Television News

There's speculation he had a hero's complex. --KCBS-TV Channel 2 on Tuesday * Call it synchronized swimming in rumor and innuendo. Whatever the title, it stinks. If anyone has a hero complex, it's those members of the media who, swept up in their own pandemonium, leaped to conclusions about Richard Jewell based at the time only on shards of circumstantial evidence. They're the ones prancing in the limelight.

If covering politics is a balancing act between chasing the news and figuring out how to pay for it, consider the problems faced by local television stations in Los Angeles this summer. With two political conventions designed to showcase the top two contenders for the presidency, organizers of both events would expect to get equal attention. But for news organizations, it's not so easy. One in is your backyard; the other, half a continent away.

Connie Chung, whose meteoric rise and high-profile 26-year television career abruptly ended last year after a much-publicized split with "CBS Evening News" co-anchor Dan Rather, is on her way back. And this time she has a new anchor and partner: none other than her talk-show host husband, Maury Povich. Together the pair will anchor and oversee a weekday series for syndication providing news, information and analysis. The show, targeted for either a 7 or 7:30 p.m.

At 11:12 p.m. Wednesday, KABC-TV broadcast a report that there had been a magnitude 5.1 earthquake in a volcanic region six miles east of Mammoth Lakes that had been subject to several swarms of much smaller quakes in previous days. A 5.1 quake could have led, after consultations among scientists, to the highest volcanic alert ever called in the Eastern Sierra. But the report was false.

They're the polar opposite of undercover cops. Celebrity CHiPs. Gawking fans pester them for autographs. As with movie stars, their presence at public gatherings gets announced. People see them on television and seek their counsel. It's a split-personality life, being one of those California Highway Patrol officers who broadcast radio and TV reports of traffic conditions and other highway news. To their fans, they're broadcast celebrities who rescue commuters from traffic hell.

They were handing out "Lehrer and Brokaw in '96" buttons at the National Press Club this week as the network anchors tried to drum up interest in their joint coverage of this summer's political conventions. PBS' Jim Lehrer said that since he began covering such gatherings in 1960, "everyone always predicted they were going to be dull. They were going to be boring. They were going to be irrelevant." But he insisted, "It's important. It matters."

It was a Tuesday early in June, heady times up there on the high road of television journalism, with cheers and applause bouncing off mellow, gray walls in a corner of the arena-sized, geometric-modern newsroom at KVUE-TV, the ABC affiliate here "Where the News Comes First." Flash back a few minutes and picture this: A sleek building in suburban north Austin. Outside, temperatures in the sizzling 90s.

Sometimes polls help journalists figure out the political landscape. Sometimes they lead them astray. In the two major votes so far this campaign year, the polls were off the mark in one race--Iowa--and caused controversy about early network projections in the other--New Hampshire. "Entrance polls" taken as voters went to cast their ballots at Iowa's Feb. 12 caucuses led to early declarations by some news organizations that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole would win big.

The judge in the Polly Klaas murder case Wednesday ordered a television reporter and news director to reveal an anonymous source or face jail. At issue is a report that ran this month on San Jose television station KNTV. The story quoted an anonymous source as saying a videotaped confession by defendant Richard Allen Davis would be used as evidence.

CBS, ABC and CNN did not exactly sound the death knell for the struggling presidential campaign of Sen. Bob Dole when they started projecting the early results of Tuesday's Republican primary in Arizona. But they indicated that the early standings meant his bid was in critical condition. Said ABC's "Nightline" host Ted Koppel at the top of Tuesday night's broadcast: "With an embarrassing third-place finish in today's Arizona primary, is Bob Dole losing the battle?"