Sniper surrounded on all sides by psychobabble

Somewhere inside the mind of a serial sniper

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It’s very crowded in here.

And no wonder, for television’s minions have spent this month rummaging through the brain of the Washington, D.C., triggerman whose lethal moves and motivations remain baffling even after Thursday morning’s wee-hours arrests in connection with the shootings.

Like the case, coverage of it has yielded much more ambiguity than fact, as many in the media set aside their roles as reporters and indulged in guesswork that assumed a life of its own.

Of all the slack conjecture driving coverage of this case, nothing has been more psychedelically absurd than TV’s junior Freuds putting on the couch someone they’ve never met or seen. Rarely have so many with so little to say said so much, from criminal profilers speaking smugly of the sniper’s “God complex” to the media’s own amateur shrinks blabbing on and on while madly chasing one sniper scenario after another in some of the sloppiest TV journalism in memory.

Meanwhile, it was all sniper nearly all of the time this week, with only rare interludes of other news as police authorities found TV highly useful as a conduit to reach someone they believed to be a murderous shooter.

There have been a few striking exceptions to the media’s loose lips, one being the meticulous reporting of CNN’s Kelli Arena throughout these weeks of turbulence. Arena, who covers the Department of Justice, was notably circumspect and restrained, for example, when her own network and other 24-hour news channels suffered a Tacoma, Wash., meltdown in the period leading to Thursday morning’s arrest of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo as they slept in their car.

Her most admirable quote: “I don’t know.”

The confusing Wednesday fiasco began when Seattle stations rolled into a Tacoma neighborhood and fed cable news channels and others live coverage of feds and local cops digging up a backyard, deep into the evening, and making off with a tree stump rumored by TV news to have been used for target practice.

By the sniper? Giving this episode weight was the coverage’s crime-busting tone -- although the ultimate outcome of the search remained to be determined -- and extended live chopper footage of a rental truck traveling down a road with a tree stump inside.

Of equal interest were the tree stumps covering the story.

Los Angeles stations swiftly dispatched reporters to Tacoma, one of them KNBC anchor Chuck Henry, who appeared to be having an out-of-body experience on the 11 p.m. news while coughing up uninformed live reports so dense and convoluted as to be unfathomable.

Arena’s polar opposite Wednesday night, though, was Shepard Smith, the crescendoing Fox News Channel anchor who quoted Seattle stations as reporting that “the sniper is an American of Hispanic extraction.” Smith seemed pretty sure of that himself too. He was even more emphatic when babbling: “It’s possible that person is now in custody! It’s possible that person is under surveillance! It’s possible that person is out there somewhere!” In other words, Smith seemed to be saying, everything was possible.

Now there’s a mind to visit.

Instead, as the TV drum roll swelled deafeningly in Tacoma, former FBI profiler Candice DeLong led MSNBC viewers through a tour of “the mind of the sniper.” And on CNN, anchor Aaron Brown wondered what the sniper must be “thinking”’ if watching the Tacoma search on TV. “His blood pressure is going up,” answered forensic psychologist Harley Stock.

The mind-play began much earlier, of course. As in Bill Hemmer’s response on CNN to Tuesday’s fatal shooting of a bus driver near where earlier sniper attacks had occurred: “In essence, what he’s saying is not only can you not catch me, Mr. Policeman, but the Pentagon [whose surveillance planes were circling the area] can’t catch me either.”

Sniper psycho-chat also floated in from afar, as in criminal profiler Pat Brown informing CBS News from Minneapolis: “This is his entire mission in life. He hasn’t had much success before. He wants to go down in [history] as a tarot card killer or something like that.”

And ...

“Up next, a look inside the sniper’s mind,” boomed “Hardball” host Chris Matthews on MSNBC.

On “Larry King Live,” meanwhile, “power, ego, narcissism” was the capsule sniper diagnosis of TV host John Walsh, who has somehow emerged as an expert on all crimes. As if having a Vulcan mind meld with the killer, Walsh added in the sniper’s voice: “I’m a low life that’s never accomplished anything in my life. Now I hold a whole area in fear.”

On and on it went, with even Dr. Phil getting in his two cents, courtesy of KNBC, the station that runs his syndicated series. And Joyce Brothers was exhumed for a few sound bites of her own.

Usual media rutabagas aside, some of these TV-launched chin strokers are smart, impressively pedigreed and even could have been right about the sniper. The bigger point is that this was guesswork, not news. And ... they could have been wrong.

In fact, much of the coverage has risen, brick by brick, from a bedrock of shameless speculation and uninformed theorizing. MSNBC’s Bill Press: “And the fourth theory is ... “ Dumb inevitably would bring even dumber, for if the sniper possibly was a marksman, most TV types sprayed lead from the hip. “So you think,” a Fox anchor asked a criminologist, “that he shoots, stashes his gun and heads out?”

Click.

At one point, CNN anchor Miles O’Brien was “seeing considerable evidence that there might be a conspiracy here,” and wondered, if there were a pair of snipers, what would happen if “they differ on strategy?”

Click.

Almost a hazy memory by Thursday was Monday’s frenzied live coverage of a white van parked beside an outdoor phone at a Richmond, Va., service station, where a SWAT operation yielded two men being taken into custody in the sniper case.

“If you are just joining us, we are hoping this is the end,” said Fox anchor Jon Scott. “The indications,” he added, “are that police are fairly confident now that they may have apprehended” the sniper.

Oh, yeah.

The white van was loaded on a flatbed and hauled away, its route shown live by choppers, because it might have been ambushed by Ninja warriors.

“And that van could hold a treasure trove of clues?” an MSNBC anchor asked a criminologist. The reply: “Oh, absolutely.”

Then came eyewitnesses to the SWAT operation. “They kept their weapons shouldered when the approached the van,” one told CNN. A Fox anchor was on the phone with another eyewitness: “And you’re suggesting whoever was behind the wheel of the white van might be a copycat?”

Then came Polaroid pictures -- taken by someone next door -- of the SWAT team making its move, as the media’s low burlesque again attached itself to high tragedy.

The knee-jerk TV operation also had misfire written all over it, for the men taken into custody turned out to be only undocumented aliens, who were turned over to immigration authorities.

As this is being written, official charges had not been filed against Williams and Malvo, although the tone of TV’s coverage left little doubt that one or both was closely connected to the shootings. We’ll see.

Needing to be amended is the old saw about news being a first draft of history, because on TV, it’s scribbled raw notes. Newscasters for years have used their live cameras to report their own, minute-by-minute news-gathering process. Calling it news, they skip over their miscues while feeling they’ve done their job if they get everything right by the end of the evening.

If they don’t? There’s always tomorrow.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at [email protected]