On Television

...Meeting & Event Professionals, would facilitate the three days of intense news coverage by providing a padded but armless chair and a writing table decorated with a cloth skirt that would be changed daily...

...The issue sold out at the newsstands and became one of the legends of American tabloidjournalism...

...Travelers from the Continent were willing to pay handsomely for good seats in the grandstands, and wrote home in great detail about what they saw...

...The police said they expected vendors of T-shirts and other souvenirs...

...A PART FROM McVeigh's unspeakable crime, the worst act of terror in American history, there was also a debate about the whole question of whether an execution should be shown to the public on television...

...But whether it soothes or saddens, comforts or vexes, whether it moves us to march against it or to pray, whether we are silenced or sickened by it, is it not our duty to have a look...

...Fourteen hundred reporters, editors and technicians from the various news media had advised the United States Bureau of Prisons that they planned to be in Terre Haute on May 16 for the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy J. McVeigh...

...Precisely to avoid such a facing and having a look, the Attorney General ordered that the closed circuit television being fed from Terre Haute to the victims' families in Oklahoma City be digitized, encrypted and otherwise protected by the FBI from intruders...

...English law once specified almost 200 capital crimes, ranging from treason and murder to petty theft and enclosing public lands...

...This year the Attorney General's strictures drew an immediate response from the Radio and Television News Directors Association, which describes itself as the world's largest association devoted exclusively to electronic journalism...

...You have cited neither as the underlying reason to limit media interviews with Mr...

...for famous prisoners or young girls, or for hangings to be followed by dismemberment, it couldswell to 100,000 ormore...

...It was a popular decision...

...The condemned would be taken in open carts, often seated on their own coffins, from Newgate Prison along Holborn and then down Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street) to the gallows...

...On the stream's banks—at what is now roughly the corner of Hyde Park and Marble Arch— stood the Tyburn Tree, a triangular gallows platform...

...Before we close this painful case, we should face what's in it...

...Families made plans to be out of town...

...You can call it catharsis, but it is simply entertainment, right alongside Howard Dietz' clown with his pants falling down or the lights on the lady in tights...

...Principled opponents of capital punishment also favored having him die on TV They argued that backers of the death penalty in the polling booth or local bar should see what it looks like, watch it take place...

...Their requests—most, but not all, dictated by the needs of television— included space outside the prison for portable buildings, trailers and staging platforms...

...The defense cost the government $ 10 million...

...Figures for the cost of the prosecution are not available...

...McVeigh had been sentenced to die for the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City...

...RTNDA president Barbara Cochran was especially concerned about the limitations on reporters' interviews with McVeigh...

...During the 18th century, five children younger than 14 were executed...

...The Bureau of Prisons decreed that each protester could carry only medicine, a cellular phone, a beeper, a protest sign, a candle with a windscreen, and a Bible...

...At the moment of execution, he snapped a picture of convicted murderess Ruth Snyder in the electric chair...

...In addition, few of the confraternity of journalists who write about TV could resist calling televised executions the ultimate reality programming...

...When the Federal death penalty was reinstated in 1993, the Bureau of Prisons composed and published a 54-page "Execution Protocol " that is to be followed in McVeigh's case...

...Duringthe trial in 1997, McVeigh's defense put 25 witnesses on the stand over a period of four days...

...Much talk concerned the traditions of public executions...

...A total of 168 people were killed and about 500 more were injured, with both figures including children brought to the building's day care facility by government employees who worked there...

...Except for the 10 reporters chosen by tot to be official witnesses, plus 10 members of the victims' families and six people designated by McVeigh himself, no journalist actually would see the execution, or even the building where an execution would take place for the first time ever...

...Among the 1,400 journalists assigned to Terre Haute for Mc Veigh's execution, some would enjoy better working conditions than others...

...Criminals from the upper classes would be offered a sherry along the route at the George and Blue Boar...

...On Television Death as Entertainment By Reuven Frank On March 2 Warden Harley G. Lappin of the Federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, warned the 60,000 residents of that small, quiet Midwestern city to brace themselves for an invasion peculiar to contemporary journalism...

...He further asked that his execution by lethal injection be televised...

