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Today marked the 30th anniversary of the kneecapping of Nancy Kerrigan. The Jan. 6, 1994, attack on the figure skater was soon traced to Portland rival Tonya Harding, whose ex-husband had hired cronies to commit the crime. Harding’s involvement—witting or not—launched the biggest tabloid scandal Oregon had ever seen. This account of the media circus appeared in the Jan. 20, 1994, edition of WW.
Because journalists aren’t doctors, they feel free to give the public what it wants, not what it needs. This explains the hype last week over Tonya Harding. Even with Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings covering the globally significant Clinton-Yeltsin summit in Moscow, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday nights’ newscasts all went first to Portland for the latest trashy tidbits.
The only thing more overblown than the Nancy Kerrigan crime plot was the media hysteria that followed it. More than 150 reporters from Beaverton to Boston descended on Portland to cover the best tabloid story in Oregon since Bruce Springsteen married Julianne Phillips—that’s as many journalists as were here for President Clinton’s Forest Conference in April (but smaller than the crush covering the Olympic basketball Dream Team in 1992).
Easily amused paparazzi swarmed all week, day and night, outside Tonya Harding’s Beavercreek home and at the Justice Center Jail downtown, staking out the places where members of the Harding Gang would most likely turn up.
Most reporters roomed at the Downtown Marriott, including a pair from the tabloid TV show Inside Edition, who ceremoniously arrived by limo. One bartender said he saw reporters “doing blow” in the hotel’s second floor men’s lounge. At least they tipped well.
Reporters would stop at nothing in their desperate search for a new news peg, and it didn’t matter if the peg contained no new news. The traditional litmus test for news stories is that they must at least shed a glint of information, but the rules were thrown out the window for the Tonya Harding story. Editors and news directors could dismiss an empty-headed item only at their peril. Despite complaints of media overkill, overnight ratings registered overwhelming viewer approval. The inevitable results were disingenuous drama, factual inaccuracies, a dearth of intelligent analysis, and an excess of zany antics.
The most overblown reports aired on A Current Affair, with reporter Michael Watkiss promising exclusive interviews with key insiders while delivering nothing more than the same pap that ran previously on KGW, KATU and KOIN. Watkiss, decked out in black Gucci boots, a slate trench coat, and a two-tone blonde ‘do, did score, however, with the best hype, dubbing Tonya Harding variously as “The Dark Queen of the Shimmering Ice,” “The Ice Princess” and “The Ice Queen.”
But he wasn’t the only hypester. KATU’s Town Hall chimed in with “On Thin Ice,” an hourlong rehash of the affair. Even Willamette Week jumped at the chance to blow the story out of proportion. Witness the blaring “Skategate!” headline on this week’s cover.
Desperately seeking anything about Tonya—there is no other way to explain Mark Haas’ interview with a doorknob. The reporter for KATU-TV couldn’t persuade the father of bodyguard Sean Eckardt to come out to the porch for an interview, so Haas put the microphone up to the keyhole of Eckardt’s Southeast Portland home for a few incoherent sound bites.
Even more desperate were reporters staking out Tonya Harding’s house. Every so often she would appear with ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, get in one of three cars and take off. A dozen or more reporters would give chase. On one occasion, she and Gillooly were stopped by a construction crew on some obviously backroad escape route. One worker blocked the vision of a KATU-TV camera, diverting the reporter’s attention long enough for the couple to make their getaway.
Sometimes reporters would get a chance to toss quick—though not necessarily incisive—questions Tonya’s way. Instead of asking the biggest question of the week—whether she and Gillooly were under investigation—they asked the gently sympathetic, but decidedly stupid, question: “How are you feeling?”
Television cameras weren’t always on hand to capture the best antics. One car chase we didn’t see on TV involved Doug Beghtel and Stu Tomlinson of The Oregonian. On Wednesday night, they followed a van from the Eckardt residence to the airport—about 10 miles. Beghtel claims the van driven by the parents of Harding’s bodyguard ran them off the road before ditching them at a light. Damn.
The object of the best chase on foot was Mark McKnight, Sean Eckardt’s, ample, dark-suited lawyer who walked at high speed the dozen blocks from the Multnomah County Courthouse to his Chinatown office following his client’s arraignment Friday. His fleet-footed feat was all the more remarkable given the 24 reporters crawling like ants all over his body, shoving microphones in his face and asking him idiotic questions, such as, “Do you think your client is like James Bond?” (Answer: “No.”) “When will your client enter a plea?” (Answer: “He already has.”)
But the feeding frenzy got completely out of hand Friday morning, when Mae Loomis, the gun-toting grandma of Shane Stant, the alleged hitman in the Nancy Kerrigan attack, fired two shots in the air to ward off snooping KGW-TV news team Ann Jaeger and Carl Patersen on Friday as they stalked her home in Corbett. Jaeger claimed they didn’t get closer than the road, but Loomis was in no mood for technicalities. “I’ve got reporters in the bushes and the phone ringing off the hook all day long!” Loomis screamed at Jaeger and Peterson. “Better get outta here!”
Much of the best work appeared in The Oregonian, which was constantly receiving credit from CNN and other networks for breaking pieces of the story. The Oregonian, for example, was first to report the biggest scoop of all: that Sean Eckhardt had confessed to the crime in a tape recording. The newspaper’s good work continued through Monday morning with a report linking donations to Harding for Olympic training with the crime. Nonetheless, The Oregonian was so enamored with the story, it took a mega-earthquake in Los Angeles to shove its Harding coverage to the bottom of Tuesday’s front page.
One oddity of the affair was the fact that some of the best scoops were broken by out-of-town reporters. The Washington Post was first to report that the U.S. Olympic Committee was angling to dump Harding from the figure skating team. And news organizations in Boston and New York were the first to report that Tonya was under investigation (she was under “criminal” investigation as NBC put it Friday night)—despite the fact that the local media has an edge in reporting hometown stories.
One possible explanation for this anomaly is that the East Coast media were tipped off by a Washington, D.C., source, perhaps by Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who was rumored to be putting heat on Attorney General Janet Reno to resolve the case as a favor to his constituent, Nancy Kerrigan. Another possibility is that these reporters were just plain wrong. That theory took hold at The Oregonian, which termed such reports as “erroneous” or ignored them altogether. Officially as of Tuesday, those reports have not been confirmed.
Finally, KATU-TV deserves special recognition for both the most creative scoop and the biggest blunder. It was first with the story of Eckardt’s confession to FBI agents at Elmer’s Pancake House in Clackamas—obtained by interviewing a waitress—but also blew it when eager anchor Jeff Gianola fingered informant Russ Reitz as the hitman wanted for assault. He corrected the error a few moments later.
And although the feeding frenzy at last has cooled off, there will be no end to published Tonya sightings: putting on makeup here, lounging on a beach there, smiling, waving to fans, like a little villainess. As Watkiss of A Current Affair promises, “Tonya Harding is going to be a story for years.”