This Just In: Brandwynne Jabs TV News : Television: The former anchorwoman who is now a producer of ‘Carol & Company’ takes a swipe at the current ‘infotainment’ approach to news.

Marcia Brandwynne says it’s not revenge. But it’s the next best thing.

Not too many years ago, as a bright and outspoken career journalist, she was fired from her anchor job at KNXT Channel 2 (now KCBS). Then she was forced out as anchor at KTTV Channel 11 despite a highly successful nightly newscast.

Dismayed with TV news and seeing clearly the airhead direction it was taking, she turned to entertainment and became a top producer on Carol Burnett’s new NBC comedy anthology, “Carol & Company.”

And tonight at 10--guess what? “Carol & Company” offers a slashing episode demolishing the “infotainment” approach that has poisoned TV news, with Burnett as a pressured anchor.

By the oddest coincidence, there’s a not-too-brainy reporter in the show named Brandi Marshwynne.

Say, what’s going on here anyway? Television entertainment looking down its nose at television news? Didn’t it used to be the other way around?

Indeed, yes. But nowadays, you’re liable to get more real commentary on news events from Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman than on the nightly network and local station roundups.

And you’re lucky to get more than eight or nine minutes of real news on the so-called “news at 11” wrapups offered by Los Angeles’ network-owned stations.

Suddenly, also--perhaps spurred by the film “Broadcast News”-- even TV entertainment programs are taking hard and often critical looks at the increasingly cheap and emptyheaded practices of the tube’s news programming.

At CBS, the drama series “WIOU” has taken its shots at local news, angering some TV journalists. Two network dramas this week--Tuesday’s CBS film “Her Wicked Ways” and this Sunday’s NBC show “Perry Mason: The Case of the Ruthless Reporter”--give less than flattering portraits of TV news.

And tonight’s Burnett outing, titled “No News Is Bad News,” definitely won’t help the image of broadcast journalism.

“I’m still upset with what I see as the trend in TV news,” says Brandwynne. Acknowledging TV’s sometimes splendid work on such stories as the Persian Gulf crisis, she nonetheless correctly adds that the potential of broadcast news “has been misused.

“I love my former profession. But there’s almost no analysis of anything. There are short little stories. And what’s worse, it seems that nobody cares and we want titillation. What our episode is about is that it’s gone so far that we don’t feel anymore.”

A press release from the Burnett show flatly summarizes tonight’s program--which is uneven but surprisingly angry for a comedy--as “an acid-tipped barb aimed squarely at the current trend toward ‘infotainment’ in network news.”

And in a previewed cassette, Burnett--in her on-air warmup of the studio audience before the comedy begins--says that she’s certain that viewers have noticed that “the news has become more entertaining and less and less newsworthy.”

In the episode itself, a straight TV news show with Burnett is suddenly taken over by a woman news director who formerly produced game shows, including one called “Divorce Court Gladiators.”

The producer says the news program will have a “new, high-impact format.”

“High impact usually means lower standards,” says anchor Burnett.

The new format for the program, “Vital Report,” is inspired in its lunacy and deliciously vicious satire:

A live audience is brought in to the news studio to choose the stories it wants to hear, voting its preferences with boos and cheers. A story about the White House is booed and abandoned. A story about Madonna gets cheers. Boos eliminate a report on taxes. Cheers bring on a tale of a boa constrictor that swallows a senator’s dog in a toilet.

The episode, Brandwynne acknowledges, was “a little close to my heart. It’s taken to the edge. It’s exaggerated. But was (the movie) ‘Network’ exaggerated?” she asks pointedly about Paddy Chayefsky’s classic dark satire of television that becomes more and more real each day.

The Burnett episode is no “Network,” but that it is even airing is significant.

“TV news has changed the way we think of ourselves and the world,” says Brandwynne. “It’s made people more knowledgeable, but it eats up topics. Americans are bored with Eastern Europe, so what’s the next topic? What’s left? Weird things and celebrities.”

The freak-show news, lapping at the heels of such unrepentant tabloid series as “A Current Affair” and “Hard Copy,” has made it virtually impossible for TV to cover in depth and at length one of the great stories of the century--the collapse of communism.

It is a story that ranks with such monumental events as the birth of Christianity, but who would know it from TV newscasts where weather, sports and entertainment reporters get more commentary time than political and social analysts?

Here and there, specks of hope occasionally become visible. Thursday’s hiring of commentator Bill Press by KCOP Channel 13 certainly gives a needed dimension to that station’s 10 p.m. news, on which he debuts Jan. 14.

Meanwhile, even TV’s best journalists, such as KNBC Channel 4’s Pete Noyes--the prototype for Lou Grant--must grapple with the hard new realities of the business. Consider:

Tonight, Noyes, head of KNBC’s investigative coverage, introduces a 7:30 p.m. pilot, “Murder One,” another of those burgeoning non-fiction shows, focusing on unsolved mysteries and anchored by Bill Lagattuta. Noyes acknowledges that a couple of old cases like the 1970s Zodiac killings and the 1930s death of actress Thelma Todd were included “because we’re in the game of getting ratings,” but he adds:

“We did the show because the murder rate in Los Angeles is alarming. There’s a danger in becoming too tabloid, and I don’t want to. I don’t know if this is like ‘Dragnet,’ but it’s matter-of-fact. It’s a fine line.”

There’s no Brandi Marshwynne on “Murder One,” but like all reality series, it could use genuine commentary and original social thinking to add texture to the smoothly crafted flood of gruesome, glitzy facts.

Carl Sandburg once said that most great decisions are made by one person sitting alone in a room, thinking. That’s a quantum leap from the world of “Divorce Court Gladiators,” the insidious cheapening of TV news and the collapse of its tower of babble-on.