The Full Tale of the Barry Tape; Arsenio vs. Ted

This one you didn’t see on the Fox series “Cops.”

There he was on perhaps every newscast in the nation, as plain as a picture taken through a dirty lens, getting busted and handcuffed in a Washington hotel room by police and FBI agents who barged in as he prepared to leave.

These brief excerpts, showing Washington Mayor Marion Barry getting snared in a Jan. 18 federal sting operation, were plucked from a videotape shown to jurors last Thursday in Barry’s drug and perjury trial and captured by the ABC News pool camera in the courtroom. ABC provided the footage and sound to other broadcasters.

Quite a show. The images, which also appear to show Barry lighting and smoking a pipe--allegedly containing crack cocaine--in the presence of ex-model Rasheeda Moore, were commanding and indicting. No matter how many qualifiers anchors and reporters used, the pictures spoke for themselves, delivering a verdict with a heavy gavel.

Guilty!

This illustrates the danger of drawing conclusions from fleeting excerpts, the picture or word taken out of context.

That is not to say that the Barry excerpts aren’t damning. However, only by viewing the entire 90-minute videotape--as shown Thursday and Sunday on dependable C-SPAN--can you fully understand why some legal experts have said there’s something in it for the defense as well as the prosecution.

Only then would you see and hear the entire lengthy conversational foreplay to Barry’s arrest, an intimate chattiness that captured the tone of the mayor and Moore even though many of their words were as inaudible as the pictures were blurry.

Only then would you probably get the impression that Barry was initially far less interested in doing drugs than in having sex with the resistant Moore, his former mistress who had set him up for this sting.

And only then would you hear Barry seemingly being coaxed by Moore to take drugs.

It was a voyeur’s view that the FBI’s hidden camera provided, and C-SPAN, with the luxury of time built into its format, let the tape run to its natural conclusion. “It’s our philosophy to show you the whole thing when we can,” senior vice president Susan Swain said from Washington.

In this case, to hear the whole thing, too. After being arrested, Barry aimed some expletives at Moore. C-SPAN repeatedly ran a crawl alerting viewers to the raw language punctuating the videotape, but unlike many newscasts, did not speak over Barry and Moore at any time or run captions drawn from a government transcript.

One particular sequence from the videotape lingers. It shows Barry, his hands handcuffed behind his back, berating himself for falling for the sting. “I should have known better,” he mutters, “I should have known better.”

Following KNBC Channel 4’s live coverage of Nelson Mandela’s appearance in Los Angeles Friday--the best coverage in town thanks to Linda Douglass’ reporting from the field--came Winnie Mandela’s appearance on “Donahue.”

Showing why, when he’s of a mind, he’s still the best daytime talk-show host in the business, Donahue got Mandela to acknowledge that she’s angrier than her husband and more skeptical than he about the white South African government that has loosened some of the binds of apartheid.

She vowed to return to the bush and “take up the armed struggle” should negotiations fail between the government and African National Congress. That earned her a standing ovation from the studio audience.

When the history of television in the 20th Century is written, Ted Koppel and “Nightline” will surely loom larger than “The Arsenio Hall Show.”

Except in St. Louis, perhaps.

In Missouri’s largest city, ABC affiliate KTVI-TV has decided to expel “Nightline” from its accustomed 10:30 p.m. (Central time) position to accommodate Hall’s talk-show hour in tandem with something called “The Party Machine With Nia Peeples.”

Something smells.

KTVI, which is owned by Times Mirror Broadcasting, is in business to make money. Fine. Profits are the soul of commercial broadcasting. And you can just bet that “The Arsenio Hall Show”--which is one of TV’s hottest items these days--will top “Nightline” ratings.

Something still smells.

There are those times when doing what’s “right” should take precedence over doing what’s most profitable, and this is one of those times. Although Hall’s show adds energy to late-night, laughs and celebrities you can get elsewhere on TV. “Nightline” you can’t. If it’s true, as a recent Times Mirror survey says, that today’s youth are turned off by world affairs, then undercutting “Nightline” feeds the ignorance and apathy.

ABC has rejected KTVI’s offer to delay “Nightline” until midnight, citing its longstanding policy against 90-minute delays for the Koppel show, which emerged in 1980 as a spinoff from coverage of the Iran hostage crisis.

The network correctly argues that allowing KTVI to delay “Nightline” 90 minutes would set a precedent that other affiliates surely would seek to follow. Some ABC stations already delay the program for as long as an hour. Moreover, ABC does allow two of its stations to delay it 90 minutes, but only because they’ve been doing so since its inception.

ABC reportedly has had no success finding a home for “Nightline” on another St. Louis station, meaning that the city may lose this centerpiece of ABC News.

How are blockbuster movies made? This helps.

NBC’s “Today” show followed its three-part series on “RoboCop 2” with an even bigger orgy on behalf of “Days of Thunder.” Four parts--including separate interviews with Tom Cruise and other cast members--aired last week, with the fifth scheduled for Tuesday.

All this for a movie of such modest merit that the best thing “Today” critic Gene Shalit could say in its behalf last week was that it should turn out to be a blockbuster. “Today” is doing its best to prove him right.