How TV News Spiraled Into ‘Tabloidgate’ : Television: ‘Frontline’ examines the state of journalism when Respectable Media get into bed with Tainted Tabloids while covering the likes of Michael Jackson and Tonya Harding.

The media scandal of the 1990s is Tabloidgate , a crossing of genes resulting in a homely journalistic hybrid whose shared interests range from Michael Jackson to Tonya Harding.

This alliance of Tainted Tabloids and Respectable Press in the cause of banner headlines has produced an alien, grotesquely formed multi-being that includes television newsmagazines, a fast-propagating subspecies of which there are now so many varieties you can hardly keep count.

You see some of them feasting on the world’s richest troubled entertainer in “Tabloid Truth: The Michael Jackson Scandal,” Tuesday’s “Frontline” documentary on PBS (9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15).

“Tabloid Truth” is producer Thomas Lennon’s and reporter Richard Ben Cramer’s sardonic tell-all account of the media who now tell all. The program traces, step by step, the story that still threatens to hijack Jackson’s career and notes the strategies of such rival predators as “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair.”

Although it’s a whiz-bang hour that you watch with fascination, there’s nothing pretty about lions tearing apart a wildebeest.

What begins with a free-lance reporter giving information about Jackson to KNBC-TV Channel 4 immediately becomes the global pursuit of the decade, one luring the hordes of Fleet Street and all the other global blood sniffers. Awaiting them here are U.S. print and TV tabloids and the Legitimate Press, and soon this pride of competing big cats and their scavenging tag-a-longs are hunting en masse, one undistinguishable from the other.

On the screen are photogs in L.A. aiming their telescopic lenses like Son-of-Sam snipers and just-arrived hungry British tabloiders, hearts pounding and young eyes shining with excitement, as if this were their Normandy Landing. On comes the rest of the cast, the warring lawyers and private eyes, the paid, greedy informants from Jackson’s own camp, the coattails hanging on to other coattails--and, of course, the Dragon Lady herself, LaToya.

“In the tabloids, it doesn’t matter if it’s true,” someone volunteers. “If you’ve got someone to say it’s true, that’s what matters.”

Of course, the stalkers some time ago began following the scent of other prey. Last Thursday night, for example, saw Dueling Tonyas on the syndicated “Inside Edition” and the CBS News program “Eye to Eye With Connie Chung,” each wielding its very own “exclusive” interview of the Lillehammer-bound skater. Under normal circumstances, you’d have given trash-savvy “Inside Edition” the edge, except that Chung had prepped herself by spending the week grubbing it out rink side with the other paparazzi in Portland. No stranger to hardball, it was “Eye to Eye” herself, after all, who earlier had gotten Heidi Fleiss to tell America about her new line of jammies.

As her network’s Tonyalogist, Chung occupied the expert’s chair on “CBS This Morning” Friday. “What was the pressure like on this human being?” asked a rapt Harry Smith. Who knows, maybe next time Harding will come in and get quizzed about Chung.

In Los Angeles, KCAL-TV Channel 9’s award-winning news used a big chunk of Harding’s “Inside Edition” interview on Wednesday while also reporting rumors--disclosed on the syndicated “Hard Copy”--that she had signed to pose for Playboy. It was not the first time that material from the two tabloid programs had been featured on a Channel 9 newscast.

The hybridization is much broader, though. So much so that when it comes to some topics, the Dueling Dianes--Dimond of “Hard Copy” and Sawyer of ABC’s “PrimeTime Live”--seem almost interchangeable.

*

A magazine writer preparing an in-depth story on Michael Jackson spoke glowingly to me of “Hard Copy” the other day, raving about its grit in pursuing those allegations that Jackson sexually molested a 14-year-old boy. While notably unimpressed by The Times coverage of Jackson, the writer was genuinely moved by the way “Hard Copy” operatives had strode, camera rolling, right up to the front door of a woman who supposedly had vital information about Jackson that she didn’t want to divulge.

What happened? “She slammed the door right in their faces.”

This was news? “At least they tried,” the writer said.

Of course, that’s it, they tried . Thus the failed effort to get a story becomes a story, implying that there is something suspicious about a person who wishes not to speak to the media.

The “tabloids are getting more like us” line was echoed by a CBS News producer I spoke to recently. Actually, they’ve hardly budged. It’s the Respectable Press that’s done the joining, the forest coming to Dunsinane.

That Great White among sharks, Steve Dunleavy of “A Current Affair,” gloats on Tuesday’s “Frontline”: “They don’t laugh and sneer at our style now.” Adds “A Current Affair” anchor Maureen O’Boyle: “We’re now competing with the same people who at one time were going, ‘Naughty, naughty.’ ”

Along with that trend, connoisseurs of “naughty” have surely noted the upswing of TV commercials for tabloid newspapers and appreciated the symbolism of National Enquirer now running spots during Channel 4 newscasts--another instance of an advertiser buying time on compatible programming.

Meanwhile, lest anyone think that handing his accuser a load of cash would spare Michael Jackson further embarrassing media exposure, “A Current Affair” delivered a wake-up call Thursday night by having performers re-enact the depositions of the 14-year-old (“He then started kissing me”) and others in “the notorious sex scandal” that we’ve all grown to love and cherish. Not that “A Current Affair” was being insensitive, having altered some of the graphic language to “make it suitable for television viewing.”

In the cynical age of Tabloidgate , what isn’t suitable for viewing?