The Evening News (5 page)

It also explained why the
four rear escape doors had not been opened from inside
.
As always with an aircraft accident, the dead would be left where they
were until a National Transportation Safety Board field officer
,
reportedly on the way, gave authority to move them after approving
identification procedures
.
The flight-deck crew emerged from the Airbus, pointedly declining help
.
The captain, a grizzled four-striper, looking around him at the injured
and already knowing of the many dead, was openly crying. Guessing that
despite the casualties the pilots would be acclaimed for bringing the
airplane in, Minh held the captain's grief-stricken face in closeup. It
proved to be Minh's final shot as a voice called, "Harry! Minh! Ken! Stop
now. Hurry! Bring what you've got and come with me. We're feeding to New
York by satellite
.”

The voice belonged to Rita Abrams, who had arrived on a Public
Information shuttle bus. Some distance away, the promised mobile
satellite van could be seen. The van's satellite dish, which folded like
a fan for travel, was being opened and aimed skyward
.
Accepting the order, Minh lowered his camera. Two other TV crews had
arrived on the same shuttle bus as Rita--one from KDLS, the CBA
affiliate-along with print press reporters and photographers. They and
others, Minh knew, would
carry the story on. But only Minh had the real thing, the crash exclusive pictures, and he knew with inward pride that today and in days to come, his pictures would be seen around the world and would remain a piece of history.

They went with Vernon in the PIO station wagon to the satellite van. On the
way Partridge began drafting the words he would shortly speak. Rita told
him, "Make your script a minute forty-five. As soon as you're ready, cut
a sound track, do a closing standup. Meanwhile, I'll feed quick and dirty
to New York
.”

As Partridge nodded acknowledgment, Rita glanced at her watch: 5:43 P.m.
,
6:43 in New York. For the first-feed National Evening News, there was
barely fifteen minutes left of broadcast time
.
Partridge was continuing to write, mouthing words silently, changing what
he had already written. Minh handed two precious tape cassettes to Rita
,
then put a fresh cassette in the camera, ready for Partridge's audio track
and standup close
.
Vernon dropped them immediately alongside the satellite van. Broderick, who
had come too, was going on to the terminal to phone his own report to New
York. His parting words were, "Thanks, guys. Remember, if you want the
in-depth dope tomorrow, buy the Time&
“
O'Hara, the high-technology buff, regarded the equipmentpacked satellite
van admiringly
.”
How I love these babies
!”

The fifteen-foot-wide dish mounted on the van's platform body was now fully
open and elevated with a 20-kilowatt generator running. Inside, in a small
control room with editing and transmitting equipment tightly packed in
tiers, a technician from the two-man crew was aligning the van's uplink
transmitter with a Ku-band satellite 22,300 miles above themSpacenet 2
.
Whatever they transmitted would go to transponder 21 on the satellite, then
instantly by downlink to New York to be rerecorded
.
Inside the van, working alongside the technician, Rita expertly ran Minh's
tape cassettes through an editing machine,
viewing them on a TV monitor. Not surprisingly, she thought, the pictures were superb
.
On normal assignments, and working with an editor as an extra team member
,
producer and editor together would select portions of the tapes, then, over
a sound track of a correspondent's comments, put all components together
as a fully edited piece. But that took forty-five minutes, sometimes
longer, and today there wasn't time. So, making fast decisions, Rita chose
several of the most dramatic scenes which the technician transmitted as
they were-in TV jargon, "quick and dirty
.”

Outside the satellite van, seated on some metal steps, Partridge completed
his script and, after conferring briefly with Minh and the sound man
,
recorded a sound track
.
Having allowed for the anchorman's introduction, which would be written in
New York and have the story's up-front facts, Partridge began:
"Pilots in a long-ago war called it comin'in on a wing and a prayer. There
was a song with that name . . . It's unlikely anyone will write a song
about today
.”
The Muskegon Airlines Airbus was sixty miles out from Dallas-Fort Worth
. . . with a near-full passenger load . . . having comefrom Chicago . .
.
when the mid-air collision happened . .
.
As always, when an experienced correspondent wrote for TV news, Partridge
had written "slightly off the pictures
.”

