Coverage of the 1989 earthquake and the domestic partnership bill - 03 November 1989

When, two, three days after the earthquake and I was still in New York, when everybody was praising the dawn-to-midnight job the television networks were doing, several friends telephoned who knew that we'd planned to be in San Francisco during the first two weeks of November.

I'd had my eye for some time on the city election, which is about to exercise California's fondness for referendums in two very important votes. One proposition, which is what these referendums are called, was to build a new baseball stadium in midtown, therefore to tear down or desert the present one, Candlestick Park, on its fog-blown location down the peninsula. It is coldest and most fog-blown in July and August at the height of the baseball season and recalls Mark Twain's famous crack "the coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco".

The other proposition is one that would institute a law which I believe would be unique in the country. It would allow homosexuals to register with their partners as married couples and therefore be qualified to receive all the legal benefits by way of healthcare, unemployment, property and inheritance rights of any other married couple. Imagine what this could do to the city budget.

However, the election, as you hear this talk, is only days away, Tuesday 7 November, and no doubt we'll have much to say about it next time. I was saying, in the midst of the telephone inferno, we were watching on that infamous night of Tuesday 17 October, and the next day and the next, close friends called and said with one voice, in several variations, "Of course you won't be going to San Francisco now". The answer was, "Of course we are."

Not because we're brave or fond of defying the omens, but because we, too, had seen the lurid television coverage of the four locations that were badly damaged but we already knew that something like 99.9% of this white city toppling over nine hills had not toppled at all and was not so miraculously intact, because, as I mentioned two weeks ago, of the three earthquake building codes, each more stringent than the previous one, which had been enforced at long intervals since 1907.

Even by the end of the first week, we knew that the earthquake had rumbled over an area about 180 miles from south to north and about 10 miles inland between the coast and beyond the East Bay – a population in all of about 1.5 million and, in all, 69 people died.

In San Francisco alone there are 130,000 buildings. Four hundred were destroyed or condemned. So we flew here last Saturday in the brilliant and balmy fall weather, which is when they ought to be playing baseball out here, and driving in from the airport and then in the following days mooching around town, all that we saw, at very wide intervals of several miles, were those orange traffic cones on sidewalks, strung together with ropes, up against buildings that looked firm enough but were evidently about to be inspected for structural damage.

However, I was right when I guessed last time that the television coverage, the exclusive emphasis on flame and rubble, collapsed houses and slumped bridges, would exact a high price from the people it was pretending to be mourning for – the San Franciscans themselves.

The damage to the city's economy, to tourism, was far more severe than I'd guessed. Popular restaurant with about a fifth of their usual trade, the hotels down to 28% occupancy. The slump plainly affects every trade and job that services tourists, from the wholesale food distributors down to lowliest busboy and waiter.

A cab driver told me that the only men who made a packet were the ones who, the day after the earthquake, helped to empty all the hotels by driving to the airport the thousands of hysterical fugitives from the sinking ship.

Soon afterwards, once power had been restored everywhere, the stark word came in from scores of business organisations, unions, lawyers, fraternal societies, librarians, the like... "Regret, please cancel the 60, 100, 200 rooms previously reserved for our annual conference or convention".

I don't know if anyone in New York, in authority, in the television networks, has called together the teams that they flew out here to the firing line and blasted them for their prurience, their unblinking focus on death and disaster.

I'm afraid an official scolding is highly unlikely. For this fall has seen the arrival on the television scene of a new and nasty type of news programme in which film of the participants in an actual event is embroidered with filmed sequences of what might have happened.

The most flagrant example I've seen is a story that's been hanging around for several months. A former American ambassador, a career man, has been suspended by the state department while it looks into charges that he had passed security secrets to the Soviet Union.

When this suspicion first broke, the man was dogged, from day to day, wherever he went, by television crews and reporters shoving microphones practically up his nose for comment. He went his way, day after day, and made no comment.

The state department has had two months or more to produce evidence which would lead to criminal charges but so far, none has been brought. This is very tiresome to the networks, so the man's story has been retold and fleshed out with active scenes, one of which shows the man, played by an actor, passing papers to another actor, representing a Soviet agent.

The haunting possibility of libel, I suppose, was countered by a printed subtitle which said "simulation", by way of conscientiously informing the viewer that we don't know if what you saw ever actually happened, but it could have, couldn't it? This dreadful practice is already establishing itself as a serious type of news programme.

More sinister still, and more permanently persuasive to intelligent viewers, is what we now call "docudrama". Dramas, so-labelled docudramas, about famous people, still alive, or only recently dead, woven around the public incidents of their lives and sourced, more often than not, with tasty – that is to say, imagined – details of their private lives.

We’ve all seen docudramas about Hitler and his gang, about Churchill, about Nehru, then came one about Kennedy's Cabinet and their handling of the Cuban missile crisis. We've had them about the Mountbattens, about the present Prince and Princess of Wales.

Now, last Sunday, a powerful one about the last days of Richard Nixon's presidency. At the end of it, there was a scene in which Nixon begs his secretary of state to kneel down and pray with him. They do so. And Nixon's shoulders and his spirit broke down in a flood of sobs. This never happened. Mr. Nixon says so. Mr. Kissinger said so again, only last week.

I have to say it's a form of drama I deeply dislike because it creates and then impresses a view of character beyond the known record and even if it doesn't play it for sentimentalism and melodrama, it presumes to know things about a private character that cannot be known, so it's an assault on what the United Nations charter defines as the first human right, the dignity of the individual.

The only drama of this kind I have greatly admired was Edward and Mrs Simpson because it concentrated carefully and brilliantly on the constitutional issue and because all the dialogue, apart from the lovey-dovey exchanges we couldn't possibly know about, was taken from authentic records of parliamentary and Cabinet reports, from diaries and memoranda and memoirs of the participants.

But just about every other docudrama I've seen has filled me with baffled tears on behalf of everybody in it, the heroes, villains, extras and hangers on.

The docudrama is an extension, the licentious extension if you like, of what the networks did when they sent out from New York their star reporters, their anchormen, to cover the San Francisco earthquake. In one incident which gave wry pleasure to the local reporters, one of these stars was stopped by the police from coming close to the marina fire. He was kept a block away and could stand up only against a perfectly intact house.

So his crew got hold of a yellow tape which had printed on it "Police. Danger". They stretched it behind him so he could be seen to be at the battlefront. There was, at once, a brief fist fight between the humble local reporters and the big-time network men.

"This", said the locals, "is our territory. This is our town". So it was, and is. They will not soon lose the memory of the famous anchormen arriving on the scene in stretch limousines and, after a quick dab of pancake make-up, adjusting themselves to the horror behind them.

Of course it's pretty hard to look dishevelled in a $1,000 suit, but it has to be said that, slipping off the silk tie and opening up the collar was a praiseworthy effort to be at one with the common people in their hour of grief.

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