Huntley and Brinkley Boss: Reporting Chicago or Abusing It?

ROBERT Shad Northshield was as distraught as anyone over what happened in Chicago last August--but for different reasons than most people.

Like millions of others, he was awed by the martial atmosphere which brooded over the city during the convention and the brutality of Chicago's police force. But from his professional point of view--as producer of NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report -- Northshield was as much disturbed by the violent reaction to NBC's coverage of Chicago.

In the aftermath of the convention, TV newsmen were berated by the police and the public as much as the police had been by the media or the hippies and yippies had been by everyone all along.

Mayor Daley produced his own version of Chicago--"The Strategy of Confrontation" -- starring his police department, and in it charged that the news media "responded with surprising naivete and were incredibly misused." Letters from angry citizens--almost unanimously critical of the networks--poured into the studios of NBC and CBS, and into the office of the FCC as well, prompting an investigation of the major networks' coverage.

Harry Reasoner reported on CBS's magazine-format "60 Minutes" that the letters CBS received ran 11 to one against the network's coverage. At NBC, the ratio was even larger.

The brunt of this criticism was felt more acutely by Shad Northshield than anyone else at NBC, for he alone was responsible for NBC's coverage of events outside the convention hall. And to him it was all a bit perplexing.

Northshield probably has more to do with what comes out of the NBC news department than any other one man. His judgment determines exactly what Chet Huntley and David Brinkley read on the air every weekday evening at 6:30 p.m. He is acutely aware that his audience is in the millions and that he is a very strong influence on their opinions. That makes him a powerful man, and he knows it. On election night in NBC's election central control booth, he bragged jokingly that he could get Nixon to concede just by having Chet or David announce that Humphrey had carried California and was now NBC's projected winner.

HE IS A big man with a heavy face and a self-confident, nearly smug air. But he becomes defensive when he talks about Chicago, and it is obvious that he has become sensitive to criticism about his role there.

He is used to being loved by the viewing public -- though the only viewers who probably even know he exists are the few who stay tuned to Huntley-Brinkley after the news is over to hear the snatch of Beethoven as the credits roll up the screen. Huntley and Brinkley have always been those two congenial fellows with the wry wit who make digestion a little bit easier every night after dinner. They became something quite different during the Democratic convention. Their public turned on them, criticized them, and Northshield wonders why.

He admits he made a mistake in airing the amount of footage he did of policemen flailing nightsticks against protesters. But that was something that could not be helped in Chicago.

NBC and the rest of the networks had to fight logistics in Chicago that were just as trying as the run-ins with over-zealous patrolmen. A telephone strike, which many media people claimed was sustained to hamper news coverage of the convention, had crippled communications around the city. One vital consequence was that there could be no live coverage of events outside the convention itself. Everything NBC aired had to be video-taped and rushed back to tre network control booth in the amphitheatre.

There Northshield -- surrounded by two dozen blank monitors that had been intended to carry outside events live--supervised a rapid editing before the film was finally aired.

The result was that coverage of events outside the amphitheatre consisted of long, uninterrupted film sequences shot understandably when there was something happening -- when the clashes between police and protesters reached their height. The same films were aired over and over again whenever Chet or David referred back to the events, as after Senator Ribicoff blasted Mayor Daley for running a police state. Consequently, both the intensity and the frequency of the clashes may have seemed greater than they were.

But Northshield considers this an unfortunate consequence of the events. Police brutality was a fact, which justified exposing it and condemning it. That is precisely what NBC's reporters did.

ON THE NIGHT of August 26, NBC's camera crew was sent to Lincoln Park, where the first real confrontation between police and protesters was expected to take place. The demonstrators were determined to spend the night there; the police had been instructed to run them out.

The media were also there in force, waiting patiently and apprehensively. Norman Mailer was there and Allen Ginsburg, Jean Genet and Terry Southern. And at about midnight the policemen were there too.

