A View to a Kill: How Low Can TV Go? : The shooting in a Florida cemetery was horrible, valueless as news. Six L.A. stations and a national network exploited it--because they could.

This time it wasn’t “A Current Affair” or “Hard Copy” or the saga of Amy Fisher or any other television story re-enacting a grisly crime.

It was living-color real, affirmation that the gap separating mainstream TV and the 1976 satirical movie “Network”--Paddy Chayefsky’s prophetic, worst-case scenario for a broadcasting industry madly driven by ratings--has dramatically narrowed.

It was deadly. It was ugly. It was gruesome. It was horrible. It was unnecessary. It was valueless as news. And six Los Angeles stations and a national network put it on the air Tuesday night, splashed it across the screen, swam in it, exulted in it, exploited it. Because they could.

‘It” was the footage and sound of a man identified as Emilio Nunez killing his former wife--emptying his revolver into her--at a North Lauderdale, Fla., cemetery where he had been visiting the grave of their teen-age daughter, who had committed suicide.

Some of the details of the case are still vague. But on the scene with Nunez before the shooting were reporter Ingrid Cruz and a cameraman from “Occurrio Asi” (“It Happened Like This”), a tabloid show on the Spanish-language Telemundo network. The crew was taping Nunez when his ex-wife, Maritza Martin Munoz, showed up. She kept walking as Cruz attempted to interview her. Suddenly, Nunez appeared from behind and shot Munoz, and continued shooting her as she lay on the ground.

There was chaos, someone shouted “Vamanos!” (“Let’s go!”), and the camera, now stationary on the ground but still turned on, showed the feet of someone getting into a vehicle.

Was this just a remarkable coincidence? Did Munoz inexplicably just happen onto the scene and then walk into this hail of bullets? Or had the tabloid show set up confrontation, hoping for a nonviolent clash, only to have its plan tragically backfire? Was this another example of a tabloid program wanting to take things perilously to the edge and then pull back, only to be yanked into the abyss as in Geraldo Rivera’s famous race-riot show involving white supremacists and an African-American?

Whatever the case, the entire cemetery sequence lasted about 45 seconds. Apparently proud of what it had--a real-life killing on camera--”Occurrio Asi” or Telemundo decided to share its bounty with other TV outlets.

And the self-serving hucksters snapped it up, capitalizing on tragedy for the sake of creating unforgettable ghastly TV.

Would it traumatize? Would it desensitize? Do these people even ponder such questions? Even preceded by the appropriate warnings, showing the footage was inexcusable.

At his worst, embattled radio personality Howard Stern was never this bad or as potentially damaging to the psyches of the young children he is accused of harming with his raw language and sometimes nasty harangues.

Telemundo and “NBC Nightly News” aired the footage, and in Los Angeles, so did local newscasts on KNBC-TV Channel 4, KCBS-TV Channel 2, KTTV-TV Channel 11, KCAL-TV Channel 9, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and KCOP-TV Channel 13.

To its credit, KABC-TV Channel 7 did not show the killing, and to his credit, Channel 13 news director Jeff Wald later said he regretted his station airing it, calling the footage “tasteless and irrelevant.”

Doing his Dr. Irwin Corey impression, though, Channel 5 news director Warren Cereghino has justified airing the footage on the basis that it illustrated “the unfortunate domestic violence and emotion escalating to such a violent level.” In other words, he showed the killing because it was a killing.

Even spacier was Kerry Oslund, executive producer of KCAL’s 9 p.m. newscast, who acknowledged that the footage had only “shock value” but rationalized its appearance on Channel 9 anyway as being part of an “ethical debate” on whether it should be shown. That is to say, should we or should we not have shown the killing we just showed in order to shock you? You make the call, sports fans.

In defense of running the footage, both Cereghino and Channel 11 news director Jose Rios noted also that it wasn’t “gory.” No blood-splattering, no contorted face of the victim, no close-up of the body, just a man repeatedly shooting a woman, a slaying executed so speedily that its ultimate consequence seemed almost blurred.

This surrealism--TV potentially turning death into an abstraction--was all the more reason not to run it, however. The abstraction grew when Channel 2--whose news director, John Lippman, is said to repeatedly urge his editorial staff to “scare viewers to death”--used the excuse of Nunez’s capture by police to rerun the killing on its 6 p.m. Wednesday newscast--without sound.

This time it wasn’t Channel 2’s Pat Lalama, live at 6 p.m. where a shooting happened at 2 a.m., or Fred Villanueva, live at 6:04 p.m. at the site of a 6:30 a.m. shooting. At last, thanks to Telemundo, Channel 2 had caught up with a crime, this time being able to not merely describe it, but to show it in progress.

Afterward, a somber Bree Walker routinely attached the obligatory anchor exclamation point: “Graphic evidence of just how fast a life can be snuffed out. Right there on videotape. Incredible. Shocking.”

She forgot to add “gratuitous.”

Personified by the televised assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, death on camera has a history. Troubled Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer may have known that when in 1987 he called a press conference and, with cameras rolling, inserted the barrel of a .357 magnum pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Only some Pennsylvania stations showed the suicide’s bloody conclusion. Other stations showed the news conference up to the point of Dwyer pulling the trigger. Locally, Channel 11 added its own touch, using a sound of the gunshot along with a freeze-frame of Dwyer holding his gun.

Compared with footage of the cemetery killing, that now seems almost quaint, an indication of just how far TV standards have plummeted in just six years.

It’s sometimes necessary, even crucial, to show violence within the context of a legitimate news story--as, for example, with the landmark footage of Los Angeles police savagely thrashing Rodney G. King, or the Los Angeles riots, including Reginald Denny being pulled from his truck and beaten almost to death.

Moreover, showing death is the ultimate means of desanitizing war: Witness the famous picture of a young Viet Cong suspect getting his brains blown out at point-blank range by a South Vietnam police chief in 1968, or footage of Buddhist monks torching themselves in Vietnam to publicize their grievances.

But show a killing in a Florida cemetery for no reason other than that a camera was there to record it? Show something this horrid that would have merited no notice outside of Florida were it not for the pictures? There’s simply no justification for it.

In writing about the Dwyer case, I speculated about what domino might fall next should TV begin sending suicides into our home: “Televised murders?” It seemed a fanciful thought at the time, but now it has come to pass.