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The press, no matter its nationality, thrives on red meat. Red meat is disaster, tragedy, conflict - wars, assassination, a Jonestown massacre, exploding coal mines.
The Three Mile Island nuclear accident was red meat, of a sort never before experienced by the press: all the fine fiber of a Delmonico. It was a story of technology run amok, man forced from his home by the peaceful atom, the prospect of a stretch of the eastern seaboard being turned into an irradiated wasteland.
It was a helluva story and the media turned out in force. They came from around the world to witness this "event," as the nuclear technicians were calling it, and they came in droves.
By conservative estimates, there were 300 journalists and media technicians on the scene. No one knew who all of them were, where they all came from, or how many there were, but it was plain that few red meat events had ever drawn this kind of attention. It was a media event of such dimension that the Columbia Journalism Review sent two reporters to write a piece about the reporters. Rolling Stone magazine contracted with Mike Gray, an engineer who did the screenplay for "The China Syndrome," to tell the story of Three Mile Island – chillingly similar to his film fantasy.
The United States, Canada, England, West Germany, Japan, France, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden - all were represented. Radio and television, independents and networks. Large papers, small papers, magazines. Vans from Action News and Eyewitness News and See It Now cruised the streets of Middletown and lined the road across from Three Mile Island. Camera crews roamed through little Middletown.
Mayor Robert Reid, an easygoing and gracious schoolteacher, said he gave at least 100 interviews. He took calls from all over the country and from abroad. His fellow townsmen adjusted to the invasion as well as he did. They willingly gave interviews and many kept count of which papers and which stations had sought their views. A civil defense worker who was pictured in Newsweek's post-accident coverage was teasingly called "star" by his pals. A drugstore clerk, having read her remarks in a newspaper, thanked a reporter the next day for the "miracle" of quoting her correctly. She said it with a smile.
The volume of material sent from the area was prodigious. Major newspapers printed two, four, eight stories each day on the event. The Philadelphia Inquirer sent more than a dozen reporters to turn out a special section each day. During the daytime cycle on Friday, March 30 - the tense day of the hydrogen bubble crisis - the Associated Press rewrote its lead story a record 27 times because of the fast-changing situation.
Just as unrelenting was the quest for local color, the seasoning of red meat stories. Reporters quickly identified the Railroad House, a Middletown bar adjacent to the Penn Central tracks, as the place to go to rub shoulders with workers from the plant. Workers were not all that communicative - many felt the press was blowing the incident out of proportion.
No wonder. An NBC camera crew showed up at the bar to film the scene of distraught workers crying in their beer. The network men played the same jukebox song over and over to provide appropriate sound backup. Not long after that, an ABC crew showed up with the same idea. They fed coins into the jukebox, playing the same country song again to get just the right effect.
Middletown dealt with these intrusions in good spirit. A downtown merchant reacted to the ubiquitous camera crews with his own spoof. He stationed a youngster with a minicamera inside the front window, filming passersby and projecting the image onto a large TV screen facing the street. At Karl Kupp's diner, a gathering spot that features homebaked pies and classic smalltown banter, out-of-town reporters were joshed by Kupp and patrons alike. For all the grimness of events unfolding down the road at Three Mile Island, Middletown could smile at itself and these newsgathering strangers.
The logistics became an enormous problem. When President Carter decided to visit Middletown, the gym in the borough hall was converted into a press center by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The daily press briefings were held there, almost as raucous as the briefings by Three Mile Island operator Metropolitan Edison Co., and NRC press aide Joe Fouchard pleaded with the reporters to "discipline yourselves."
Because of the complexity of the story, NRC brought press assistants from field offices around the country. They were available to answer technical questions, and often did so with careful detail. But even the flacks had problems. "I finally did something right," said NRC's Karl Abraham after arranging with a printer to have a briefing transcript delivered in 90 minutes. The printer missed his deadline by several hours and reporters were seething. Abraham could only shrug his shoulders.
