Visiting . . . With (Gasp) a Journalist

Huell Howser is easy to underestimate.

He comes across at times as KCET’s Beverly Hillbilly, a harmless gee-whizzer and speaker of refined yokelese who resonates his small-town Tennessee roots every time he opens his mouth.

Thus, many of his viewers were probably shocked to learn from The Times and other newspapers recently about the other Howser, the one who has nourished an epic controversy in Long Beach by publicly protesting the city’s plan to raze 11 historic buildings on its just-closed naval station to accommodate a new shipping terminal that local officials and business leaders say would be an economic boon. Howser accuses the city of an “arrogance of power” that discounts public opinion.

Howser learned what was happening while in Long Beach taping one of his low-key “Visiting . . . With Huell Howser” programs for KCET in which he talks to local residents about their communities.

Whether he’s right or wrong on the issue is not the point here. What is the point is that his role in the dispute belies the good ol’ boy image on TV that is only one side of Howser. Beneath the chatty veneer is an intense advocate with strong opinions that he argues fervently, especially when the subject is preservation.

Howser is California’s biggest super-fan, an ardent preservationist who has transformed his home into a repository for half the artifacts of Los Angeles, the half no one else wants.

The question of mixing journalism and advocacy is a judgment call in Howser’s case, for his KCET role is hardly that of a traditional newsperson. In a recent story in The Times, Howser labeled himself a journalist, something that probably made local news types in Los Angeles laugh out loud.

Get serious. How could he be a journalist when he doesn’t report murders, rampages or police chases? A journalist who hasn’t done one O.J. Simpson story? My eye.

Howser is not an amnesiac. He sees our present as connected to our past. He’s so corny that he’s spent years doing what real TV journalists in Los Angeles refuse to do: invest time in communities to discover who really lives there instead of zooming in on only mayhem. The members of minorities he interviews are not the ones you see hauled away in handcuffs night after night on local TV, a relentless negativity that fosters distortion and fear.

Some journalist. He’s obviously a hayseed who doesn’t belong in the big city.

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MICKEY MOUSE NEWS: It must be great working for Disney-owned ABC. You get to travel a lot and ride roller coasters free.

Take venerable Michael Jackson of KABC-AM (790), whose radio call-in show is coming from Orlando, Fla., this week in honor of Disney World’s 25th anniversary. As is ABC’s “Good Morning America,” letting the rest of the world’s news--including the critical Middle East summit in Washington--simmer on a back burner while focusing mainly on the kingdom of Mickey operated by its parent company. So much for priorities.

Now Disney World’s 25th birthday is worth noting. Disney’s syndicated “Regis & Kathie Lee” also landed there this week, and even NBC’s “Today” dispatched jovial Al Roker there for some occasional cut-ins. But puleeeeeze! “Good Morning America” is granting Disney World nothing less than a marathon free commercial, something gross even by TV’s usual chauvinistic standards.

Not that there hasn’t been time, also, for some old-fashioned in-depth reporting in Orlando.

Co-host Joan Lunden: “They got things here for the big kids and the little kids. . . .”

Correspondent Bill Ritter: “This is a place without war, without poverty. And oh yes, the food is fantastic!”

The staffers of “Good Morning America,” whistling while they work.

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MEDIA 101: The gap between media and the classroom continues to narrow, happily.

Crusaders for media literacy are meeting in Los Angeles this week for a conference examining how teachers can make their students smarter about the media. The driving philosophy here is that knowledge about media--what they’re up to, what they can do, what they should do--is as essential as basic subjects traditionally taught in schools.

Running Thursday through Sunday, the National Media Literacy Conference opens at the Westwood Double Tree Hotel with a talk on “the seven great debates in the media literacy movement” by Renee Hobbs of Clark University, one of the movement’s top advocates.

“Vote yes,” Hobbs wrote recently, if you agree with respected media scholar Neil Postman that “media literacy is just about the only antidote for a culture where we continue to amuse ourselves to death, where information has replaced knowledge, where style has replaced substance, where violence is the major form of entertainment and where we let technology drive the quality of our lives without reflection or analysis.”

Yes.

Hosted by the Center for Media Literacy in Los Angeles (call [213] 931-4177 for information) along with a slew of national education groups, the conference continues at UCLA with an impressive list of speakers that includes famed TV researcher George Gerbner, “Backlash” author Susan Faludi and another eminent media scholar, Mark Crispin Miller.

Heading the program are discussions of topics ranging from the V-chip to media mergers, and workshops will show teachers how to give students the skills to interpret and critique the media.

Now, if there were only a way to also make the media smarter.

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LESBIAN LESSON: Talk about courage: Coming out of the closet is a cinch compared to admitting you’re out of the loop.

Just as they did with ABC’s obscure “Twin Peaks” in 1990-91, readers are helping me fathom a prime-time series whose esoteric subtleties are eluding me. This time it’s ABC’s “Ellen.”

Two of them noted my lapses in monitoring “Ellen” for hints that Ellen Morgan, the character played by Ellen DeGeneres, would be disclosing later this season that she is gay.

There have been hints that there would be hints. And as I noted in a column Monday, there were indeed hints on the season’s premiere. Hot on the trail of this story, however, I also wrote that there were no hints in last Wednesday’s Episode 2. What I had missed, one caller said, was a picture of k.d. lang over Ellen Morgan’s bed. Right, lang, the superstar singer, is a lesbian. Was I blind?

What I also missed, said another caller, was the clear clue in a dream sequence triggered by Ellen’s revulsion toward a mounted deer’s head. In the nightmare, Ellen herself was a deer.

“She was wearing antlers,” said the caller. Of course, only male deer (and a few extremely macho lesbians) have antlers. How could I have missed something this obvious? And come to think of it, isn’t Ellen an anagram for Nelle? And isn’t it possible that somewhere there’s a lesbian named Nelle? This is all starting to make sense.

Tonight, meanwhile, nothing escapes these newly sensitized eyes. I’m a laser, the lesbian police on a stakeout, locked on every nuance and microdot of minutia linked to sexual orientation. Just let Ellen try to lather up and shave her face without my noticing.