How It Played (When You Become the Lead Story, part 8)

After our Wednesday morning outing for the KXL interview, Carole was pretty wiped out. There was nothing else but to wait and see what the media would do, so I chose to put in a few hours with one of my part-time employers, the Portland Streetcar.

In a coincidence much like the one that had put me near the scene when Carole was hit a week and a half before, I was on duty and riding across the Tilikum Crossing bridge from the west to the east side shortly after 5:00 p.m., when I looked out at the collision site and noticed someone standing there in a yellow slicker with a video camera close by. I surmised that one of the TV stations might be doing a live feed about Carole’s story, so I called her immediately on my cell phone and told her to switch on the TV.


Thus, Carole got to see KGW’s Christine Pitawanich deliver the lead story live from the collision site about six blocks north of our apartment. The two-and-a-half-minute report included not only the Trimet video clip (which they ran three times; we also saw it used as a teaser for various newscasts that night), but excerpts from our interviews in the KXL sound booth (that’s my elbow prominently on display in a green polo shirt) and at the PSU Urban Center, where I got a couple seconds of on-camera talk time.

Carole said she later caught much the same report on KGW at six o’clock, and we heard the station had run something at four as well.

Meanwhile, a reporter from KPTV/Fox News channel 12 called us at home and asked if she could interview Carole. My exhausted wife did not want to leave the apartment again, but we told the reporter, Kaitlyn Bolduc, if she came to our building with a camera, we could oblige her. It must have been 7:30 or 8 when the Fox team arrived and did a quickie interview with us in a common space at our apartment complex.

Bolduc was clearly unaware that KGW had already run our story several times by then. I gathered she (or the producer who had assigned her the story) was responding to the report that had appeared on BikePortland.org that morning, as well as the release of the Trimet video, which was probably first viewable in public on BikePortland.org very shortly after 12 noon. Bolduc told us they hoped to get something on the Ten o’Clock News, and she did.

In its two-and-a-half-minute segment, KPTV Fox 12 managed to show the impact in the Trimet platform video five times: three in quick succession during the 30 seconds between 1:15 and 1:45 alone.

The stories mostly speak for themselves, but there’s one interesting visual facet to the coverage by both stations that I’d like to discuss. Here’s how the bicycle signal that’s right at the pedestrian crossing was depicted in the KGW story at 1:40:

And although there’s a four-second shot of the light starting at 0:40 in the Fox story, there’s another at 1:40 that shows much the same perspective as the one above in the KGW report:

KGW even added a closeup of a green light on the bicycle signal at 1:44:

The signal looks pretty sizable in all these shots, doesn’t it? Especially with pedestrians and sometimes vehicles in the background. If you’ve driven around Portland, even through the intersection at SW Moody and Meade only 50 yards to the west of this spot, you might readily assume this is one of the bicycle signals you see there.

It’s not. Here’s how it looks when I stand next to it:

The actual green light you see in the KGW closeup above is only 3 inches across. The height of the entire signal is 17 inches -- a foot and a half. Measured from the bottom, the signal is only five feet, six inches from the ground.

So I wouldn’t blame viewers who have never been to the site, if they might have been misled by the TV coverage.

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 1” -- introduction

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 2” -- the setting and a bum steer

Read “When You Become the Lead Story, part 3” -- immediate aftermath

Read “Two-Plus Days in the Hospital (When You Become the Lead Story, part 4)

Read “The Search for Official Evidence (When You Become the Lead Story, part 5)”

Read “Going to the Media (When You Become the Lead Story, part 6)”

Read “Why Our Tale Struck Gold” (When You Become the Lead Story, part 7)”