TV stations should rethink coverage of crime scenes
In the days since a shooting spree in Pine Hills left three people dead, including a 29-year-old woman, a 9-year-old girl and a local television news reporter, and two others injured, I’ve paused to reflect on the event and the aftereffects of the gunman’s actions. In fact, all of the Orlando news community has in one way or another.
Having covered Central Florida news as a videographer at Orlando television stations for more than 30 years, I felt a genuine sense of loss at news of the death of Dylan Lyons and concern for his photographer Jesse Walden. Both were reporting on what had become an all-too-common story in Pine Hills over the years: the fatal shooting of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Reporting a story like this has become routine. Talking to neighbors has become routine. Interviews with cop has become routine. Requesting body cam, dashboard cam, 911 tapes and surveillance video has become routine. Maybe a suspect was arrested. Maybe not. The news cycle always took us to another and then another until they all blurred together.
But this one was different. We — the people who bring you the news — became the story. That isn’t supposed to happen, but the line nearly gets crossed countless times. I doubt there’s a news veteran in Orlando who hasn’t had to de-escalate tension before the violence spilled over to them. I myself have been threatened numerous times. In 2014, an angry parent punched me repeatedly outside Lake Mary High School, the same year a Brevard County resident tried to assault me with my own tripod.
But this really isn’t about me and, to an extent, it isn’t about Lyons and Walden either. They were simply doing what they were assigned. What it’s about is the cavalier manner in which TV news crews are needlessly placed in potentially dangerous situations and told that it makes for a better presentation for viewers.
The call to go live at a cold crime scene is one of the most debated issues in television news. For the producers and news directors, sitting safely in their offices, “going live” is boilerplate; an almost-automatic element of the story that everyone from newsroom middle-managers to outside consultants claims lends immediacy to the story whether it’s worthy or not.
In the case of the shooting death of Nathacha Augustin, it wasn’t. The crime happened that morning. Reporters and photographers could have gathered all available footage and information (as I have done countless times) and assembled a story for broadcast by 3 p.m.
The “arms race” among Orlando television newsrooms has gone on for decades and a big part of it is how often a reporter should be a live presence. Live trucks, with their massive colorful logos and blinding broadcast lights, have been the weapon of choice for every news director who cycled through Orlando. But standing outside where nothing is happening adds nothing to the viewers’ understanding. That’s not journalism. It’s feckless, blind compliance to a tired business model.
Managers often claim that no story is worth risking your safety … shortly before sending crews to a violent and chaotic breaking news event in a part of town that you wouldn’t drive through in broad daylight, much less shortly before a 10 p.m. newscast. I admit it was a thrill for me for years, but I always kept my head on a swivel and my 6-foot frame in plain view of potential troublemakers. Sadly, less experienced reporters with whom I worked often carried their TV-friendly faces into a sketchy neighborhood on their own with just a small camera in one hand and their fingers crossed on their other, often at night. All of us in the Orlando TV news community had been lucky. So far.
But that luck ran out last month for Dylan and Jesse. I’m surprised it hadn’t happened years ago but now it has, and it’s garnered a whole lot of unwanted attention for the way we cover the news here. Every working journalist in this town eventually had the same thought: that could have been me.
As the world and our communities become more dangerous, it’s time for the news bosses to reorder their priorities and start rethinking the coverage you can count on to something we can all live with. Or at least go home from at the end of our workday, something Dylan and Jesse couldn’t.