By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff, 12/12/99

It began with the death of one man named John F. Kennedy and, with awful symmetry, was recapitulated 36 years later, after the death of another man named John F. Kennedy.

Along the way, it developed into a national rite of mourning that analyst Ralph Whitehead has dubbed the "televigil," marked by conventions and characteristics unique to the television era.

As the century draws to a close, television is no longer content merely to chronicle events. When tragedy strikes, TV coverage increasingly assumes the contours of an emotional outlet, a channel for a mass grieving process. At other times, it merely offers viewers the cheap thrill of vicarious participation in a major news story.

Either way, even as many groan at the frequent instances of overkill and the ratings-driven cynicism of the networks, it seems to be a role that a sizable segment of the public wants television to play. "The televigil delivers catharsis," observed Whitehead, a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Consequently, he said, TV coverage now offers both "a journalistic dimension and a therapeutic dimension," with the latter sometimes overshadowing the former. "In the beginning, journalists were there to tell us what's happening; that was their primary role," said Whitehead. "It was only secondary for them to play a role in the grieving process. Over time, what was the secondary role became the primary role."

For a TV genre born of tragedy, there has unfortunately been no shortage of material in recent years. We have gathered around the set for televigils after the Challenger disaster in 1986, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the massacres at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school last year and at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., this year, the airplane crash that claimed the life of JFK Jr., his wife, and her sister in July, and the deaths of six Worcester firefighters in the past week.

Television's response to those and other tragedies was defined by the two hallmarks of the televigil. The first is saturation TV coverage that preempts other programming and, in Whitehead's words, "quickly springs the bounds of the evening newscasts and begins to fill up some, or in rare cases all, other hours of the broadcast day." The second is television's attempt at what Whitehead calls "structuring the nation's grief."

A nation's mourning

That new role began to take shape with JFK's assassination in 1963. For the first time, the networks devoted several days of airtime to around-the-clock coverage that captured unforgettable images, including the sight of 3-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket. (That image would be replayed endlessly when JFK Jr. himself died, completing the circle by once again becoming a key part of the TV narrative.) Television became an outlet for a nation's grief, and sometimes reflected it, as when Walter Cronkite's voice broke as he reported Kennedy's death. In that piercingly human moment, Cronkite was not just a journalist but an American citizen mourning the loss of a president.

But television was still largely bound by the conventions of journalism in 1963. This meant that while the medium exhaustively chronicled the mourning for Kennedy, it didn't try to lead the grieving process.

It observes no such restraint today.

When major tragedies like Columbine erupt, TV goes wall-to-wall - and sometimes off the wall - with its coverage. In fact, TV's mobilization for televigils has become such a universally known practice that students hiding from the shooters inside Columbine High used cell phones to call TV stations.

The networks leave no stone unturned in telling the life stories of the victims, straining to create the illusion that the viewers knew them personally. When the story involves a celebrity like JFK Jr. or Princess Diana, they reach into the archives for footage that is then put into endless rotation. When it is a massacre, like Columbine, they instead recycle the most arresting images, such as the picture of the bleeding boy falling from the window.

On newscasts and prime-time newsmagazines, they interview friends and family members, making the once-private act of grieving a very public affair. "The communities affected have contributed to this," noted Whitehead. The networks devote considerable airtime to pictures of the makeshift shrines (flowers, letters) built as acts of devotion by people who, in most cases, had no acquaintance with the deceased.

TV journalists also self-consciously assume the roles of mediators of the nation's grief. When John F. Kennedy Jr. died, CNN ran this title card over its coverage: "JFK Jr.: The world mourns." On ABC, Connie Chung asked the Rev. Billy Graham: "Do you think John Kennedy Jr. is in heaven with his mother and father now?"

Becoming participants

After the Columbine shootings, NBC's "Today" host Katie Couric held the hand of a victim's father while she interviewed him. Also after Columbine, ABC's Ted Koppel hosted a "town meeting" in Jonesboro, site of earlier school shootings, to discuss the issue with anguished relatives of victims and community members.

"Ted Koppel, heretofore a journalist's journalist in his demeanor, jumped into the therapeutic sweepstakes himself," said Whitehead. "I thought that was a remarkable moment."

Fordham University communications professor Everette Dennis was equally struck by the media's front-and-center role in the grieving process. Noting the relatively short shrift the networks gave to Vice President Al Gore's visit to Littleton, he said that "television and its own cast of commentators saw itself as more important than Al Gore."

Another key aspect of the televigil is the parade of experts across the screen who offer speculative answers to the question of "Why?" This occurs almost immediately after answering the who-what-when-where questions, and sometimes before. Often, the experts are drawn from the ranks of sociologists and psychologists, and their analyses are couched in the jargon of therapy and syndromes.

It is an approach that would have been hard to picture in 1963, when the televigil was born, but it may reflect the times we live in, the age of the I-feel-your-pain presidency.

The televigil would likely not have grown into such a force without the emergence of all-news cable networks like CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, which intensified the pressure on CBS, ABC, and NBC to offer continuous live coverage of major stories. That sustained coverage, notes Dennis, "is diametrically opposed to what else is happening in television: shorter and shorter reports, the bombardment of fragments." He sees one upside to it: "It provides a kind of institutional memory that we didn't have before." But in general, he believes it is driven by "commercial, pandering" impulses.

"The networks sense that there is an appetite for continuity in a story that keeps unfolding, even when there is no story," added Dennis. "With JFK Jr., there wasn't much of a story after the plane was first missing, because the outcome was inevitable. But it allowed for the rehashing and repurposing of all kinds of news material; you could go back to childhood and do his cameo appearances through the American scene."

It's clear, as the 21st century rushes towards us, that the American scene will continue to include the televigil, that curious hybrid of journalism and therapy which came to define television news in the last part of the 20th century. What is less clear, but potentially worrisome, is what the long-term effects of TV's obsession with the form will be.

"The tragic events of Columbine occupied the nation through the medium of television for many days, yet almost nothing of a national or official nature has happened because of Columbine," said Whitehead. "If an emotional solution is readily available, will the energy remain for a political solution?"

This story ran on page M02 of the Boston Globe on 12/12/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.