On September 21, 1970 ABC changed the way football was broadcast. Broadcasters became as important as the game. It worked great for televising football, but it may not be such a good idea for reporting on police investigations.
ABC was in bad shape in 1970. Chairman Leonard Goldenson knew he had to come up with something to make the network profitable. He and Roone Arledge, one of his executives, put together the formula for Monday Night Football and bet the network's future on it.
They wanted a Monday night game and they wanted it right in the middle of prime time. This was different than the standard Sunday game, but it really wasn't all that radical. What was radical was how the game would be presented.
Up until Monday Night Football the game was considered the show. This was sports, after all. But Arledge changed two things.
First, he viewed the game through an entertainment lens. He saw the game as part of a show. He also saw the announcers as part of THE show.
The usual announcing team consisted of two people—a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator who was usually a retired football player. Arledge increased that team by adding one other person. That person was Howard Cosell.
Cosell started out as an attorney, representing a few athletes. He had gotten into radio in 1956. He wasn't the greatest sports expert in the world and his raspy Brooklyn accent would never pass for the classic "announcer's voice." But none of that mattered.
What did matter was that he was glib, arrogant, opinionated and different from anything else in TV sports. Arledge paired Cosell's hard-edged New York style with the easy, folksy style of ex-Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith. And it worked.
Monday Night Football became the most successful prime time show of all time. Folks who didn't know who was playing that night would tune in just to see what Howard and Dandy Don had to say. Now the folks covering the game had become as important as what they were covering.
Up until last month the reporters covering police investigations had pretty much been like the announcers of pre-Monday Night Football. The investigation was the show while the reporters stayed in the background. That changed with the DC sniper story.
The cable news networks were already fiercely competitive, perhaps a result of too few viewers and advertising dollars to support them all. And they found out quickly that we wanted to see the sensational stuff. They also found out that whenever they switched from the sniper story to other news they lost viewers.
The first thing the networks did was relegate other news, like a potential war with Iraq and the US midterm elections, to the crawl along the bottom of the screen. In the meantime we got to watch reporters interview each other in front of a bank of microphones where, sometime soon we were promised, someone would make an official statement.
The problem is that most of the work of any investigation happens out of sight of the camera. Those banks of microphones with no one using them don't make compelling television. And reporters can only interview each other so many times before they start repeating themselves, each other and the story.
So, to make things more interesting the networks started bringing in battalions of experts. Most of them were either former FBI agents or former New York cops. They seemed to divide neatly into four groups.
Some of them were very good. One of them was Clint van Zant, who worked at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit before he retired. He's a seasoned profiler and investigator. His opinions were based on the facts at hand. He rarely speculated and when he did he gave you reasons for his view and some things that might prove him wrong.
That's good and it's responsible, but it's not very exciting. The networks wanted excitement. They needed it to keep viewers tuned to their channels. If there weren't enough facts and hard news, they could use speculation, teasers, and hearsay to fill air time and boost ratings.
A guy who understands how this works is Gerald Nachman. He's MSNBC's editor-in-chief. Nachman described the process this way, "You gotta shovel coal into this furnace. And sometimes you run out of coal and start breaking up the furniture."
That's why we had so many other experts besides the sober and competent ones like van Zant. There wasn't much happening out there in front of the cameras. It was like when Howard and Don got a dud of a game on Monday night. Instead of talking about what was actually happening on the field, they spent time talking about almost everything else.
One group brought in to fill air time was made up of experts with own pet theories. These were usually psychologists of one sort or another. They spent air time telling us why their particular theory was the right one to use. If you got two of them on the same show you often got dueling theories.
Many of these experts said they had books due out soon. Most of them turned out to be wrong about the sniper. They figured the sniper would be a white male, but instead the sniper turned out to be two black males.
As the investigation ground on with precious little hard news about results, the networks dipped further and further into the expert barrel. This gave us our third group of experts. "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz was touted as an expert in mass killings.
After a while it seemed like anyone who had ever been a New York City detective was going to show up on some show, some time. You just had to wait long enough.
The fourth group was made up of the experts who weren't even there, at least for most of the investigation. Not one network seemed to want to come up with real experts on how snipers work and train. I didn't see an expert like that until the story had already been underway for a couple of weeks. It wasn't clear if the networks thought they didn't need any experts on snipers, or that they just couldn't get one from the FBI or the New York Police Department.
It did seem like the reporters had all read the same briefing book about snipers, though. The book said that "snipers" (meaning trained military snipers) could hit targets from 700 yards away. Reporters seemed to have been required to memorize that statistic.
Never mind that you couldn't do that with the weapon the DC sniper was using. Never mind that his shots never came close to that range. A reporter would recite that 700 yard figure and tell us, soberly, that "it's more than a third of a mile."
In the end the cable news coverage generated far more than light. Even so we should be clear about some things.
Real, knowledgeable, articulate experts are a rare and precious commodity. They need to be used carefully, even if they aren't as interesting as some of their less expert and more speculative peers.
The work of a police investigation goes on out of sight most of the time. In television dramas the police use clever deduction to solve the crime of the hour and they do it with time left for commercials. Real life is different.
In real life crimes tend to get solved in three ways. Sometimes there are "the usual suspects." If a married person turns up dead, most investigators look first at the spouse.
Sometimes there's sheer grunt work. We sure had that in this case. Investigators listened to hours of Baltimore dispatch tapes to find the one call that gave them the license number of the blue Caprice.
Sometimes technology can help with the grunt work. The Automated Fingerprint Information System (AFIS) quickly matched the fingerprint from the Montgomery, Alabama murder with the print of John Malvo that was in Immigration and Naturalization Service files.
Investigators are human, too. That's why they get fixated on things, like the white van that never was. If technology can help sort mountains of data, it can help break preconceptions by offering alternatives.
In the end, though, this crime got solved in the third old-fashioned way. That's when the bad guy makes a mistake. In this case bragging to a hotline operator about a killing in Montgomery, Alabama was the mistake that lead to a chain of discoveries.
It's humans that drive all of this. Monday Night Football has thrived for years because it's possible to treat a telecast of a football game as an entertainment event. We've seen the cable news networks treat the DC sniper case like entertainment and it didn’t sit well.
None of this is much credit to the cable news folks, but it's not much credit to us either. The cable news folks have learned, again, that if they offer sensational, saturation coverage of a big news story, we'll plunk down in front of our TVs and watch it. And as long as we keep doing that, they'll keep shoving whatever stuff they have at us, because that's how they make money.
This feature appeared on 4 November 2002
