The fire had burned up to the back patio of the house and stopped.

It was a question to which the questioner has already given her subject the answer. But I don't know why I should have been surprised. It was typical non-network news coverage.

It not only denotes a complete lack of understanding on the part of the questioner; it's not really a question at all. It's just designed to keep listeners watching.

They aren't expecting an informational answer, just one with emotion. Naturally the homeowner is feeling lucky. Who wouldn't in view of the obvious circumstances? But the circumstances seem not to be obvious to the so-called newsperson—in this case a woman, but it doesn't matter. Male questioners ask equally stupid questions.

Indeed, it's the kind of question local television news reporters ask all the time. It's a little like asking Jackie Kennedy how she enjoyed her visit to Dallas. Alas, it's what passes for news coverage on some television news broadcasts, especially "local" news.

The questions aren't meant to elicit information. They're designed to draw some kind of visible and verbal reaction from the person being questioned. It's because television news is really just a show, entertainment, really. It's a play, a drama. It's acting.

The interviewers try to prod the interviewee into expressing happiness, fear, gloom, thankfulness, anger or any other kind of emotion that will show up on their faces and on the screen.

Pencil reporting, as we pencil press reporters used to call it, doesn't have this capacity, this handicap, as I think of it. Instead, the pencil press reporter gathers information from his or her subject and renders it into prose, capturing both the information and reaction, preferably information. After all, that's what reporting is all about.

Except it isn't in television news. Television news is visual as well as aural. It requires one more sense on the way toward some kind of total experience. Television news people would love it if it were a total experience. They try desperately to make it that way.

Hence their repeated claim to be "live," a claim that often becomes ludicrous. A TV news reporter is given to us "live" at the scene of the event that happened—except that it happened a few hours or maybe even a few days or even a few weeks ago. It is, in fact, about as dead as it can be, because what happened is past and no amount of telling us it is "live" is going to bring it back to life.

Dumb scenes like this include a reporter standing along the rocky Bay shore where Laci Peterson's body was found or a reporter standing in front of the pier where the Staten Island ferry crashed and so on.

Another favorite TV news trick, especially of continuous news networks like CNN and the various Fox channels, is to replay footage of an event now past when there isn't any other footage to play. Instances of this kind of hokum include constantly rerunning the Columbia shuttle disaster and rerunning scenes of mayhem around the site of the crashed Paris Concorde. We get to see the same trail of smoke and the fire engine passing before the camera again and again. There isn't anything else on file to show us.

Better this, so news executives reason, than looking at Wolf Blitzer's face yet once more. You still have to listen to his voice, though, repeating the same news over and over.

Radio news, on the other hand, seems to me to be a cut above television coverage and perhaps—and I hate to admit it—sometimes better than pencil reporting.

Maybe that's because radio reporting involves only one sense, the ear, and because it has to be more concise than the pencil. It also has to be descriptive to make the listener "see" the event. Most radio news reporters write their stories first and then read them, but they also are trained to ask questions that gather more than sound bites.

Extended radio coverage, as practiced on National Public Radio, for instance, is often insightful and, as the saying goes, sometimes even "in depth."

And there is still room in radio reporting for some display of emotion, more than you're likely to find in a printed story, for instance, but less than most television news employs.

Radio reporting doesn't depend on phony "live" coverage. Sometimes it is live, though, really live, as for instance, with NPR's Anne Garrels, watching from her hotel window as American troops invaded Baghdad, the listener was there with her. But more often it is edited from tape just as a newspaper story is put together, sometimes from several reporters.

And most radio reporters seem to ask questions that make sense, not nonsense, even when they ask it remotely. A lot of radio reporting these days happens via telephone or satellite telephone. The questioner is in one location, the interviewee in another, though the good reporter doesn't make this obvious.

And for some reason radio reporting seldom descends to the level of "How lucky are you feeling?"

If you're lucky, my guess is you get your news from something other than television.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to Almaden Resident.