The Intersection Between Media and Law: Television News in COVID-19 and Beyond

“In order to produce a good news story, it really comes down to the people and letting them tell the story,” said ABC 10News reporter Adam Racusin during last month’s Bench/Bar Lunch & Learn, at which 10News journalists gave insight into the production of television news including legal journalism.

The April 29 event featured remarks from Todd Reed, Brad McLellan, Adam Racusin, and Mimi Elkala of 10News KGTV, ABC’s local San Diego affiliate. Reed is 10News’s newly appointed news director who formerly served as executive producer of “America Tonight,” Al Jazeera America’s flagship news program. McLellan has been an assignment editor at KGTV for the past 43 years of his 46-year tenure with the station. Racusin is an investigative reporter, often covering court-related stories, who worked at news stations across the country before landing at 10News in 2015. Elkala is a general assignment reporter who has covered a number of high-profile court cases in her six years at the station.

ABC 10News produces 44 hours of TV news content weekly: seven hours daily Monday through Friday and 4.5 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. To create all of this content, the 10News journalists are early risers, rising as early as 4 a.m. to keep abreast of the latest news and start planning coverage, all before the morning editorial meeting. Then it’s a matter of conducting interviews, editing video footage, writing and recording scripts, creating print articles for the web, and getting ready for the station’s evening broadcasts. Some events, such as jury verdict announcements in key cases, are livestreamed online separate from the scheduled TV broadcasts.

McLellan, who joined the station in the 1980’s, noted that social media has created greater demands for the quick delivery of information.

“People don’t wait for newscasts anymore; with social media, our deadlines now are immediate,” he said. “Once we find out about something, we verify it, check for accuracy, and when we feel confident we can go with that story, we work very closely with our digital team to get that information out immediately.”

The journalists discussed how the pandemic affected the content and production of TV news. Content-wise, pandemic coverage dominated over other usual news topics like sports. Production-wise, the station had to adapt to social distancing both in the newsroom and out in the field. 

“These were unprecedented times in which we were learning as we were going along,” Reed recounted. “We didn’t know what would work and what wouldn’t work: how do we accomplish a live shot, how do we talk to somebody and still be cognizant of social distancing? Everyone has a mask on, so it’s hard to hear audio and you can’t ready anybody’s lips. It presented quite the challenge, but we were able to overcome it, and now we are slowly getting back to whatever this new normal is.”

Reed also believes that pandemic news reporting molded the newsroom into better journalists.

“We became the source for information more than ever before,” he said. “Editorially, it made us think — how do we tell this story differently, what angles can we pursue today, how do we keep it interesting. I would argue it made us better storytellers.”

Alongside the fast pace of daily news production, investigative reporters like Racusin work on longer-term investigative pieces. For one law-related piece, it took the news station six weeks to get all of the required legal permissions to conduct a critical interview of a detainee for a pre-pandemic article on immigration at the border. Before conducting that interview, the station had to obtain permission from the Court, the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The process took six weeks in part because the station had to obtain a federal court order authorizing the interview.

“The man’s story was so important to understanding what was going on at the root of everything,” Racusin said. “That’s what makes a good court-related story.”

Accuracy and ethicality are essential for both lawyers and journalists. Akin to the Rules of Professional Responsibility for lawyers, journalists abide by the Code of Ethics promulgated by the Society of Professional Journalists. The media company that owns KGTV even has a Chief Ethics Officer who is an attorney specializing in journalism-related legal and ethical issues.

Essential to being a good attorney or journalist is listening carefully, collecting all the facts, and giving people a reason to trust you, Elkala emphasized.

Summarized Reed, “Ethics is our guiding light. As a local news station, we’re here because we’re inquisitive, we want to help our community, and we want to leave our community a better place.”