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David Spates Give the Earnhardt video a rest In the world of TV news, it's all about the
sizzle. Substance comes second. The video clip makes the story,
and if I were Dale Earnhardt's widow, I'd be furious about the
"story" the TV media outlets were telling last week. I'm not a race fan to any degree, and I could
care less which ad-covered driver wins each week. I don't even
bother with the Daytona 500, but I do watch other sports and
sports highlight shows, and I defy you to name me a sports show
that aired last week that didn't accompany its pre-race coverage
of Saturday's Pepsi 400 with video of Earnhardt's fatal crash
in February. Without exaggeration I can truthfully say
that nearly every time I turned on the TV late last week for
a little channel surfing, I saw the video clip of Earnhardt crashing
into the wall. (Incidentally, the reason the TV weasels were
showing the clip over and over is because Saturday's Pepsi 400
was the first race since Earnhardt's accident to be held at the
Daytona track, the very track where Earnhardt was killed.) Mrs. Earnhardt was concerned about newspapers
publishing autopsy pictures of her late husband, as she should
have been. I hope she was equally outraged at the television
networks for showing the crash ad nauseam. I'm not a race fan,
and I was appalled. I blame it on the "eye-candy" direction
that journalism seems to have taken. Granted, this newspaper has published shocking and horrific pictures in the past and it will do so in the future, but we publish startling pictures with news value in mind -- when it happened. We don't publish the pictures over and over again. The photos run once -- when it happened. Anything more is catering to the readers' urge to gawk, and we try to never forget that every photo we publish has a family attached to it. Believe me, the Chronicle staff has
taken plenty of pictures out in the field that we chose not to
publish as a matter of taste. But it would seem that the TV news media don't
follow those same rules. Every televised pre-race story showed
the clip of Earnhardt's crash -- a crash that instantaneously
killed a man. It wasn't a crash that injured Earnhardt. It killed
him. He was dead before the car stopped skidding. Stone dead. Now obviously the TV news are going to run
the video clip immediately after it happened. It was news, after
all. If it were up to me, I'd run it, too. It's an odd wreck
to boot. It didn't seem like he hit the wall that hard, right?
But that was in February. This is July, five
months later. Sure, there should be some mention made of the
fatal crash that happened at the same location, but to repeatedly
televise the moment of impact shows incredible insensitivity.
Insensitivity to the family, insensitivity to the fans, insensitivity
to the viewing public. There's nothing in the video that can't
be conveyed with a well-constructed sentence. Maybe that's the problem. Well-constructed
sentences and television rarely go hand in hand. A picture is
worth a thousands words, am I right? Why bother racking your
brains for the correct phrase when you can simply toddle to the
video library and dig up the clip of a fatal car crash? I hate to sound holier-than-thou when it comes
to the decisions that TV news directors make in terms of what
they televise. I can understand the pressures they face. Their
bosses demand higher ratings, so they do what they can to inflate
the bottom line. That's just how the world works. Sometimes we all have to do things that we
don't really want to do, but I'd like these people to keep in
mind that in addition to being a famous driver, Dale Earnhardt
was also someone's son, someone's husband and someone's dad. When you put things on a personal level, it
tends to change the perspective. It makes me think of watching
war movies. We've all been to the theater to watch a war
movie -- Pearl Harbor, Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, whatever.
Invariably there are a few people in the audience who giggle
and chuckle when a character in the movie gets killed. Now I
realize that it's just make-believe and special effects and all
that, but I can't understand how anyone could snicker as they
watch a soldier get killed. I saw Saving Private Ryan
in the theater and there were plenty of twisted reprobates giggling
through the entire opening Normandy invasion scene. If you've
seen the movie, you know that there isn't much to laugh about. I just want to slap those people silly, and
then ask them how they would feel if it were their father or
brother or child who was getting a leg blown off. Imagine someone
you love in that situation and suddenly it isn't quite so funny. That's what I think of when I see the Earnhardt crash footage. Somebody loved that man. Not me, but someone, and watching him die on every channel gets a little tiring. · · · |