This minute, I’m going to leave you with a question to answer.

Way back in 1992… Rodney King was severely beaten by police officers.  who were later found     not guilty and there were riots in Los Angeles. Other cities feared it would spread… and in New York … where I was a young anchor with CBS .. businesses had boarded up their windows and shut down for the day fearing the worst.

At CBS we had what’s called a “stylebook.”  A *thick* loose leaf notebook that told us what we could say on the air… and what we couldn’t.  And one of the rules was that you could *never* use the word “riot” while a protest was in progress…  the belief being … just the use of that loaded word would fan the flames while the disturbance is in progress.

There were no riots in New York after the Rodney King verdict.  But that’s only part of the story.  We had a reporter on the ground in a rough section of Brooklyn…. watching an ugly disturbance.  rock throwing and window breaking.  Soon as he’d gone on the air… the Mayor’s office called to insist  we stop reporting *live* play by play of the incident. 

At the instruction of our news director..  right or wrong… there was no more live reporting from the scene.  And without any live play-by-play… the situation fizzled.  The rock throwing and window breaking remained an isolated incident… barely reported with a shrug.

At the same time time Los Angeles was burning on live television.  

Did we make the right decision in New York?  Failing to tell the story… or succesfully preventing a riot?   I don’t know.  But I’m thinking about that day almost 30 years ago…  after watching the arrest of that CNN crew this morning  in Minneapolis 

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