Kathy Fiscus Tragedy
 She was 3 1/2 years old, from San Marino, playing with her sister and a cousin when she fell through a 14-inch hole and became trapped in an abandoned water pipe 94 feet below the surface of the ground. In another time, perhaps, it would have been a source of private grief, but Kathy Fiscus disappeared on April 9, 1949, at the dawn of the television era, and for 27 hours, KTLA preempted its regular programming to report live from the scene, with Stan Chambers, among others, reporting. It took more than two days for rescuers to retrieve Kathy's body, but even before her fate was determined, she had become a kind of legend, as the TV cameras kept vigil at the well site, informing viewers of every development, no matter how small. Television coverage made this incident a transformative event, a precursor of every wall-to-wall news event that was to come. By the time the dead girl was recovered, the entire nature of news — and the way we interact with it — had been irrevocably altered, bringing the most personal of stories to the public with an immediacy that would have been unimaginable just a few short years before. Click for video
Adapted from a Los Angeles Times story by David L. Ulin.
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