THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 21, 1994 TAG: 9406210085
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Larry Bonko
DATELINE: 940621 LENGTH: Medium
There hasn't been anything like it on television since the Gulf War, and even as the allies' invasion of Kuwait and Iraq reached its climax, I don't recall seeing the fighting played out on 11 cable channels at once.
{REST} But in prime time last Friday night, when the suicidal Simpson was riding in a white Ford Bronco with his old friend Al Cowlings at the wheel, one cable channel after another began delivering the pictures into living rooms throughout Southside Hampton Roads until the figure hit 11.
Simpson was wanted in the stabbing deaths of his former wife and a friend of hers. He had failed to turn himself in at the appointed hour, and now a manhunt was under way on the spaghetti bowl of freeways in Southern California.
There was a basketball game on NBC - and an important one, too, because the supremacy in professional basketball was being decided - but the network cut away from the hoops to show pictures of the white Bronco tooling down a freeway called S-110, and then on another, 405-N.
Soon ABC and CBS were also on the air with pictures taken from helicopters.
It was The Night of the Skycam.
CNN had the pictures, too. Whenever a major news story is breaking, CNN turns on the cameras and lets them run. The network's ratings have been down as much as 16 percent in the last few months, mainly because nothing much was happening nationally or internationally lately to interest American viewers.
They were way up last Friday. It's been estimated that between 60 and 75 million people in the U.S. watched the prime-time pursuit of Simpson.
If you were hooked up to the Cox system, you could watch the chase play out on the big-city channels coming in from Chicago and New Jersey. ESPN checked in with continuous coverage. So did CNN Headline News. And CNBC interrupted its nighttime talk shows to bring in the Skycams, et al.
Even the lighthearted E! Entertainment Television broke into its regular programming to put the chase on cable. The channel that is on the Cox system for Spanish-speaking viewers, Telemundo, also picked up the pictures originating from the helicopters flying over S-110 and 405-N.
There were so many helicopters that at times they were ordered to fly higher and cease mucking up police frequency. Only CBS had a camera on the ground near the driveway of Simpson's home, where he eventually gave himself up.
When that happened, co-anchor Connie Chung said, ``It is sad and sobering to see him in custody.''
The TV coverage has been universally sympathetic to Simpson, the world-class athlete and broadcaster with a dark side lately revealed. Too little sympathy was expended on the victims and the people they left behind, I thought.
NBC eventually restored the signal to the Houston-New York basketball game, and put on ``The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,'' on a night when nobody really wanted to hear Leno's one-liners. CBS wisely dropped ``The Late Show'' starring David Letterman.
When WAVY came on with its local late-night newscast, sports director Bruce Rader reminded viewers that Simpson had been in Norfolk recently to take part in a weekend of fun and fund-raising for charity put on by another football icon, Bruce Smith of the Buffalo Bills.
Rader told the Channel 10 audience that Smith wasn't up to showing his face on TV and talking about what was happening to his friend, Simpson. The story was so strange, so compelling, that 11 cable channels rushed to cover it.
by CNB