From New York Newsday, 6/29/03
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...levision-print

Trying Time For Cable News

By Marvin Kitman

Did you think the coverage of Chandra Levy and Gary Condit was a bit
excessive during the summer of 2001?

You remember that glorious time before 9/11 when the cable news
networks were, in effect, finding someone guilty until proven
innocent.

Did you think the cable news networks overdid the JFK Jr. plane crash
coverage in 1999?

That was a marvelous time when the cable newshounds covered the watery
scene for days as if they were waiting for his body to pop out of the
water like a jack- in-the-box.

And who could forget the Elian Gonzalez story, that six- month fiesta
of manipulated Miami madness that ran into the summer of 2000.

While those stories all live in the annals of garbage TV journalism,
they were nothing compared to what could be happening in the months
ahead.

We have three big trials on the cable docket: Scott Peterson, Martha
Stewartand Eric Rudolph, the Olympic bombing suspect.

The Peterson preliminary hearing starts July 16.

Rudolph's trial is Aug. 4.

Stewart has been denied the right to a speedy trial by having hers
rescheduled from the original start, which was to take place this
month.

Three overlapping legal soap operas is good - or bad - news,
dependiong on one's appetite for saturation news.

Summertime is the season when our three 24/7 cable news networks
traditionally look for ways to kill each other in the battle for
ratings.

The basic strategy is to catch the "floaters."

Floaters are the dedicated hard-core members of the cable news
audience who float from channel to channel looking for dirt, I mean
news, on their favorite story.

They don't have loyalty to a particular channel but to a story,
usually the story du jour the cable news channels made in the first
place by turning the spotlight on a particular event and riding it
until most of the sane audience begs for mercy.

But not the crucial floaters.

It doesn't matter that nothing new is added to the story.

They are happy just hearing the same news regurgitated by the hour.

It makes them feel as smart as the pundits.

Nobody likes to do it, cable news executives will tell you.

But they have to do wall-to-wall pumping of a story.

It's about the ratings.

So when you have three juicy overlapping stories it's like winning the
trifecta.

Cable news could replace reality-TV dating-game clones.

Kitman's law is that bad news drives out good news.

Not since the O.J. story will there be such a feeding frenzy as these
news-shark channels chew these stories to bits.

Having three major trials in theory is a good thing.

There is a chance each of our cable networks can have its own
signature trial. MSNBC could do Peterson; CNN can do Martha and Fox
the alleged mad bomber.

Nielsen ratings would reveal which trial is more important to the
American public and history.

Knowing cable news, however, each will overcover all three trials, not
wanting to take any chances.

Nothing succeeds like excess, as Oscar Wilde might have said if his
own trial on homosexuality charges had been on cable.

I'm looking forward to the parade of pundits, especially during the
Martha trial.

CNN's jury-panel expert will tell us what clothes empaneled woman
jurors will wear.

Already, the three cable news networks are lining up their teams of
legal beagles for the Peterson case.

Some smart network should get O.J. Simpson as its forensic
color-commentary guy; he's an expert on murder trials.

He could tell what it's like to be unjustly accused.

Now that we will have American values straight again with these three
trials, we can get back to the serious business of diverting
everybody's attention from the real world.

I was a little worried about the coming news vacuum now that we've won
the war in Iraq.

The only thing left is to get Iraqis to like us and stop shooting our
nation-builders.

It's a comfort to know that, thanks to TV news, the most trusted
source of information, a recent poll found one-third of the American
public believes weapons of mass destruction were uncovered in Iraq.

Another 22 percent believes Iraq used chemical or biological weapons
against coalition forces.

The whole world is in recession.

You can get a six-year loan with zero interest on a car, and dealers
still can't give the cars away.

Ford is seemingly going bankrupt.

Still, there is no economic news worth saturation coverage.

You can't do foreign news, because surveys find that Americans are
bored by foreign news.

So covering the 60 countries where we may have to send our troops to
help rebuild is frowned upon.

Once the three trials kick in, I predict, everything else will
disappear from the cable news screens.

You will be hard-pressed to get any news about the peace process in
the Middle East or whether North Korea is going to start a war.

But we will have every leaked detail of what the grand jury says.

"It's in the cards. Unless you watch BBC this summer," my friend Denny
warns, "we won't know what's going on in the rest of the world."

He's wrong.

There might be a factoid on the bottom of the screen, I argued:

"North Korea drops atom bomb on Seoul."

But a small one.

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And that's the news, folks.

Harry