute pretaped orbituary covering King from childhood on.

Within hours after the assassination, all the networks had put togather well-balanced footage of the event, most notably film showing fires and looting in Washington and New York City. It was much like the 1967 summer :Negroes shouldering into shops, helping themselves as if it were a free day at Macy's. Mindless, smiling, they carried their booty through the streets-- here a woman struggling with a huge arm chair, there a man with several suits over his arm, there another man lugging not one but two television sets the better, no doubt, to watch the later looting in the comfort of his own living room.

All told, the TV coverage, thanks to past experience, was better organized than in previous times. Having learned to gauge the impact of TV's immediacy, NBC reporters on the streets avoided using the provocative word riot, and in at least two instances were told by their headquarters to breathe deeply and compose themselves before going on the air with their stories

Still commercial television being what it is, viewers had to sit through the ludicrous incongruity of chirpy commercials that the stations had spliced between footage of pillage and tragedy. Meanwhile, the networks reported that several hundred people telephoned the stations to protest the pre-empting of Bewitched and Dragnet.

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