Look! Up in the Sky, It’s Real News!

You may have caught urbane Peter Jennings with Larry King on CNN last week. Though initially guarded, Jennings was very polished, very impressive.

They spoke largely about ABC’s “World News Tonight” (the best 22 minutes of network news on television), the Canadian Jennings’ rise from obscurity and matters befitting a news anchor who’d lived abroad, flown the globe for stories and could distinguish Mid-Wilshire from the Middle East and germs from Germans. The evidence flashed on the screen--a clip of Jennings smoothly reporting from the toppled Berlin Wall, for example, where on that occasion he was joined at the hip with traveling trench coats Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC.

So civilized and ultimately chatty was Jennings on CNN that at times he sounded nearly like Noel Coward, his glow of witty refinement spreading across the desk even to King, who prides himself on being forever the Brooklyn schmoozer.

Yet, funny thing: Although their conversation did, indeed, embrace the real planet, from tobacco to presidential politics, how weirdly isolated it seemed, as if floating in a purified stratosphere of cotton clouds many miles above the mean streets and belly laughs of newscasts in Los Angeles. Watch enough news in this town, and your sense of reality and proportion inevitably flip-flops.

But enough.

Given the merger of local newscasts with slapstick, it’s time to stop nit-picking and begin celebrating them for what they are: the great slippery banana peel of popular culture.

Let Jennings and the other network evening newscasters do their thing. But don’t the masses need just a little bit of fall-on-your-butt comic relief from the burdens of the ‘90s? And don’t we get it from these kazoos of local news, especially during such ratings sweeps months as May, when stations brazenly punctuate their newscasts with noisily trumpeted, in-depth “special reports” that result from exhaustive journalistic investigations?

Last Thursday, for example, KNBC-TV Channel 4 blew the lid off bad breath.

Same night, KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” covered the heck out of “fantasy cribs.” And on KCBS-TV Channel 2, “Action News” weighed in on the fabled “chupacabras,” the name given a terrifying, unidentified creature that some Puerto Ricans claim is killing and sucking blood from their sheep and goats. After a thorough examination of these incidents, “Action News” was able to narrow the mystery to two possibilities: Either “chupacabras” does exist or it doesn’t.

Resorting to nearly any tactic to gain attention, stations with daytime newscasts also increase their chopper coverage during ratings sweeps, gratuitously preempting their least popular regular programs, for example, to hover above and analyze even the tiniest puffs of smoke on the ground or fires that are nearly extinguished, seeking to create an aura of exciting news even when none exists. And when this happens, furthermore. . . .

Huh? What is that? Oh . . . I’m being signaled by a Calendar editor to stop typing my column immediately.

*

Editor’s Note: This column is being preempted for breaking news. We will return to it as soon as possible, but now we go to Capt. Howard in the Calendar Chopper.

Capt. Howard: Yes, that’s right. We’re above a talent agent burning trash in his backyard. Now if this were a windy day, that small blaze would be whipped into a fiery holocaust blackening thousands of acres and leaving death and destruction in its wake.

News Desk: Hundreds of deaths?

Capt. Howard: At least.

News Desk: How horrible. And if those trying to escape were fallen upon and slaughtered by vicious ninja warriors?

Capt. Howard: A blood bath, but we’d still have to report it. And now look at this, this is really something. We’re now over a large TV studio that, as you can see, is not on fire. But boy, oh, boy, this is exactly the kind of structure that would burn ferociously if it ever did catch fire.

News Desk: Forcing many TV series out of production?

Capt. Howard: Absolutely.

News Desk: Even “ER,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends”?

Capt. Howard: If they were produced there, they’d be history.

News Desk: The casts?

Capt. Howard: All gone.

News Desk: Lots of deaths?

Capt. Howard: This is tough, but I’m afraid thousands.

News Desk: Including tiny children, some of them still clutching their teddy bears?

Capt. Howard: You know the answer.

News Desk: Just chilling. And if that fire were set by an arsonist who subsequently sought to escape in a car, leading police on a dangerous high-speed chase across miles and miles of Los Angeles freeways?

Capt. Howard: We’re over one such freeway now, describing for our readers the route the arsonist would almost certainly take, recklessly weaving in and out of traffic, endangering other motorists and the sweet old ladies and innocent little toddlers some of them surely would be transporting.

News Desk: Oh, my God. And if the arsonist crashed into a military vehicle carrying a nuclear bomb?

Capt. Howard: Los Angeles would be wiped off the map.

News Desk: Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt?

Capt. Howard: History. And, of course, we’d be covering that tragedy, too, live from the Calendar Chopper.

News Desk: Where’s the justice? Thank you for that blockbuster story, Capt. Howard. Unfortunately, we’re out of space, which means the column we’ve preempted will resume here Wednesday. That is, if there is no breaking news.