A police standoff held Milwaukee TV hostage for nearly six hours this morning, until a robot broke a window and a gas canister was tossed into an SUV.
Cameras were focused tightly on the SUV during the live coverage by several stations, including Channel 4, a potentially touchy situation had gunshots been exchanged.
All four TV news operations -- Channels 4, 6, 12 and 58 -- went virtually wall to wall with what was mostly a static picture of the SUV wedged between armored vehicles on westbound I-94 near 18th Street. Channel 58 briefly went to "Let's Make a Deal," but went back to live coverage.
It was a story with a couple layers, including snarled morning rush-hour traffic and the potential for a violent conclusion to the story.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
