VANCOUVER - Live television has a way of making the unreal seem real.

Watching events unfold on local TV here in Vancouver in the minutes - and then hours - following Wednesday's decisive seventh-game Stanley Cup loss by the hometown Canucks to the Boston Bruins was a reminder that live TV, like Stanley Cup playoff games, doesn't always unfold as expected.

The wild swings in emotion - shame-faced apology one moment, unbridled anger the next - were in stark contrast to the staged euphoria that marked media coverage in the weeks and months leading up to Wednesday's fateful game.

The sudden candour, after so much empty-headed elation masquerading as real news - even The National's eminently respectable Peter Mansbridge was reduced to playing the role of cheerleader - was a shock to the system.

As fans (real hockey fans) streamed out of Rogers Arena after the Tim Thomas Show, things turned ugly in a hurry. Local news reporters, expecting a street party, got a rude awakening instead, even though, for anyone whose powers of observation extend beyond superficial views of the Vancouver skyline, this is a West Coast city with an ugly underbelly.

For once, the local news stations could no longer, as Vanity Fair media columnist James Wolcott had described it, "spin the unspinnable and defend the indefensible."

Inevitably, stripped of their scripts and separated from the news consultants, reporters were left to their own devices - and some really shone.

CBC's Ian Hanomansing seemed determined to report only what he saw, and took the time to constantly remind viewers that he didn't have all the facts. Hanomansing was one of the few reporters in all my surfing to try to answer the question that kept going through my mind as I watched: Is this as bad as '94, the last time hockey fans rioted after a Stanley Cup final in Vancouver? Is this as bad as it looks? Or is it just a handful of morons stirring up trouble while, mere blocks away, life is carrying on as normal? "We don't have all the facts; I'm just telling you what I see," is a BBC signature: It's one of the things that elevates BBC above, say, Sky TV, or even CNN.

Another standout, for me, was Global BC's John Daly, a veteran of the Vancouver police beat, which is a little like being the Cairo correspondent for Al-Jazeera.

After a litany of bubble-headed in-studio pronouncements from jumped-up weathercasters like, "I'm so shocked," "This is so disappointing," and, "These aren't real Canuck fans," Daly was asked, "Are you surprised?" and he had the presence of mind to say, "No, I'm not surprised."

Daly then said what no one wanted to hear in the hours leading up to the deciding game - and that the local news failed to report: that there has always been a dark streak hiding underneath, just waiting to surface.

Another standout was CTV British Columbia's Perry Solkowski, who, at a hastily called, impromptu on-the-street news conference by Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, pressed the mayor on the issue of rumoured fatalities and pressed the mayor for specifics. He did this, while other reporters, shuffling their feet and looking visibly uncomfortable, seemed willing to take bromides like, "Our public officials are well-prepared and have a plan," at face value.

For once, CTV British Columbia's irritating helicopter, with its chatty traffic reporters, proved invaluable, providing the kind of perspective- providing sky views unavailable during TV coverage of the 1994 riot.

Another difference from the 1994 riot, as a Vancouver police spokesman told both CTV and Global, was the widespread use of social media: Much of the looting and hooliganism was caught on cellphone cameras, and police are already asking people to do the right thing and share footage with authorities if they snapped images of a crime being committed.

There's a larger question that sociologists and social psychologists will have to wrestle with, and that's whether those very same social media played a role in making a bad situation worse, by encouraging ``monkey see, monkey do'' behaviour and slowing down crowd dispersal to a crawl.

Meanwhile, back in the TV studios, some things were said that grated on me:

* "These are not Canuck fans," for starters. Yes, of course they're Canuck fans. Anyone who works for a living knows what replica jerseys cost in the real world. Taking the time to add a player's name and number, and spell the name correctly and get the number right, takes a special kind of fan. A great many people in the crowd throwing bottles, smashing windows and grinning happily for the cameras were happily showing off their Canucks jerseys. There were some real hockey fans on the street that night, and they were in Rogers Arena, some of them having paid $7,000 a pop just to see Bruins goalie Tim Thomas steal the show. But the people outside were fans, too, or they wouldn't have been decked out in Henrik Sedin and Daniel Sedin replica jerseys.

* "This isn't the Vancouver I know; we're better than this, I thought we had grown up in the past 17 years," was another. This could only be said by someone who keeps his eyes closed when he wanders outside: Vancouver not only has a seedy underbelly; it is right there for anyone willing to see it.

* "We proved we're a world-class city. We hosted the Olympics, remember, without any trouble. Why did this happen now?" Suffice it to say that the Olympics was about Canada, and the Canucks' Stanley Cup run was about Vancouver. Big difference. Also, the hockey team - the men and the women - won at the Olympics. The Canucks lost.

* "What will the outside world think of us?" Sorry, but the outside world won't care. The outside world has bigger things to worry about than a hockey riot in a semi-obscure city somewhere in Canada.

A couple of things, though, I wish had been said:

* This riot was a largely white, middle-class, predominantly male affair. This wasn't about personal rights and freedoms at Cairo's Tahrir Square, or nine-year-old girls huddling in terror in makeshift camps on the Syria-Turkey border. This was, "I want a free iPod."

* I wish someone had asked what responsibility the local media bore in the run-up to the chaos. For two months, they ratcheted emotions higher and higher until, in the end, something gave.

In the days, weeks and months to come, local media will fixate and obsess over what happened, when, how and why. This is for the good. They'll be paying attention to things that matter - homelessness, a lack of jobs, a disaffected younger generation, worthy role models (no, not hockey players) - and how there's more to a city, even a superficially beautiful city like Vancouver, than shiny skylines, livability surveys and a glowing write-up in a tourist brochure.

"This isn't the real Vancouver," was a common refrain on local TV Wednesday night.

Yes, of course it is. It's time to deal with it, and do something about it.

astrachan@postmedia.com

blog: www.canada.com/tvguy