This afternoon, as they often do, all three local Los Angeles TV stations preempted their regular newscasts to cover a high-to-medium-speed chase that wove its way through Southland highways and byways. The situation in Iraq and Africa, the hurricane about to destroy Yucatan, the Congressional battle over funding for AIDS research…none of that was as important as a bunch of cop cars following a guy around for more than two hours. And like a jerk, I got caught. Started watching and just couldn't turn it off until it reached its conclusion.
I'm not sure what fascinates us about these things. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that our television is usually so plotted and predictable, and even the so-called "reality" shows are scripted in certain ways, pre-taped and edited. Watching a chase, we're actually watching reality. It's also interesting to wonder about the guy in the fleeing vehicle: What's going through his mind? He has eight police cars following him and a half-dozen helicopters overhead. Does he really think he's going to get away? I suppose a lot of people watch because they think they might see a bloody crash.
I have one other reason for watching these things: I'm fascinated by coverage, and by how badly a lot of professional, highly-paid newsfolks are at ad-libbing. Admittedly, they sometimes have to fill a lot of air time — around two hours, today — without much to say about it. But you'd think that with one of these chases occurring in town every month or two, someone would have figured out more than about five things to say about them. (Today, the biggie was to explain that the Highway Patrol often stops fugitives with spike-strips, but that this chase was under the jurisdiction of the L.A.P.D., and they don't use spike-strips. I think I heard that about four hundred times.) All during it, you can almost hear the folks in the control booth squirming over the fact that they thought they were cutting to ten minutes of exciting live footage and now it's going on two hours without commercials. But of course, they can't ignore it or go back to the normal broadcast because the competing stations are covering it, and everyone will just switch over to them to see the conclusion.
I also love the fact that we're watching someone fleeing from the police (which is a crime), running stop signs and traffic lights (ditto), driving recklessly (ditto) and sometimes causing accidents and endangering lives (big crime). And all this time they're referring to him as a "suspect." We once had one of these guys firing a gun at the cops and the newsguy actually said, "The suspect is shooting at the policemen." It reminds me of that great cartoon Charlie Rodriguez once drew for the National Lampoon. It had one man shooting another on live TV from about three inches away…and superimposed over the gunman was the label, "Alleged assassin."