COLUMN ONE : Obsessed With Flash and Trash : TV, newspapers swarm to cover personalities and celebrities. But as lines blur between journalism and sensationalism, media may give an increasingly distorted picture of society.

Early in a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre last December, Bette Midler cocked her head to the left, grinned, frowned, wrinkled her brow in mock perplexity, grinned again and asked her audience, “Are people acting stranger than ever before or are the media just reporting it more?”

The media are reporting it more.

New technology, increased competition and dwindling audiences have triggered radical structural changes that have made the United States (and its news media) more obsessed than ever with personality and celebrity--and the more bizarre the better.

In the process, the media have not only blurred the lines between responsible journalism and sensationalism, they have undermined their own integrity and credibility and--worse--they have given readers and viewers an increasingly distorted picture of their society and of themselves.

In 1968, when Andy Warhol said, “In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes,” CNN wasn’t even a twinkle in Ted Turner’s rheumy, pale-blue eyes; there was no “Nightline” or Court TV; “60 Minutes” was still seven months from its first air date; People magazine was six years from its first issue.

Now, CNN is on 24 hours a day providing instant news of each incremental development in the attack on skater Nancy Kerrigan. “Nightline” is on five nights a week, offering--in one four-night span last month--two programs on Kerrigan and Tonya Harding and another on singer Michael Jackson. Court TV brought live coverage of the trials of Lorena Bobbitt and the Menendez brothers into living rooms daily. “60 Minutes,” which celebrated its 25th anniversary last fall, has become one of the most popular and profitable programs in television history. People, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, is one of the most successful publications in the world.

Televised magazine shows can be very profitable, so it’s no surprise that at least one weekly network magazine show is on the air virtually every night--”60 Minutes,” “20/20,” “Day One,” “Now,” “PrimeTime Live,” “48 Hours,” “Eye to Eye,” “Front Page,” “Dateline.” (Yet another, ABC’s “Turning Point,” debuts next month.)

Their hybrid offspring, the syndicated daily magazine shows--”tabloid TV”--are even more ubiquitous. “Hard Copy” and “American Journal” are broadcast five nights a week; “Inside Edition” and “A Current Affair” are on six nights.

All those programs. All that empty air time. It’s a vast maw craving information--infotainment--around the clock; the producers of this programming have found--as reporters and editors have always found--that the best way to tell a story is to personalize it, to “humanize everything, put a face on it,” in the words of Bob McGruder, managing editor of the Detroit Free Press.

That’s what the media did repeatedly after the Northridge earthquake, and that’s what the media do on other stories, major and minor. Names make news. That’s not new. It’s long been the first lesson learned by most reporters. But in television, the lesson has become law.

“Television is more a business of personalities than it is of ideas,” Don Hewitt, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said in an interview 14 years ago. Mike Wallace, Hewitt’s ace correspondent, echoed that sentiment in an interview in December.

“Every story that we try to tell . . . we want to get the most interesting, articulate, compelling character on the tube to tell that story,” Wallace said.

But today, with what McGruder calls “the bigger media monster” disseminating more information, “more quickly and more widely” than ever before, the same individuals show up over and over, the same names get repeated over and over. Voila --instant (if sometimes synthetic) celebrity.

There are, of course, two classes of celebrity--”real” (Bill Clinton, Madonna, Michael Jordan) and “artificial” or “overnight” (Heidi Fleiss, John and Lorena Bobbitt, Amy Fisher and her Long Island boyfriend, Joey Buttafuoco). Both kinds figure prominently in our personality-driven society, but given the inevitably limited supply of real celebrities, “the Joey Buttafuocos of the world and the Amy Fishers . . . are replacing (real) celebrities,” says James Willwerth, a Time magazine correspondent based in Los Angeles.

As we enter the information superhighway, Willwerth says, we’ll have “yet another several hundred different ways” to expose and exploit celebrity and tragedy.

Twenty-five years ago--with rare exception--a putative celebrity had to cross a certain threshold of accomplishment or credibility to be deemed worthy of attention in the mainstream media.

