TV Blurs Facts and Filminess : Infotainment: Seeing really is believing. But the need to make television news more profitable, more visual, is also making it less credible.

The word late last month seemed at first gratifying: NBC News was getting out of the business of staging dramatic re-creations of real events.

Perhaps network news’ much publicized and criticized flirtation with reenactments, a technique mixing news crews and actors to stage events as they might have appeared, was coming to an end.

A bravo to Michael Gartner, president of NBC News. Maybe it even meant the networks would stop tarting up news shows for higher ratings.

Well, not quite. However laudable, Gartner’s decision does little to alter the phenomenon re-creations illuminate: The lines between information and entertainment in television news are blurring, and viewers in response lose trust.

The blur is because of growing pressure on TV news to pay for itself, a development Gartner and peers cannot ignore.

In plain fact, Gartner’s decision won’t even erase anything currently on the air. NBC’s own TV magazine show, regularly using re-creations, is merely being transferred to the entertainment division.

News re-creations, popularized by such “reality-based” entertainment programs as “America’s Most Wanted,” had become a lightening rod in electronic journalism. CBS News and NBC News launched new prime-time magazines employing the technique last fall.

The shows were designed to compete with entertainment programming, but ratings have been disappointing and criticisms have been heavy.

The news that Gartner was pulling out got big play in the press. ABC News President Roone Arledge took the occasion to say his network did not engage in re-creations. CBS said it would continue to do them on “Saturday Night With Connie Chung,” though it is scaling back.

The problem at NBC, Gartner said, is that research revealed viewers were confused about what was real and what was re-enacted.

“Journalistically, I had no problem whatsoever with anything we did,” he said. But “Our primary responsibility at NBC News is to convey information clearly. If viewers are confused, the answer is simple--abandon re-creations in news programming.”

Gartner was right. The issue is larger than whether TV re-creations are journalistically proper. Arguably re-creations are video’s analogy to a courtroom artist’s sketch or a prose stylist’s description. The reason re-creations are a problem, as Gartner understood, is that people cannot discern between real TV images and staged ones--even if labeled.

The confusions originate in the human mind; people process visual information more easily and less critically than written or spoken data. And the better people remember something, psychological research also shows, the more they attribute it to a credible source.

So even if re-creations are properly labeled, with written and spoken warnings, viewers may not notice the labels. And if they do notice them, a week later they are likely to recall any images they remember as real anyway.

That is television’s social and political power--and its potential for deception. Seeing, because of the way our brains work, really is believing.

The danger of re-creations, then, is that people could become so confused that TV would lose its high credibility.

Then if the issue is credibility, not propriety, Gartner’s stand on re-creations really means less than it seems. For the forces debasing believability go well beyond news re-creations.

The rise of visual competition, such as cable, means that TV news now must make money. Thus the networks have moved heavily in the direction of profit-oriented “infotainment.”

Even though Arledge may dislike news re-creations, his new “Prime Time Live” magazine with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer borrows from entertainment talk shows, including a live, participatory studio audience. The technique emphasizes star power and the spontaneous, airy treatment of most subjects.

The networks flog news celebrities ever harder. CBS calls its new magazine “Saturday Night With Connie Chung” and ABC has tried to define “Prime Time Live” as the Sam and Diane show.

Gartner himself is said to champion young Deborah Norville on the “Today Show” because network seers think she will help lure young women back to the program. Norville’s carefully managed exposure included service as NBC’s hostess for the Thanksgiving Parade.

All these infotainment values pose the same threat as their cousin, re-creations. Such news programming threatens the believability of TV news.

Even while they earn big money and big ratings, exploitative programs are losing public trust. A recent poll by Times Mirror revealed that 75% of the U.S. public no longer believes Geraldo Rivera, a former news correspondent.

The one TV news program that has gained in believability is CNN, the most credible operation on the air and a singular product because it has not moved toward infotainment.

Meanwhile, advances in technology--enhancement of colors, added sounds and altered visual images--only heighten the temptation to make the news more entertaining. NBC’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” uses new computer technology to superimpose correspondents onto scenes they never visited.

And while NBC has transferred “YTT” to the entertainment division, viewers probably won’t know or care which side of the company makes it. Another recent poll revealed that almost half the watchers considered the highly rated “America’s Most Wanted,” produced by Fox Broadcasting, to be news. Only 28% considered it entertainment.

This confusion of reality on television is inevitable. But each network blurring raises new questions.

Last year, when NBC aired a TV movie, “Roe vs. Wade,” about the Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, NBC broadcast an 11:30 p.m. news special report on the case. The movie was the news hook for the special report, both NBC productions.

Was the TV movie entertainment? Or news? Was the special report news or network promotion?