Some Sweeps in the Right Direction

There was a time when you’d get an automatic laugh from sweeps series, those multipart, provocatively labeled minidocs that stations deployed in their newscasts as a means of enticing viewers to watch during ratings periods.

Say hello to progress.

The strategies haven’t changed, but at least some of the topics have. For example, led by KNBC-TV Channel 4 (which had to be prodded by Latino staffers, sources say), some stations have been running series exploring the diversity of the Latino experience. In depth? Not quite. But at least they’re a step in the right direction, an acknowledgment that the growing Latino population here is more than merely a peripheral body to be addressed only on Cinco de Mayo or in stories about drugs or gangs.

The test will be whether this effort is sustained (KABC-TV Channel 7, by the way, already has a semiregular Latina commentator in Rosemary Vasquez) or merely window dressing.

Christine Lund has already passed another kind of test.

Say hello to commitment.

The Channel 7 anchorwoman’s devotion to humane treatment of animals was again on display last week in her incisive and horrific four-part series--this month’s gutsiest sweeps series to date--on charro rodeos. The centerpiece of these Mexico-originated spectacles, which occur at various sites in Southern California, is horse tripping. Get a horse running full speed and then trip it with a rope. Or torment steers with tail twisting.

Great sport.

“The horse crashing to the dirt of this arena” is akin to a home run in baseball, Lund said over one particularly ugly sequence that she shot with her hidden camcorder while wearing a disguise. Chronicling flat-out cruelty to these animals, her undercover footage was relentlessly gruesome, graphically showing these animals suffer, seemingly to the delight of fans.

Astonishingly, these events are not illegal, and Lund updated the so-far futile effort to have them banned in California through legislation. Later she also attended a charro event openly as a journalist, accompanied by a camera-person.

“We’re only here to protect the animals,” one participant insisted about charro rodeos. “It’s an art form.”

The way clubbing seals is an art form.

WOULD JOEY LIE?: He’s one lovable palooka. Yet now that Joey Buttafuoco has confessed to sleeping with Amy Fisher (when he was 37 and she was 17) and has been sentenced to six months jail time for statutory rape, will CBS run a retraction?

Ah, the perils of docudrama. And the potential dishonesty.

You may recall last year’s trio of widely watched docudramas purporting to deliver the goods on what really happened--or didn’t happen--between Amy and Joey. At the time, Joey was denying he had slept with Amy, who is in prison herself for shooting Joey’s wife.

The NBC movie was favorable to Amy, portraying her as a victim of a manipulative Joey. The ABC movie played it sort of down the middle, but shaded toward Amy.

“Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita,” the CBS movie whose producers had purchased the Buttafuocos’ rights, depicted Joey as a victim of a slutty teen-ager. But somehow he was able to resist Amy’s aggressively seductive advances. No sex.

Now we know that isn’t true, that Joey lied, that, in effect, the movie lied. So CBS owes America a retraction, right?

DANCES WITH RATINGS: Speaking of TV’s assembly line of crime movies, there was an interesting development in the latest national Nielsen ratings.

Riding high in the Top 10 were two Westerns, the CBS miniseries “Return to Lonesome Dove” and “Dances With Wolves,” Kevin Costner’s frontier epic about a disenchanted U.S. soldier who immerses himself in the culture of the waning Sioux.

“Return to Lonesome Dove” aired minus many of the good points of the “Lonesome Dove” miniseries that spawned it. And both it and “Dances With Wolves”--especially the latter--were laden with Old West-style violence.

Doesn’t their prominence in the ratings say something about America’s tastes--that a substantial segment of viewerdom is ravenous for a different genre of programming? Even if it isn’t perfect? Even if isn’t nonviolent?

DANCES WITH CRUELTY: I usually hold off for a full-blown letters column before running mail. But letters excoriating me for my recent remarks about psychologist Joyce Brothers--in connection with her latest KCBS-TV Channel 2 minidoc on sex--came so fast and furious that waiting seemed pointless. And so, this representative sample:

Stacey Peck of Los Angeles found what I wrote “one of the most gratuitous pieces of cruelty I have ever read. Why you found it necessary to describe (her) as ‘moldy’ and then say that she was ‘unzipped from her body bag . . . rouged, powdered and propped up’ for her appearance is a mystery to me.”

As it was to many others, including Channel 2 reporter Patty Ecker, who found my comments “thoughtless, insulting and unnecessary . . . ageism at its worst.”

And wrote Bill Kennedy of Los Angeles: “It has occurred to me that you don’t have to hurl a brick at a person’s head, pummel someone mercilessly with a baton or spray someone’s genitals with paint to commit a hate crime. How else can you characterize your incredibly cruel and vindictive description? What in the world compelled you to write something so mean-spirited?”

And, finally, came this from a Downey man whose name I could not decipher but whose message was clear:

“How about a list of those who are ‘moldy’ to Howard Rosenberg? I’ll head the list. I’m nearing 70, and, in spite of all I can do, I’ve begun to turn a little green around the edges. Is there a Pulitzer cheese? Does it get better with age? Does it smell, after a while, like Limburger?”