Fox News Showed a Suicide

YouTube A screen shot of Fox News’s coverage of a car chase that ended in an apparent suicide, posted to YouTube by BuzzFeed.

6:16 p.m. | Updated The Fox News Channel, in the course of  following a car chase live in Arizona, on Friday broadcast the suicide of  the man who was being pursued by the authorities.
The network anchor at the time, Shepard Smith, apologized to viewers after returning from a sudden commercial break. “That won’t happen again on my watch, and I’m sorry,” Mr. Smith said, clearly shaken by the circumstances.
The broadcast immediately spurred scrutiny about the network’s tendency to take car chases live during its daytime newscasts. Mr. Smith, in particular, has developed a reputation for his colorful play-by-play coverage of such scenes.
Mr. Smith had been following the chase, then switched to other news, including the violence in Syria, before returning to Arizona as the man being pursued pulled his car over. “Looks like he’s a little disoriented or something,” Mr. Smith said as the man ran down a path.
The Associated Press reported that the chase may have been provoked by a carjacking, adding that the police said the man was found dead at the scene.
The man left the car, then stepped a few feet off the path into a grassy area and pulled a gun out of his right pocket. He pulled the trigger and fell face-first to the ground before Fox cut to Mr. Smith, who was leaning forward and saying to his producers, “Get off, get off, get off, get off it.” He raised his voice and said again: “Get off it. Get off it.”
A Fox spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the network would continue to show such chases.
Car chases, captured by local news helicopters in some major cities, are frequently shown on a 5- to 10-second delay because of the possibility of violence. Fox and, to a lesser extent, several other national cable news networks, like HLN and MSNBC, sometimes pick up the local feeds, especially on relatively slow news days.
Mr. Smith said on the air afterward: “When the guy pulled over and got out of the vehicle, we went on delay. So that’s why I didn’t talk for about 10 seconds. We created a five-second delay, as if you were to bleep back your DVR five seconds. That’s what we did with the picture we were showing you, so we would see in the studio what was happening five seconds before you did, so that if anything went horribly wrong, we’d be able to cut away from it without subjecting you to it.”
But the Fox control room did not cut away in time. Then, Mr. Smith realized, it was too late.
He leaned back in his chair, disgusted, and the network cut to a commercial break.
After the break, Mr. Smith apologized at length. “We really messed up,” he said. “And we’re all very sorry. That didn’t belong on TV.”
The case called to mind a televised suicide in Los Angeles in 1998, when a man unfurled a banner that read “HMO’s are in it for the money. Live free, love safe or die,” then set his truck on fire and shot himself with a shotgun. The scene was broadcast live by several Los Angeles television stations, including two that had been running children’s programming beforehand. One of the stations’ feeds was repeated by the cable news channel MSNBC.
After that incident, some local stations apologized, put time delays on future live coverage and instructed aerial cameramen during to send back wide shots rather than close-ups during chases.