It was a specialized art form
,
difficult to learn, and some in television never quite succeeded. Even
among professional writers the talent did not receive the recognition it
deserved, because the words were written to accompany pictures and seldom
read well alone
.
The trick, as Harry Partridge and others like him knew, was not to describe
the pictures. A television viewer would be seeing, visually, what was
happening on the screen and did not need verbal description. Yet the spoken
words must not be so far removed from the pictures as to split the viewer's
consciousness. It was a literary balancing act, much of it instinctive
.
Something else TV news people recognized: The best news writing was not in
neat sentences and paragraphs. Fragments of
sentences worked better. Facts must be taut, verbs strong and active; a script should crackle. Finally, by manner and intonation the correspondent should convey a meaning too. Yes, he or she had to be an excellent reporter, but an actor also. At all those things Partridge was expert, though today he had a handicap: he had not seen the pictures, as a correspondent normally did. But he knew, more or less, what they would be
.
Partridge concluded with a standup-himself, head and shoulders, speaking
directly to the camera. Behind him, activity was continuing around the
wrecked Airbus
.”
There is more of this story to come . . . tragic details, the toll of dead
and injured. But what is clear, even now, is that collision dangers are
multiplying . . . on the airways, in our crowded skies . . . Harry
Partridge, CBA News, Dallas-Fort Worth
.”
The cassette with the narration and standup was passed to Rita inside the
van. Still trusting Partridge, knowing him too well to waste precious time
checking, she ordered it sent to New York without review. Moments later
,
watching and listening as the technician transmitted, she was admiring
.
Remembering the discussion half an hour earlier in the terminal bar she
reflected: with his multitalents, Partridge was demonstrating why his pay
was so much higher than that of the reporter for the New York Times
.
Outside, Partridge was performing still one more of a correspondent's
duties-an audio report, spoken from notes and largely ad-libbed, for CBA
Radio News. When the TV transmission was finished, that would go to New
York by satellite too.
The CBA News headquarters building in New York was a plain and unimpressive eight-story brownstone on the east side of upper Manhattan. Formerly a furniture factory, now only the shell of the original structure remained, the interior having been remodeled and refurbished many times by an assortment of contractors. Out of this piecemeal work had come a maze of intersecting corridors in which unescorted visitors got lost
.
Despite the drab domicile of CBA News, the place contained a sultan's
fortune in electronic wizardry, a considerable portion of it in
technicians' country, two floors below street level, sometimes referred
to as the catacombs. And here, among a multitude of functions, was a
vital department with a prosaic name-the One-inch-tape Room
.

All news reports from CBA crews around the world came in, via satellite
and occasionally by landline, to the One-inchtape Room. From there, too
,
all taped recordings of finished news went out to viewers, via a
broadcast control room and again by satellite
.
Endemic to the One-inch-tape Room were enormous pressures, taut nerves
,
tension, instant decision making and urgent commands, especially just
before and during broadcasts of the National Evening News
.
At such times, someone unaware of what was happening might consider the
scene disorganized bedlam, a technological nightmare. The impression
would be heightened by surrounding semidarkness, necessary for watching
a forest of TV screens
.
But in fact the operation functioned smoothly, quickly and with skill
.
Mistakes here could he disastrous. They rarely happened
.
A half-dozen large and sophisticated reel-to-reel tape machines, built into consoles and with TV monitors above, dominated the activity; the machines used one-inch magnetic tape, the highest-quality and most reliable. At each tape machine and console sat a skilled operator receiving, editing and transmitting tapes swiftly, according to instructions. The operators, older than most workers in the building, were a motley group who seemed to take pride in dressing shabbily and behaving boisterously. Because of this, a commentator once described them as the "fighter pilots
”
of TV broadcasting
.
Every weekday, an hour or so before National Evening News broadcast time
,
a senior news producer moved down five floors from his seat at the
Horseshoe to preside over the Oneinch-tape Room and its operators.

There
,
acting as a maestro, shouting instructions while sernaphoring with his
arms, he viewed incoming material for that night's news, ordered further
editing if necessary, and kept colleagues at the Horseshoe informed of
which expected items were now in-house and how, at first glance, each
looked
.
Everything, it always seemed, arrived at the One-inch-tape Room in haste
and late. It was a tradition that producers, correspondents and editors
working in the field polished and repolished their pieces until the last
possible moment, so that most came in during the half hour before the
broadcast and some after the broadcast had begun. There were even
nail-biting occasions when the front half of a report was going out from
one tape recorder and being broadcast while the back portion was still
feeding into another machine. During those moments nervous, sweating
operators pushed themselves to the limit of their skills
.
The senior producer most often in charge was Will Kazazis, Brooklyn-born of
an excitable Greek family, a trait he had inherited. His excitability
,
though, seemed to fit the job and despite it he never lost control. Thus it
was Kazazis who received Rita Abrams' satellite transmission from DFW-first
Minh Van Canh's pictures sent "quick and dirty
,”
then Harry Partridge's
audio track, concluding with his standup
.
The time was 6:48 . . . ten minutes of news remaining. A commercial break
had just begun.
Kazazis told the operator who had taken the feed in, "Slap it together
fast. Use all of Partridge's track. Put the best pictures over it. I
trust you. Now move, move, move
!”

Through an aide, Kazazis had already let the Horseshoe know that the
Dallas tape was coming in. Now, by phone, Chuck Insen, who was in the
broadcast control room, demanded, "How is it
?
”

Kazazis told the executive producer, "Fantastic! Beautiful! Exactly what
you'd expect of Harry and Minh
.”