The Five-Month-Old News Story
There are some things that television does better than anyone else. One of them is provide blanket coverage of a five-month-old crime that no one paid any attention to when it happened.
Channel Five led off its ten o’clock news with the assault:
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This report never does mention the date of the attack–“an oversight,” says executive producer Danece Kern.
The next evening, Two rallies with a vengeance:
Phil Walters really didn’t want to face the Dan Ryan at rush hour. “I wasn’t keen on the story,” he says. “So I called ahead to make sure there was something worth going to.” Walters talked to Greves by phone, and it sounded as if there wasn’t. The little girl had been held only two hours; the community wasn’t up in arms about gangs. But Greves mentions that the suspected abductor, Perry Hernandez, has been implicated in an earlier crime, and Walters is alert enough to ask about that. A Metra mugging last spring, says Greves. Anyone badly hurt? says Walters. No, says the chief, but the thing of it is that it happened on camera. There’s actually a tape.
Actually, Jay Levine went on at length that night about the abduction; but Walters barely mentioned it, and neither said anything at all about the gang shooting. By the values of TV, Levine wasn’t being thorough; he was being scooped. Walters had interviewed Greves privately and homed in on the angle that would keep the April mugging alive in the news for days to come.
Victim: “No. I just got off the train.”
