TV Coverage Maintains Mostly Dignified Tone

BY ALESSANDRA STANLEY

New York Times

After a long, sorrowful vigil, the Vatican chose to inform the news media of Pope John Paul II's death in the most efficient, if prosaic, way possible: an e-mail message sent to all the major news organizations.
And after two days of somber vigil, the television coverage was just as no-nonsense. The broadcast networks interrupted regular programming with the long-expected announcement and briskly delivered assessments of the John Paul's legacy and the search for a new pope.
CBS News was in the biggest hurry: The news division breezed through an elegiac biography of the pope and a feature on the conclave in less than half an hour so the network could return to a pregame show leading up to the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament.
CBS also chose to show the basketball game instead of an evening news broadcast. (The network managed to squeeze in a news item about the pope's death during halftime.)
ABC and NBC stayed in Rome where their top correspondents had flown in to set the stage for the succession. ABC broadcast a feature, "Rules of the Conclave," that explained how the cardinals sequestered in the Sistine Chapel elect a new pope. It was illustrated with the kind of artist's sketches normally reserved for murder trials where cameras have been banned.
All the networks had lined up Vatican experts, but Brian Williams of NBC News was the only broadcast network anchor to cover the story and anchor the evening news.
MSNBC was first with the news of the pope's death at 2:53 p.m. CNN had provided some of the most thorough and reliable coverage of the pope's final days and hours, but the network was outside St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York when the news broke.
By the time a CNN anchor made the announcement at 2:55 and turned to a live report from the Rome bureau chief, the Vatican undersecretary of state, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, had already informed the thousands in St. Peter's Square that the pope had died. Broadcast networks went live a few minutes after CNN and Fox, so few American viewers heard it live when the archbishop told the world, "We all feel like orphans tonight."
Throughout the long vigil that began on Thursday, television coverage was dignified and painstaking, but there were a few mishaps.
At 1:24 p.m. on Friday, Fox News suddenly announced that the pope had passed away. After a producer read a bulletin from an Italian news service and blurted over an open microphone that the pope had died, the Fox anchor Shepard Smith went with it. "Facts are facts," he told viewers. "It is now our understanding that the pope has died."
The Vatican quickly and vehemently denied the reports and Smith corrected himself, but he took the long view. "The exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment," Smith said, "for we will be reliving John Paul's life for many days and weeks and even years and decades and centuries to come."