If a story was going to be on TV, McGruder says, it had to meet the standards of the three network news shows, “and stuffy old guys like . . . Walter Cronkite . . . got to make those choices.”

In those days, there were only half a dozen gatekeepers in the national media--the editors of the New York Times, Time and Newsweek and the executive producers (or anchors) at the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news programs. If one of them--especially the executive editor of the New York Times--didn’t deem a story fit to print (and in those days, you can be sure he wouldn’t have regarded a story about a woman cutting off her husband’s penis as fit to print), it never appeared in the mainstream media. Or if it did, it generally appeared only briefly and inconsequentially, a paragraph or two buried on the back page, all but obscured by a large advertisement for tires or lingerie.

“Now there are different kinds of broadcast news shows, with a lot of different people making those decisions, and they have different definitions of news and of people who make news,” McGruder says.

Many of the people making these decisions today--capitalizing on the impact, the immediacy and the sheer pervasiveness of television--define newsworthiness primarily in terms of entertainment value and ratings potential.

Thus, in 1994, there are 20 or 25 gatekeepers in the nation’s news media.

Or, it sometimes seems, no gatekeepers at all.

In journalism’s version of baseball’s legendary double play combination, Tinker to Evers to Chance, we now have tabloid to network to newspaper.

The editors and news directors of the most traditional news organizations look down their journalistic noses at tabloid television, but the people who own many of the top print and broadcast news organizations--ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times Co., the Washington Post Co.--also own many of the local stations that carry the syndicated tabloid shows.

These parent companies haven’t ordered their stations to reject or censor the tabloid shows. Indeed the parent companies’ flagships, some of the nation’s most prestigious news organizations--eager for ratings and readers, unwilling to be beaten or to be perceived as either high-brow or “covering up”--often chase the same stories and personalities that appeal to a tabloid TV audience.

Last Thursday night, hours after “Inside Edition” broadcast an “exclusive” interview with Tonya Harding, Connie Chung of CBS--who last November went “Eye to Eye” with Fleiss--had her own “exclusive” with Harding.

Names--and stories--slide into the respectable news media and into the nation’s collective consciousness these days through the side doors, back doors and cellar doors of supermarket tabloid newspapers and syndicated tabloid shows (the “crash dummies” of journalism, in the words of Landon Y. Jones, managing editor of People magazine).

“Hard Copy” gets a jump on the story about accusations of child molestation against Michael Jackson, and the “Hard Copy” reporter is interviewed on the “CBS Morning News”; the next thing anyone knows, the story is on the covers of the newsmagazines and the front pages of major newspapers across the country, even though no criminal charges have been filed against Jackson.

“Editors try to be pretty . . . high-minded about all that, but then they worry about who’s going to get the sleaze before they do,” McGruder says. “That’s something we struggle with all the time. . . . How much time should we waste on Michael Jackson and his sad life?”

The tabloid TV shows compete frantically to be first, often paying people for their exclusive stories--which reputable newspapers don’t--and this drives prices up and standards down.

“When I watch television in the morning and my two kids come in, I have the remote control nearby,” says Allan Siegal, assistant managing editor of the New York Times. “I have to reach for it six or seven times a day, in a frenzy, to turn off promos (for tabloid TV shows) that are in colossally bad taste--’Circumcised men who want their foreskins back.’ ”

Nevertheless, Siegal says, “If you are a newspaper that wants to address itself to what people are talking about, what people are talking about is conditioned to a great extent by tabloid television.”

Tabloid TV and tabloid newspapers have become our new, national agenda-setters on certain kinds of stories.

When Patricia Bowman accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her in Florida two years ago--he was ultimately acquitted--the mainstream media withheld her name at first, as they have traditionally done with alleged or actual rape victims. Then a British tabloid, the Sunday Mirror, published her name. An American tabloid, the Globe, did likewise.

NBC News followed suit. The editors of the New York Times decided that NBC’s use of Bowman’s name had taken “the matter of privacy out of their hands.” They published her name the next day.