...Even before the postponement, the media frenzy was accelerating by the day...

...Within hours of the government's announcement of the date for McVeigh's execution, all 1,600 hotel rooms in Terre Haute were booked...

...From 1571 to 1759 an estimated 50,000 people were executed at Tyburn...

...Pictures of executions are forbidden in the United States...

...Reflecting changed times, it includes special arrangements for protesters...

...Giles' Church, whose bell tolled through the entire cavalcade...

...Rather, you...

...The secondary lesson to be learned is also unchic: The medium is not the message...

...Consequently, demonstrators of all views will be bused from a Terre Haute city park to two sites inside the prison grounds, with about 1,000 feet separating those opposed to the execution and those supporting it...

...But about a month before the originally scheduled execution date, the Attorney General ruled that McVeigh could speak to a reporter or reporters by telephone for only 15 minutes a day, for a total of 300 minutes, and that none of these interviews could be recorded...

...Fears were expressed that the condemned man's last words, besides the poem, might include statements insulting to his victims and their families...

...left hanging for half an hour...

...There were more than 100 requests for interviews—to be vetted by both the accused and the Bureau of Prisons—from virtually every famous TV journalist and not a few from other media...

...Hangings were usually on Monday...

...Then there was the matter of "the public's right to know" A lawyer for an Internet company, trying to secure a court order that the execution be made available to his client, declared: "The press has a right to communicate what goes on in an execution chamber...

...Federal law also prohibits any recording of the broadcast...

...Amphitheater, tabloid front page, video tube—most people look to all of them for that moment of excitement, the break in a monotonous day...

...Visitors were also fascinated by the London crowds, which pelted unpopular criminals with rocks and garbage as they made their way toward Tyburn, but found other miscreants so popular for one reason or another that they were applauded on their way to the gallows...

...Vigo County Sheriff Bill Harris canceled all vacations in his department and drew up a system to patrol every highway leading into the city...

...the message is the message...

...The charge included phone service, bottled water, and use of a golf cart to travel the little less than a mile between the press site and the officially designated protest area...

...The Internet company he represented is best known for its adults-only subscription Web sites that maintain live cameras in girls' dormitories...

...It was blurry, its details were almost indistinguishable, but it filled the front page of the next day's Daily News...

...In this millennium, can anyone be sure that some precocious teenager grazing the firmament from his computer keyboard, or some Chinese or Andorran spy plane, with its secret, advanced, unimaginable equipment, won't lock onto the microwaved signal and roll the tape to record images that will somehow, some day seep into the channels of commerce...

...The crowdrarely numberedfewer than 10,000 at the site of the execution itself...

...The Associated Press reported that a local grocery store madeplans to peddle shish kebabs in the parking lot closest to the prison, calling them "McVeigh specials...

...Even conceding that the debaters themselves may truly be concerned with the right of the people to know, or the morality of the death penalty, or deterring crime, history is clear that what the public itself wants is the thrill of the event, the amusement of the occasion, the entertainment...

...In the next century, even though more than 100 children were sentenced to death, all were reprieved...

...Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed...

...Nor is it the medium that dictates the response...

...Such pleas are always couched in noble terms and cite high principles...

...It wants to avoid the kind of display that accompanied the 1989 state execution of serial killer Ted Bundy in Florida, where gleeful demonstrators carried dummy electric chairs and waved frying pans...

...When he first made his request, in a letter to the Sunday Oklahoman newspaper that ran on February 11, it brought forth a minor flurry in the country's Op-Ed pages...

...They were forbidden in 1928 when Tom Howard, a photographer for the New York Daily News, took advantage of his position as an official press observer and strapped a tiny camera to his ankle...

...A magazine quoted Albert Camus: "One must kill publicly or confess that one does not feel authorized to kill...

...About 250 family members were invited to watch McVeigh's final moments, as they had the trial, at an Oklahoma City location kept secret as long as possible...

...In Georgian times, for those who could afford them there were permanent grandstands at the site, called Mother Proctor's pews...

...The Foreigner's Guide to London of 1740 warned visitors: "These executions are always well attended with so great mobbing and impertinences that you ought to be on your guard if curiosity leads you there...

