Michael to Mohammed to Moscow : Television: From the trivialities of sports to the terrors of nations’ instability, it’s been a week that shows the scope of the medium’s universe.

The media have spent much of the week talking and writing about the unbelievable M.

He’s black. He’s bald. He’s elusive. He’s slippery.

And what moves! They’re so extraordinary that he confounds his opponents and makes them look foolish. When they zig, he zags or zooms, and they simply can’t quite catch up with him. Just when they think they have him, they don’t.

What’s more, this week he again demonstrated his ability to command the attention of Americans through television.

Yes, as CNN noted in a profile Wednesday night, there’s no ignoring Mohammed Farah Aidid.

He’s the Somali clan leader and warlord who surely is behind that widely telecast video of a captured U.S. soldier whose chopper was downed in Somalia. And it was Aidid’s followers who were captured on TV and in newspaper photos gleefully dragging the body of a slain U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu. It was macabre, it was repulsive, it was enraging.

This week’s other M? Michael Jordan has gotten a lot of coverage too.

“The whole world is in shock” about Jordan’s retirement from the NBA, a reporter from a Fox station in Chicago said Wednesday before Bulls superstar Jordan’s televised press conference from suburban Deerfield. The whole world? Oh, sure, they must have been real shocked in Moscow and Mogadishu. Bosnia, too.

There was no overstating the media’s shock, though. For in addition to earning front-page stories in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, Jordan’s morning press conference was available live in Los Angeles on at least nine channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, CNBC, KTLA-TV Channel 5, KTTV-TV Channel 11 and Spanish-language Galavision.

You can bet that Aidid’s resignation wouldn’t get that much live TV coverage. Nor Boris N. Yeltsin’s.

Grabbing exposure and frequent-flier mileage for its top anchorman where it can get it, NBC even dispatched Tom Brokaw to Deerfield for Jordan’s press conference. There was Brokaw doing a stand-up from the site (“Behind me here you can see. . . “), plus getting some inside scoop about Jordan from NBC’s top sports specialist, Bob Costas, who was in New York. But wait. Shouldn’t Costas have been in Deerfield and Brokaw in New York?

Just because Brokaw had jetted half-way across the nation to get his mug on camera and bask in Jordan’s glow didn’t mean he wanted to give America the wrong impression about NBC’s priorities vis-a-vis the greatest basketballer who ever lived, however. “His retirement cannot compare with what’s going on in Somalia,” said Brokaw, segueing to a story on the latest carnage from Mogadishu, where Aidid so far has been a phantom target for U.S. troops trying to capture or kill him.

Deerfield to Mogadishu. Deerfield to Moscow.

It’s been that kind of disorienting week on television, where emotions and images get constantly flipped like flapjacks.

On CNN Wednesday morning, one moment you were watching Jordan explain his actions to the multitudes (“I’ve reached the pinnacle”), the next moment watching Russian President Yeltsin, whose taped TV explanation of his actions to his people and the world (“This is our tragedy, this is our grief”) immediately followed.

It’s been a week that acutely dramatized not only the remarkable depth and breadth of Jordan’s influence and charisma, but also, far more significantly, the depth and breadth of television’s amazing universe.

At 11 a.m. Sunday, for example, yours truly, with remote control in hand, was in his usual position before four TV sets, getting a fragmented, fly’s-eye-view of that universe, simultaneously watching the original “Cape Fear” on the Arts & Entertainment network, the Kansas City Chiefs clobbering the Los Angeles Raiders on NBC, the Atlanta Braves beating the Colorado Rockies on TBS and Russia possibly self-destructing on CNN. Live.

Television’s technology is now life’s familiar furniture. So perhaps we should be accustomed to watching epic history as it occurs--from Oswald’s assassination by Jack Ruby to Germans joyously dismantling the Berlin Wall to Chinese rebelling in Beijing to Baghdad getting bombarded in the Gulf War. Yet there was something almost surreal about seeing this aggression from opposite poles, about watching Muscovites battle one another on one channel as U.S. sports teams battled each other on two other channels. To say nothing of Robert Mitchum terrorizing Gregory Peck’s family on a fourth.

There has to be a message here, but defining it is not easy. Perhaps it’s this: As trivial as sports are, contrasted with horrible pictures of death and suffering and global events that transform nations and international relationships, at least they’re something solid we can all rely on. They’re a path of continuity that safely guides us through minefields of chaos.

Despite everything else that’s happening in the world, it’s nice to know that on CBS this week we can find the Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays vying for their respective league championships. And that even while resigning, Michael Jordan did not close the door on one day returning to the NBA.

So regardless of the awful news pouring in from everywhere, bring on the World Series. And back to you, Tom.