July sweeps doesn't start until Thursday (July 8), but the local news outlets got a jump on things Tuesday night. Yup, wall-to-wall coverage of a mostly ho-hum car chase took up most of the 10 p.m. newscasts.
L.A.'s local broadcast outlets had been moving away from covering car chases in recent years. Not only are these chases lacking in any news value, but they're a collossal waste of money and resources. Chase coverage will frequently pre-empt commercial breaks, causing loss in revenue (although stations are getting more savvy, even cutting away from chase coverage to air ads), while they also bump legitimate news packages off the screen.
But the chases are slowly seeping back to air. The trend was reverting back even prior to the recent LAPD beating incident, caught on tape by two local stations. But that event may have convinced news directors to again cover car chases as a breaking news story, in case it turns into another mess of an LAPD pursuit.
In this case, KCAL/9 and KTTV/Fox 11 covered the bulk of the chase last night, even when the suspect got too close to LAX, forcing the TV stations' helicopters to retreat and broadcast simple shots of the L.A. skyline. KTLA/5 was more reserved, going live for snippets of the chase but also weaving in regular news stories.
Oddly, Fox 11 reporter Tony Valdez spent a great deal of time discussing what would happen if the suspect sped down to the Mexico border. Yet, as anchor John Beard pointed out, the guy wouldn't have enough gas to make it that far, so it's a moot point. Not to mention that there was no indication whatsoever that he would try to crash Mexico.
Over at KTLA, the station cut back to the chase as it hit its conclusion. The suspect jumped out of his car in a residential Redondo Beach neighborhood, running down the street with a gun to his head. I started to wonder whether the guy was about to pull the trigger, and why KTLA wasn't pulling its helicopter camera back, just in case a gory scene was about to unfold.
Luckily, the chase ended pretty uneventfully, as the suspect hopped to the ground. Not a moment later, KTLA anchor Hal Fishman tried to steer the newscast back to... well, news. "OK, we're done here," he said, trying to rush the station's helicopter reporter off the screen.
Of course, the 11 p.m. news outlets were probably kicking themselves that the pursuit ended right before the start of their newscasts. That didn't prevent them from still going live in Redondo Beach. But as this KABC reporter learned, it's never easy to go live when a whole crowd has gathered. Flashing hand signals, waving and making faces at the camera, the bystanders added an even more circus atmosphere to the chase.
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