Posted by Devin Parker

I've learned two lessons over the past 72 hours.

First, I've never seen such cavalier jaywalkers as those I've seen in Minneapolis. These people will wait until the light has changed against them and then cross the road. I kid you not.

Second, television news is the absolute last place you ever want to go to get news from. If you're lucky, the coverage will only scratch the surface, giving you only the vaguest idea that something, somewhere is happening. If it's anything like the television coverage which has blundered around the San Bernardino Mountains, you'll be presented with rumors, unverified half-truths, and outright falsehoods; any actual content you happen across will only be there by accident. I know now that there's very, very little I can trust when it comes from television news networks. Perhaps if they spent more time researching their subject and less time applying makeup and adjusting their coiffures?

I was so angry about it, in fact, that I finally took my own advice, sat down, and wrote a stern letter! Yeah, that'll show 'em!

No, seriously, I really did. I watched reports on CNN yesterday (as they're the only people actually devoting any time to the California Fires out here), and was absolutely disgusted. If you want to know in what ways I was disgusted, read on: I decided to post my letter here. I originally hand-wrote it and planned to snail mail it to CNN, but I was unable to find a mailing address; thus, I had to send it via their Comments boxes on the California Fires topic and the Live From show segment. Here's hoping it actually reaches someone who may read it...

Here's my letter of pig-biting outrage:

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I want you to know how angered and frustrated I have become with the irresponsible reporting displayed by your reporters and cameramen in their coverage of the wildfires in the San Bernardino Mountains (the "Old Fire".

As a longtime resident of the San Bernardino Mountains currently living in Minnesota to attend school, I find that CNN is the only television news network with any amount of time and coverage devoted to the Southern California fires available to me. I understand that, in an attempt to cover news occuring all over the world, your network hasn't the time to delve too deeply into the details of any given event. However, I do feel justified in expecting your reports to be accurate and informative in what they do cover.

For example, the Live From report I watched yesterday afternoon (airing somewhere around 2:30 PM Central Time, I believe) featured a young male reporter who was narrating events from a helipad where firemen watched helicopters dropping fire retardant. When this reporter originally appeared here (in earlier reports, before your "Live From" segment), his location was given as "Big Bear." When he was shown on "Live From," his location was listed as "Lake Arrowhead." These are two seperate towns with a 40-minute drive between them! It was only through deduction that I decided he must be reporting from Mountains Community Hospital in Lake Arrowhead, because he never gave his precise location.

This leads me to another, connected, problem. The cameraman focused exclusively on the reporter from the chest up except for a brief few moments when he focused on a helicopter flying over treetops against an ashen grey sky, pausing to drop retardant on something offscreen. Throughout the report, nearly every camera shot was a close-up of a person with little or nothing behind them by which their location could be identified (in specific, a fireman was briefly interviewed who said that his own house was not far from where they stood; again, the only way I was able to determine his location was by catching the briefest glimpse of the Rim of the World High School behind them as the camera swung to focus on the fireman - even then, I wasn't entirely sure), or a tight, focused shot of a cluster of bushes on fire. There were no wide shots of local landmarks, buildings, or even of Highway 18 itself (long the "frontline" against the fires) in relation to the position of the fires - no way for anyone with any familiarity with the area to know where the fire was. People who are afraid of losing their homes or businesses watch your reports so that they can know where the fires are and what communities are in danger. No maps of the region were ever shown (aside from the largest map of Southern California, which is unhelpful in this case), and no information, such as website addresses or telephone numbers, were given for people who wished to know more.

This problem is compounded when your news anchors and reporters give the wrong town names - Big Bear instead of Running Springs, Lake Arrowhead, or even Crestline, for example - while showing this kind of vague scenery. At the time of this report, fire was menacing the edges of Lake Arrowhead and Running Springs, but it was yet 15+ miles away from Big Bear. Again, to a person worried that they might lose their home and possessions, these are not trifling errors!

