Brand-New Lineup, Same Brand of News

With typical bluster and hyperbole, the “Action News” promo promised more Monday than would be delivered: “We changed our lineup to bring you more.”

Let’s see, KCBS-TV Channel 2 loses 90 minutes of news by dropping its 4 p.m. newscast and halving its 5 p.m. newscast, then gains an hour by inserting “Action News” at 6 p.m. following a relocated Dan Rather with “The CBS Evening News.”

Calculators ready? Net loss: a half hour.

Actually, the news lineup was juggled in the hope of swelling those traditional low ratings. If not more news, though, Monday’s debut of the new and improved “Action News” did bring you more of the same.

* The Same Heavy Crime Tilt. There were exceptions. One was reporter Linda Alvarez’s memorializing Leonard Pieroni, a local business leader who died in that recent plane crash with Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. Another was humor reporter Steve Hartman’s fun-poking jab at sports interviews and sports reporters (“contradictory, redundancy, verbosity”) that was subsequently validated when “Action News” aired the interviews its own sportscaster, Jim Hill, had conducted following Monday’s Dodgers home opener.

Overwhelmingly, though, “Action News” zoomed in on crime with its usual tenacity. For example, there was Channel 2 reporter Brad Goode in Sacramento, site of the Unabomber’s most recent attack. The business of California’s government was not the attraction, of course. Only a “trail of terror,” as “Action News” put it, had finally enticed the station to the state capital.

There too was reporter Harvey Levin leading the 6 p.m. program with word that O.J. Simpson had “failed” a lie detector test given him two days after the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman. These “incriminating results,” as Levin termed them, were later described by “Action News” as “another bombshell” in the case. Why doesn’t Channel 2 go ahead and open a permanent O.J. “bombshell” bureau in Brentwood?

Also prominent on “Action News” was an audiotape regarding those baton beatings of suspected illegal immigrants by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies following an 80-mile, high-speed chase. The huge, incriminating printed headline: “CAUGHT ON TAPE.”

However, the snippet of the tape transcript reported by Channel 2 (someone saying, “Get down, get down now,” and someone else saying, “Call our station, we are out of communications with them”) was not only out of context (based on a full transcript printed in The Times) but also inconclusive.

Just as noteworthy was accompanying footage run by Channel 2, the now-famous fleeting shot of a deputy swinging a baton several times, the one now available everywhere on TV. Curious how TV shorthand works. Tailored for brevity, the visual side of this incident has been severely cropped, with the story consisting almost entirely of the beatings, as if what preceded them--the fleeing pickup truck losing its camper top while allegedly trying to ram other motorists, and its occupants allegedly throwing objects at pursuing police cruisers--now ceasing to exist.

Not that the chase or subsequent flight by most of the truck’s inhabitants necessarily would justify excessive force (in this case allegedly against suspects who appeared not to be resisting), any more than there was any justification for the more savage, more prolonged beating of Rodney G. King. Yet for the sake of public information, the full context should be reported so that not merely one side of the story is affixed in our minds.

* The Same Questionable Judgment. There was Debra Snell reporting live from Marlon Brando’s star on Hollywood Boulevard (well, if you can’t get him . . . ) in a package regarding the actor’s remarks about ugly ethnic stereotypes in some movies and his controversial criticism of Jews that he claimed were responsible for them. “We’ve seen the nigger, we’ve seen the greaseball, we’ve seen the chink, we’ve seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap, we’ve seen the wily Filipino, we’ve seen everything, but we never saw the kike,” Brando had said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

However, in a bit of selective “political correctness”--a gratuitously overused term that happens to apply in this case--Channel 2 inexplicably bleeped “nigger” from the CNN footage, while letting the other ethnic slurs stand, as if they were somehow less repugnant.

* The Same Scary Headlines and Reporting. “There are new fears tonight of a California connection to the mad cow disease,” anchor Ann Martin read from a TelePrompTer. “Now a woman in Stockton has died, and that is raising questions.”

As it turned out, the woman died only of a similar rare disease, reporter Mary Grady went on to report, not the one that has put England into a frenzy. And even though Grady claimed “some doctors do believe it could be linked to the mad cow disease,” there was no basis for that in her report, which wound up juxtaposing the two fatal afflictions confusingly, almost as if they were one.

Does this seem familiar? If so, it’s because the new lineup offers not true change but an alternative means of receiving what viewers have already been receiving from “Action News” and the station’s earlier like-minded news formats.

You’d think that Channel 2 and its bosses at CBS in New York would have learned by now that the station’s loopy news doesn’t work. It doesn’t work journalistically. And two decades of almost monolithically bad news ratings (with an occasional brief bump upward here and there) attest to its commercial failure as well.

That failure is not the fault of such personalities as deposed anchor Jerry Dunphy or present anchors Martin or Michael Tuck or any of the other talking heads who were hired and promoted as saviors by the station and then ejected when viewers were not impressed. Nor is it the fault of the station’s blur of news directors and general managers--not matter how repulsive their news policies--who have passed through this revolving door while essentially following orders and having their actions endorsed by their superiors.

It’s the fault of CBS management in New York who have been unable to create and sustain a workable news formula at one of the network’s flagship stations.

Now, “Action News” is not a demon among angels here. Its TV news competition in Los Angeles is not exactly holy. So here’s some advice from the ivory tower: Why come in third while aping competitors? As long as “Action News” is losing in the ratings, why not lose at least with dignity? Why not bag the gimmicks and whoopee cushions, the relentless self-promotion and tabloid tactics and all the other shenanigans and sleight of hand? Why not stress--fasten your seat belts here--good, old-fashioned information. You know, thorough, more careful, more intelligent reporting of stories other than crime. Try it for a year. And if “Action News” still gets clobbered, nothing lost.

Will Westinghouse, the new owner of CBS, heed this sage counsel? Um, don’t hold your breath. Instead, do, indeed, get ready for more of the same. You’ll recognize the “Action News” stories when you see them.

Contradictory, redundancy, verbosity.