Gennifer Flowers became an overnight celebrity in 1992 through much the same syndrome. She sold the story of her alleged 12-year affair with Bill Clinton to the Star. CNN picked it up. So did the networks. And the major newspapers and newsmagazines.

Peter Jennings, anchor for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” says he initially opposed broadcasting the Flowers story without further reporting by ABC correspondents, but “it was made clear to (me) . . . that if you didn’t go with the story, every (ABC) affiliate in the country would look up and say, ‘What the hell’s going on in this place? Don’t they know a story when they see it?’

“I succumbed,” Jennings says. “I’ve done so several times since to the notion that . . . (a given story) is somehow out there. “

Some stories are out there so pervasively that to ignore them is to “play ostrich man,” says Shelby Coffey, editor of the Los Angeles Times. “You have to give your readers some perspective on the information they’re getting.”

But this argument, undeniably valid on some important stories, is often invoked to justify jumping on a bandwagon of sensationalism for a story that responsible news organizations wouldn’t otherwise cover. This phenomenon--the rush to be second, the journalistic equivalent of “the devil made me do it”--occurs most commonly on lurid personality stories.

Jennings is not unfamiliar with the phenomenon of personality-cum-celebrity journalism. To begin with, he--like the other superstars of television news--has become a celebrity himself.

Like movie stars, some TV journalists actually have public relations representatives to screen interview requests from other journalists.

Hewitt, of “60 Minutes,” says the willingness of some TV journalists to perform like celebrities helps explain why television news shows have become so enamored of celebrity, instant or otherwise.

Some reputable network journalists serve as what Hewitt calls “hosts” or “masters of ceremonies . . . Ed Sullivans,” bringing on the acts for TV magazine shows. That rankles Hewitt.

Jennings does not do that. But since March, 1986, he has presided over “Person of the Week,” the profile-cum-tribute that is “World News Tonight’s” contribution to personality journalism.

Jennings is acutely aware of the powerful role that personality plays in television--and of the powerful role that television plays in society.

Indeed, television is the latest in a series of technological developments that have made the cult of personality possible.

As James Monaco writes in his book “Celebrity”: “The growth and development of the history of celebrity is closely tied to the development of media technology. . . .”

In earlier eras, “you knew really well only the people in your village,” Monaco writes. “You lived with them, you watched them and listened to them daily and you drew your own conclusions.

“You did hear about other people--kings, thinkers, warriors--but since you’d never seen them, they had no immediate presence, and anyway, you had only the broadest of caricatures of these strangers.”

As Monaco points out, the rise of the mass media changed all this--”first gradually, with the development of newspapers and magazines . . . then explosively with the birth of film and broadcasting. . . .”

Historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who first wrote about the power of imagery and the impact of personality in his 1962 book, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America,” said in a recent interview that the increased emphasis on imagery and personality in our society today is “one of the uncelebrated fruits of technology.”

The seeds for these fruits were planted long before Boorstin, in the mid-to-late 19th Century with the invention of the telegraph, the photograph and, especially, the rotary press, which “made possible the cheap dissemination of printed matter for the newly literate middle classes,” as Monaco puts it.

This meant that for the first time, “encounters with the names and activities of many people one didn’t know became a daily experience,” writes sociologist Josh Gamson in his new book, “Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America.’

Photography took the creation of imagery out of the exclusive hands of painters and engravers and made it available to everyone--including newspaper and magazine editors, who could now illustrate stories with vivid, realistic images of the sort that would ultimately come to dominate magazine covers and movie and TV screens. At the time, however, the telegraph that fed the media and the rotary press that printed the “penny press” that came into being around the turn of the century seemed the more significant developments.

Alfred Harmsworth--Lord Northcliffe--founded the modern popular press when he started the Daily Mail in London in 1896. Harmsworth admonished his editors to “never lose your sense of the superficial,” and he carried that philosophy across the Atlantic in 1900 when he accepted Joseph Pulitzer’s invitation to design the World in New York.