I assume that helicopter pilots and newsvan drivers have an idea of where they are; why don't your reporters, who are giving us information, have maps of the area that they're in? It seems to me that someone giving a news report about a fire - a situation in which the "where" part of the "who-what-when-where-why" pentad is of paramount importance - should have concerned himself more with researching the area than interviewing firemen about where they live or watching helicopters.

This brings me to the next issue in my complaint. The reports opened with a florid voice-over describing the sounds of the fire. The reporter himself repeatedly described the explosions he heard and the appearance of the area. Why was this necessary, when your cameramen have cameras with which to *show* us what things look like? If these reports were being made over the radio, I could accept this, but on television it seems redundant, like filler meant to kill time in the absence of having any solid facts - any *news* - to report. Is there a reason why we must watch the reporter's face throughout the report instead of seeing what's happening?

I don't believe that it's necessary or even beneficial to present some sort of "you are there" experience in lieu of giving facts regarding the fire's exact location, where firefighters believe it may be headed, what communities (or, more specifically, what buildings) are currently being threatened, what percentage of the fires are contained and how long do the firefighters think it will take before achieving 100% containment, etc. The effects of this kind of reporting are only heightened tensions, anxiety, and hysteria, not education. If the news is not meant to educate, then what is its purpose?

Finally, I must take issue with the questions being asked of interview subjects by your reporters. I think it logically follows that a firefighter will most often be drawn from the community in which he or she will fight fires, yet I don't assume for a minute that a man or woman who shows themselves willing to lay down their lives for the sake of strangers by becoming a firefighter is going to give less effort to extinguishing a fire that doesn't threaten their own home. Non-questions like, "do you live in this community," achieve nothing, but do waste valuable air time. Does the reporter expect that the firefighter may answer, "No, I don't live around here, so it doesn't really matter to me one way or another"? Then why ask the question at all? I'm simply requesting that your reporters ask *relevant* questions, and questions we don't already know the answers to ("What are you feeling right now? What's going through your mind as you fight these fires?" and questions along these lines help no one at times like this, and are best saved for in-depth reports on firefighters themselves, not natural disasters).

I don't mean to be insulting, and I apologize if any of this message has come across as such. However, I do want your network who appreciate how frustrated I am by your coverage of an event still in progress that deeply impacts my family, friends, and community. Please understand that these concerns are shared by many people in the communities of the San Bernardino Mountains - you have only to read the Bulletin Boards of rimoftheworld.net or the SBMountains Yahoo Group to see them listed.

Out-of-state residents and evacuated families alike are desperate for accurate and relevant reports regarding the status of our communities and the fate of our homes. I hope that your news teams - specifically, your anchors, reporters, and cameramen - will take these criticisms to heart and take steps to prevent such failures in the future.

Many thanks to your crews who have been willing to go to the frontlines to obtain what information they can on our behalf. Regardless of my complaints, I do appreciate the effort.

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There. Now, the cynical side of me tells me that, of course, no one but the bottom-floor temp lackeys manning the e-mail shuffling boards will ever read this and promptly delete it, marking a tally on the "Negative Response" board. However, I think it's only fair that I give them a chance. Who knows, maybe someone who has something to do with the running of things may read it? I have little fantasies swimming around in my brain of some manager-type getting this and printing it out, and then the higher-up-manager guy posts it on the wall, the anchors and reporters read it and say to themselves, "You know, this small-town guy is right; maybe we have been focusing those cameras on our own bloated heads far more than on the subject we're supposed to be reporting on...maybe it's time for a positive change. Why am I in this business, anyway, to glorify myself? No, I had ideals once! Nossir, this letter's right - I'm gonna turn this show around and be a force for good!" Then everyone posts a copy of it inside their cubicle and looks to it every time they're tempted to sail through an assignment...

Well, I did say it was a fantasy. Perhaps "delusion" would be more accurate.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30, 2003 at Thursday, October 30, 2003 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed .

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