...McVeigh gave interviews, including one to 60 Minutes, cooperated with two reporters from the Buffalo News who wrote a book about him, and told them his last words would be those of the poem "Invictus," by the second-tier 19th-century English poet William Ernest Henley: Out of the night that covers me, Blackas the Pit from pole topole, I thank whatever gods maybe For my unconquerable soul...

...The issue was debated on two levels: between those for and against executions on TV, and (in less orderly fashion) among those who supported it for opposing reasons...

...Terre Haute, chosen to be the site of the Federal prison system's only death row and execution chamber because of its central location, thereupon ordered its schools closed on execution day...

...Authorities said they were encouraged by the fact that the closed circuit television of McVeigh's trial had not been recorded anywhere...

...In the 18th century, foreigners often looked forward to executions at Tyburn as the high points of a trip to England...

...McVeigh...

...As these events grew in popularity and international reputation, they came to be called "hanging matches...

...To Americans, the best known may be those at Tyburn, in London—mentioned frequently in Shakespeare, famously depicted by Hogarth, and recurring throughout English history and literature...

...The thousands gathered at the foot of the Tyburn Tree would not have understood the plea of the author of an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times on February 20: "If seeing war creates a hunger for peace, perhaps watching an execution will make us hunger for justice and righteousness and humanity...

...Not only were parents concerned that the presence of protesters and the concentration of media would disrupt their lives, but closing the schools would free 13 additional police officers forprison duty...

...In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud...

...Journalists unwilling or unauthorized to spend that kind of money would have to bring their own chairs and tables, and walk...

...If executions are ever televised, the viewers will react no differently than the multitudes jostling before the gallows at Tyburn, the ladies knitting at the foot of the guillotine, the many thousands who bought the Daily News for its photo of Ruth Snyder's last throes, the stadiums in China filled beyond capacity with those watching firing squads eliminating profiteers and black marketers...

...Vendors and hawkers pushed their way through the crowds, and the air was redolent with the smells of grilled and frying meats...

...have attempted to justify limitations on media access out of concern that it would give a mass murderer 'access to the public podium.'" Cochran's letter added, "Video is our society's common language...

...criminals from the lower classes got bowls of ale at St...

...This intense media interest was merely whetted when the FBI's bureaucratic ineptitude caused a delay of the execution date...

...Eliminating television interviews with Mr...

...the government needed 18 days to call 137 witnesses...

...That was not quite a request for live cameras at the moment of lethal injection, but the arguments could not be far different...

...All this, of course, took us a long way from the public executions of history...

...McVeigh will significantly affect the content of information about his final days and upcoming execution, resulting in impermissible content-based discrimination...

...Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who granted the bereaved family members their request to watch the execution on closed-circuit TV, said he would not let the condemned man determine any of the conditions of his execution...

...It described what the visitor would see: "The rope being put about his neck, he is fastened to the fatal tree when, a proper time being allowed for prayer and singing ahymn, the cart is withdrawn and the penitent criminal is...

...But an execution might be different...

...It has been estimated, however, that fully nine-tenths of those executed were young men not yet21...

...But this was the position of only some who wanted McVeigh's execution televised...

...Crowds would gather along the entire three-mile procession...

...A Washington Post reporter discovered that for $1,146.50 per journalist a local firm...

...Foreigners were particularly impressed by how the atmosphere of the occasion affected the condemned...

...The man who enjoys his coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit it out at the least detail...

...Many took care to present themselves in their finest clothes and carefully prepared their final words, trying their best to achieve a well-crafted quip...

...The U. S. Supreme Court has recognized only two state interests that justify limiting prison access: security and the orderly administration of justice," Cochran wrote to Ashcroft...

...Throughout the ages, it was noted, they provided a deterrent to the criminal classes...

...This is, after all, the century of Buck Rogers...

...Tyburn was the name of a stream that made its way down to the Thames...

...In the United States there have been many recent executions in state prisons, but the Federal justice system has not carried one out since 1963...

...Beneath the bravado of the Right-wing nihilist, a terrified boy might be discernible...