Many media critics blame a more recent invader from the British Empire--Australia-born Rupert Murdoch--for bringing flash-and-trash tabloid journalism to the United States when he moved from London’s Fleet Street to San Antonio, then New York, in the mid-1970s. But yellow journalism was actually born 70 years earlier, when the circulation war between Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s Evening Journal made suffering and tragedy a cottage industry and established the sensationalized, personalized approach to news in this country.

Pulitzer and Hearst were the precursors of today’s personality-obsessed media moguls, and Richard Schickel, author of “Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity,” offers a description of their objective that could easily be applied to much of the popular media today.

What those early purveyors of personality journalism sought most vigorously, Shickel says, were “human symbols whose terror, anguish or sudden good fortune . . . seemed to dramatically summarize some local event or social problem or social tragedy.”

Each new development in communications technology made those symbols more vital because each development increased, geometrically, the flow of information. The symbols had to be simplified to be grasped, to be plucked like reeds from the raging river of data in which we were increasingly awash.

In the early 20th Century, a new kind of symbol was created--the movie star. At first, they were the simplest symbols of all--idealized, larger-than-life figures, kings and queens, gods and goddesses.

But by mid-century, as Gamson writes in “Claims to Fame,” Hollywood embarked on a public relations version of plastic surgery, trying to transform the movie star from royalty to commoner--”prettified versions of the folks who lived just down the block.”

Such ordinariness, albeit counterfeit, was an effort to “promote a greater sense of connection and intimacy between the famous and their admirers,” Gamson says.

Television completed that connection and intensified that intimacy by reducing stars to a manageable size and bringing them into our living rooms and bedrooms.

Like its predecessor, radio, television projects “relatively pure personality,” as Monaco wrote in “Celebrity.”

“People tune in, not to hear the news or the stories, especially, but simply to spend time with the personalities. Hence the rise of the talk show, the true home of the celebrity”: Johnny Carson. David Letterman. Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh in particular is a paragon--almost a self-parody--of self-promotion; his callers and the issues he discusses are mere props for his egregiously, if entertainingly, egocentric brand of talk radio.

Other talk show hosts--especially daytime hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue--are not only celebrities, they help create celebrities out of each day’s news.

But they have help from the print press.

The demand for “real” celebrities has for some time outstripped the supply. After all, they show up daily (and nightly) on TV interview shows, and they regularly appear on the covers of People, US, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Premiere, Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone, among others. Increasingly, the top stars insist on preconditions before granting an interview--the promise of a cover photo, approval of the writer and/or photographer, approval of the questions.

Editors don’t want to relinquish that control. Besides, how many Madonnas and Michael Jacksons are there anyway? And how many times can we watch and listen to them tell the same stories?

Time and Newsweek once put Hollywood stars on their covers as a vehicle to sell magazines and discuss issues.

“You wanna do adoption? Well, Burt Reynolds is adopting so let’s take a look at adoption in the United States,” is how James Willwerth of Time describes the longtime practice.

No more. With all the other magazines on the newsstands now flashing their star covers, Time and Newsweek largely avoid them; when they want to write about an issue, they write about ordinary people grappling with the issue.

People magazine helped force this change by dominating the newsstand with its celebrity covers, but as the most successful print purveyor of personality, People has also been the leading print exemplar of the fusion between “real” and “artificial” celebrity.

In effect, People--followed by the tabloid television shows--responded to the exigencies of growing demand and limited supply in the celebrity market by simply expanding the concept of celebrity.

Although more than 75% of People’s covers feature “real” celebrities--movie stars, TV stars, rock singers--People’s Landon Jones says the key to the magazine’s success is actually its coverage of “ordinary people” in extraordinary circumstances.

Ordinary people such as the Bobbitts and Lyle and Erik Menendez fill about half of each issue of People, Jones says.

But the attention span on the exploits of ordinary people is relatively short, Jones says.

Thus, as Nancy Glass, anchor for the syndicated television program “American Journal,” says, these “ordinary” celebrities have become “disposable,” the media equivalent of so many Kleenex.