NRC's words and those of anyone else who was quoted were sent to the outside world by telephone, facsimile machine, radio, air. NBC ferried its crews between a motel and the plant site by helicopter. The New York Times sent an editor from the home off ice to direct its news team. One organization dedicated an editor fulltime to harassing Pennsylvania Bell until it installed a telephone in the Middletown press center for private use of the newspaper. Newsweek had a team of nine on the scene, CBS more than 40.
Reporters in some cases ended up interviewing each other. In Middletown, a TV crew photographed two reporters standing on a corner eating slices of pizza. On the Friday when Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh warned area residents to take cover, the community of Falmouth, a mile or so south of the plant, became a ghost town. Helen Rank, reporting for the weekly in nearby Elizabethtown, stopped in the village to conduct interviews. She found only a reporter from Washington, D.C. They exchanged views and took notes.
Looking back on it, Jim Hill, a reporter for the York Daily Record, a paper published about a dozen miles from the island, wrote: "After three days feeding on the carcass of Three Mile Island, I was beginning to feel as ugly as what I ate. There was nothing delicious about this story."
Hill was right. There was nothing delicious about the story. It was a painful, distasteful one for some, who feared its potential. Reporters themselves could be victims of the ultimate disaster. Unlike a war or a riot, where refuge can be found from bullets and bricks, there was no refuge from invisible, tasteless, odorless radiation. If the unthinkable happened at Three Mile Island, if there was a core meltdown in the reactor, radiation would not discriminate.
Most editors understood that. Some sent in radiation exposure badges for their staffs. Others rotated reporters in and out of the area as a precaution against possible overexposure. AP shipped breathing devices and protective clothing for its staffers.
The fear was real. Jack Knarr, a columnist for the Philadelphia Journal, stayed at home. He wrote a piece saying "these people are nuts." An editor wanted him to go to Harrisburg and Knarr said, no way.
Paul Critchlow, the governor's press secretary, saw it from another angle. He remembered the Saturday night, just after 9 o'clock, when the Associated Press reported that the hydrogen bubble in the reactor was about to explode.
"About 20 or 30 reporters burst through the door of this office," he said. "They said: 'We want to know if our lives are in danger. What the hell's going on here? We want to know if we have to get out.' . . . They were pale. They were frightened. At that point, they had lost an interest in the story they were supposed to be covering."
There was cloak-and-dagger stuff, too, which would be humorous in movies but was even richer in reality. One night, alerted by a rumor that Carter was arriving any moment, a gaggle of photographers burst out of Lombardo's restaurant in Harrisburg, each toting uneaten, expensive, Italian dinners in doggy bags. Another evening, two Philadelphia Inquirer reporters monitored a radio conversation between two Met Ed employees on a secret channel. They were talking about a leak of hydrogen. "Shut the damn thing down and quit screwing around," one man said. The next day, the NRC's Harold Denton was startled when the Inquirer reporters read him a transcript of the confidential conversion. He explained, after hearing the details, what was going on. No great revelation.
If it was a fear-inspiring story, it also was a confusing and complicated one for most reporters, unschooled in the language and the complexities of nuclear science. The Chicago Tribune hired a professor as a technical adviser. A network did likewise. It was, ultimately, a story in which answers could be provided only by a small group of experts.
Before the NRC on Sunday, April 1, took over the sole role of issuing formal statements, confusion and contradiction had been rampant. Met Ed's press conferences degenerated into shouting matches, frustrated and belligerent reporters challenging John Herbein, the company's vice president for power generation.
Herbein brought it on himself, in a way. His style was clear on the afternoon of the first day, when he sat down with Lt. Gov. William Scranton III to explain the situation. He provided an "encouraging picture," Critchlow said, with "the situation very much under control." No radiation emissions, he reported. Then the state people confronted him: Their own environmental resources teams had detected radiation. What about it? Oh, yes, Herbein acknowledged, between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. the company has been putting gas into the air above the island. Had Herbein told the press? "They didn't ask," he told Critchlow.
An oversight, for certain.