Veteran NBC correspondent Jack Perkins' narrative of NBC's films of what happened read like this:

In the darkness and confusion, policemen used their nightsticks with great zeal, clubbing and injuring about 60 people. Seventeen of them were newsmen--there trying to cover it--including a CBS cameraman . . . an NBC cameraman and NBC News reporter John Evans.

They beat cameramen to keep them from filming policemen beating other people, and newsmen not in spite of the fact they were newsmen but because of it.

This suppression of the news and these beatings were in direct violation of police orders, but they happened. And none of the newsmen we talked to had ever seen anything to match it in any other city in this country.

This direct affront to their city was probably enough to anger most proud Chicagoans. Policemen and viewers, however, were upset by the alleged lack of objectivity in reports like Perkins'. From them arose the charges of slanting the news. Mayor Daley claimed the media had been unfair by not giving the taunting, obscenity-shouting protesters equal time in their coverage. Television, he charged, had shown only his policemen's reaction, and not the provocations they were reacting to.

The director of public relations for the Chicago police department lodged this complaint:

All over America people came to the conclusion that the television networks--in particular NBC and CBS--had not been fair in reporting the events in Chicago.... Needless to say, it was not the role of television to side with the officials of the City of Chicago or the Chicago Police Department.... But, by the same token, it was not the role of television to be the ideological allies of the mob. It was not television's role to slant the news day after day in favor of the revolutionaries and against the elected representatives of the people and the police.

Northshield concedes that his camera crews may have focused too exclusively on the police. But he does not apologize for it. He is convinced the police over-reacted and that nothing the demonstrators did, or could have done, justified the police response.

POLICE objections to the networks' coverage raised an even larger and more fundamental issue, however -- the question of objectivity in television journalism. One of the Chicago police officials' main complaints was that "reporters give their personal opinions of the events they are covering." About the only mitigating result of Chicago, according to one official, is that networks may now "see that a credibility gap has existed between themselves and the people they seek to inform...and, as a result, go all out to strive for objectivity in reporting."

Northshield dislikes blatant editorializing on TV; he is mildly contemptuous of the kind of thing Eric Severeid does for CBS. But he says with unabashed frankness that "there is no such thing as objectivity in television reporting, not so long as it involves human feelings." And he does not apologize for it. And anyway, the public outcry against the networks was not a reaction against non-objective reporting or the result of a credibility gap between network and public. On the contrary, he says, the outcry resulted from the complete credibility TV has for the public -- the result of merging what a viewer sees on a TV screen and his own experience.

NORTHSHIELD'S explanation of why TV was abused after Chicago is something like the "messenger-bearing-bad-news" theory, with a McLuhanesque touch. Television, he says, has become more than a vicarious experience for the American viewer. What happens on the TV screen is as concrete a reality as anything that happens in his own life. What happened last summer was that ugliness intruded into the viewer's life through TV one time too many, and he rebelled.

1968 had been an ugly year for news. The mire in Vietnam looked deadlier than ever until March. The new year got off to a bad start--the Pueblo was seized. Early summer was shattered by the murder of Dr. King and the widespread riots that ensued. Then Bobby Kennedy was shot.

Too much pain had been inflicted on America, right in her own living room, right at dinner time with the family. The sight of Chicago policemen beating and kicking people was too, too much, and America kicked back at the courier of the sight--the news people.

It is unlikely that the police and the networks' views of why TV was abused after Chicago will soon be reconciled. As unlikely as it is that newsmen and policemen will reach an understanding on the rules of TV journalism. Until they do, relations between the two will remain less than congenial.

Shad Northshield undoubtedly feels vindicated in his judgment of what to cover and how to cover it in Chicago, now that the Walker Report on convention violence is public knowledge. Not that he really ever felt his decisions needed vindicating. And he seems confident that his newsmen will again worm their way into the hearts of NBC viewers once the news they must report becomes less noxious again. The only question is--will it