“Andy Warhol said 15 minutes (of fame)?” Glass asks rhetorically. “I think we’re down to 7 1/2 . . . and falling quickly . . . 10-9-8--Joey?--5-4-3--Amy?--2-1--you’re outta here.”

We live, increasingly, in an era in which “celebrities” are made (and unmade) quicker than you can say “Baby Jessica.” Some disappear so quickly that it’s difficult to recall a few weeks later who they were and why they were “famous.”

“In the old days,” wrote Charles Marowitz in “The Angel of Publicity,” “fame was the result of achievement.” People were celebrated for what they did--for what they invented, thought, wrote and painted, for the armies or countries or causes they led. Now, as historian Boorstin writes in “The Image,” we have a “new kind of eminence”--celebrity. The celebrity is “a person who is well-known for his well-knownness”--famous for being famous, famous not for doing but for simply being.

The dangers of this phenomenon are readily apparent. In politics, candidates--and those who cover and vote for them--emphasize personality over policy, thus marginalizing the political dialogue and the political process. In society at-large, many people mistake artificial achievement for real achievement and thus may set artificial (or impossible--or destructive) goals for themselves.

Journalists play a pivotal role in all this. In personalizing the news, they sometimes emphasize emotion over fact, thus trivializing and distorting the news and the public agenda. They invade the privacy of victims and victims’ families in search of detail that will humanize their stories. Journalists often fail to “absorb the complexities of personality,” instead turning complex individuals into mere caricatures, symbols, “two-dimensional” stick figures, says Jones of People magazine.

Moreover, as the PBS program “Frontline” pointed out last night, “when news and entertainment is all one business, there is no wall between fiction and fact as long as it’s good commerce.” (“A Current Affair” last week broadcast a re-enactment, with professional actors, of the deposition of the young boy who had accused Michael Jackson of sexually molesting him.)

The adoration of celebrity--the fixation on the individual--can also lead to demagoguery, to people being “seduced” by a tyrant on a white horse who promises to solve all their problems, says John Fairchild, chairman and editorial director of Fairchild Publications.

At its worst, the obsession with personality and celebrity can lead to its opposite extreme, to stalking celebrities, to shooting John Lennon and stabbing tennis player Monica Seles, even to assassinating a President, says Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University.

The quest for attention, to become a celebrity oneself, can have equally tragic results.

“How many times do I have to kill before I get a name in the paper or some national attention?” a serial killer in Kansas asked in a letter to police.

In Los Angeles last month, a 31-year-old day laborer named Enrique Palma Lopez was charged with kidnaping two boys--the second one, friends told the Los Angeles Times, after he had “felt a profound letdown when television reporters stopped coming around and when promises of work failed to materialize” after he’d been treated like a hero for “finding” the first boy and bringing him to authorities.

The Times said Lopez lost his steadiest employer, a contractor, because Lopez was “too busy talking to the media” when the contractor came by to hire him.

Does the media’s fascination with personalities such as Lopez--with heroes and villains alike--represent a sudden erosion of time-honored journalistic values?

Time’s Willwerth doesn’t think so. Amy Fisher’s story was made into three television movies, and Willwerth is reasonably confident that had there been customers for the rights to Amy Fisher’s story in 1975--or 1965 or 1955--”the same scramble would have gone on.”

“Human nature,” he says, “doesn’t change at all.”

After all, the big winners on the TV quiz shows of the 1950s--Charles Van Doren and Dr. Joyce Brothers in particular--became household names overnight (and will be resurrected this fall in a movie directed by Robert Redford). Even earlier--and on a much grander scale--Charles Lindbergh was celebrated as a national hero when he crossed the Atlantic in 1927. American newspapers used 25,000 tons more newsprint than usual the day after his flight. The New York Times devoted almost its entire first five pages to his feat.

When Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnaped five years later, the news media engaged in another paroxysm of excess.

