Live, from the O.R., it’s Dr. Dave!
Channel 4 and Presbyterian/St. Luke’s and the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children brought the world into surgery interactively on Twitter on Tuesday.
Dave Hnida will tweet from the operating room (along with a cameraman), talking to the family and answering anyone’s questions about the gallbladder surgery on a 7-year- old girl. Surgeon Steven Rothenberg will perform the minimally invasive procedure through a tiny incision in her belly button.
“We’re trying to get our arms around this new technology,” says Hnida, who first tried Twitter last week. “It’s the wave of the future,” a way to open the mysterious O.R. to laymen. He was amazed at the large following the station has on Twitter: “It’s like an office visit with thousands of people.”
KCNC news director Tim Wieland claims this is “the first time any TV station in the world has worked with a hospital to provide the public with direct interaction during a major surgery.”
Hnida hopes this will become a regular event going forward. Ask the lawyers.
American Indian series.
Neither strict documentary nor feature film, but an odd blend of the two, the five-part PBS miniseries on American Indians works for those who have time and patience.
It’s “not history, but felt experience,” a producer says. Purists may find it unnerving, but the enterprise is evocative for anyone willing to give the 90-minute films a chance.
The miniseries “We Shall Remain,” which began this week on PBS, is the most expensive “American Experience” undertaking to date. The five 90-minute films air Mondays at 8 p.m. through May 11 on KRMA-Channel 6, and beginning April 22 on KBDI-Channel 12.
The remarkable hybrid film series, laced with native language, is billed as the first intertwined history of white America and Indian America, upending the country’s predominant creation myth. Naturally, it’s about cruelty and power, European entitlement and assumptions of superiority through the massive dispossession of native peoples.
Think Ken Burns’ style of talking heads over and between dramatic re-enactments. Sometimes the historians are onscreen in interviews, sometimes they speak over dramatizations of Indians and new immigrants. Additionally, a number of Indians offer emotional retellings of the cultural assault on their sovereignty, letting anger, sorrow and despair rightfully show through.
“It’s so sad,” one says. “When we say ‘land’ (it is pronounced one way), but if you say ‘my land,’ it means ‘I am physically the land and the land is physically me.’ After the Europeans were here for 70 years, the language changed to indicate the land can be separated from my person.”
The series doesn’t try to be a comprehensive record of the epic tragedy. Instead, it aims to drill down into a handful of stories over a 300-year history, beginning in the 1600s with the Wampanoags of New England and a different take on the iconic Thanksgiving story, and ending in the 1970s with American Indian activists’ occupation of Wounded Knee. Those hours bookend the stories of Geronimo and Tecumseh and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
The envelope, please.
KUSA-Channel 9 was among the five top regional winners at the Radio-Television News Directors Association 2009 Edward R. Murrow Awards for excellence in electronic journalism. KUSA won eight categories, including the award for overall excellence.
KCNC-Channel 4 won for coverage of the Windsor tornado, as did Greeley-based KUNC Radio. KOA Radio was cited for its morning newscast, feature reporting and use of sound.
One less eye in the sky
Speaking of KOA, traffic copter reporter Amelia Earhart, who does double duty for KUSA-Channel 9, announced Monday she will be leaving at the end of the month to take a job at a Los Angeles TV station. (She’s not saying which one because her hiring will come as a surprise to whoever is being fired there.)
Only two birds left in the Denver skies — Channel 4’s and the combo Channel 7/Channel 9/KOA — makes for safer flying. There used to be four copters circling every traffic jam and burning building.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