People have always been interested in the triumphs and tragedies of others and--especially, voyeuristically--in “horrors . . . in lurid stories,” says Miller of Johns Hopkins. “What’s changed is that TV now seems to provide” those stories on a regular basis, thus raising peoples’ threshold for the horrific and the bizarre and requiring ever more horrific and ever more bizarre stories to keep the audience from becoming blase.

Even People magazine is dependent on television to create a climate in which readers want to read about its stars, ordinary or otherwise.

When People put Fisher on the cover in 1992, for example, the issue sold below average. Why? Because TV had not yet broadcast any of the Fisher/Buttafuoco movies, and few people outside New York knew who she was.

So why did People put her on the cover?

Because Amy and Joey were a big story in New York, and the editors of People fell prey--not alone and not for the first time--to the “myopia of New York journalists, myself included,” Jones says.

The publicity machine in New York--where the national print and broadcast media are based--is like “a three-stage rocket booster,” hurling stories into orbit, Jones says.

Thus, one New York personality after another is flung across the news media horizon and into homes from coast to star-struck coast. Donald Trump, the real estate tycooon. John Gotti, the gangster. Bernhard Goetz, the subway vigilante. Jennifer Levin, the victim in the “preppy murder case.” Leona Helmsley, the hotelier-turned-tax evader. Jean Harris, the headmistresss who murdered her diet doctor lover.

California also offers a wide assortment of celebrities, beginning with those hearty perennials--movie stars--that every East Coast editor envisions Southern California is really all about.

When brush fires roared through Southern California last year, editors at the New York Times “very badly wanted a (story with a) Malibu dateline” the first night the fires hit Malibu because “they knew all these movie stars were there, rich and famous people” says Robert Reinhold, then the paper’s Los Angeles bureau chief and now an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Because of logistical and deadline problems, the New York Times didn’t get its Malibu story until the next day. But when the earthquake struck Los Angeles last month, the New York Times again carried a “rich and famous” Hollywood story--an account of damage done to the homes of Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau, among others.

Movie stars aren’t Los Angeles’ only celebrities. We also have more than our share of instant celebrities of the more notorious variety: The Spur Posse from Lakewood High School. The Menendez brothers. Heidi Fleiss. Various mass murderers and serial killers: Charles Manson. The Hillside Strangler. The Skid Row Slasher. The Night Stalker.

Producers of the syndicated tabloid television shows say Texas and Florida--California’s colleagues in the sun belt of sin--are the other fertile fields for good “personality” stories. Generally that means crime, violence, money or sex--preferably all four . . . and the kinkier, the better.

Such stories give viewers both a vicarious thrill and a confirmation of their own normalcy--”I’m OK even if you’re not” or, at times, a relieved “there but for the grace of God go I.”

“The reason this kind of story (is) on the air is there is an appetite for it,” says Linda Ellman, co-executive producer of “Hard Copy.”

Thus, when KTTV (Fox 11) devoted 45 minutes of live coverage to Fleiss’ arraignment, ratings more than quadrupled. When Lyle and Erik Menendez stood trial in the perfect blend of bizarre sex and violence--defending themselves against charges they murdered their parents by saying their parents had molested them--spectators jammed the Van Nuys courthouse every day. (The brothers’ trials ended in hung juries.)

Such stories used to be the exclusive province of local news. But television--tabloid TV, Court TV, CNN--has helped make them national stories. In the process, like network television before them, they have--in a certain, almost perverse fashion--helped knit the country together (or at least provide the country with a common frame of reference).

“This country looks to television for its cues more than any other that I know of,” Jennings says. “No country that I know of has become so exclusively interconnected by television.”

That goes a long way toward explaining why the people (and the media) of this country seem more preoccupied with personality and celebrity than are the people (and media) of any other country in the world.

Next: In the United States, “the wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.”

The Cult of Personality

The United States is a celebrity-obsessed society, and with the demand for celebrities outstripping the supply, the concept of celebrity has expanded considerably in recent years. Increasingly, pseudo-celebrities like the Menendez brothers, Heidi Fleiss and Amy Fisher are rivaling traditional celebrities for coverage in the nation’s news media.