‘Mad City’? Check Your Set

“Mad City” is Costa-Gavras’ new movie about a gathering of media roaches. His despicable TV newscasters merge in a San Jose-sized city and swarm like insects, lying, twisting, manipulating, exploiting, impersonating medical staff, peeking a camera through the hospital window of a critically wounded man, prolonging a hostage crisis and throwing away the ethical rule book to get a sound bite or story. It’s “Dog Day Afternoon” meets “Network,” minus the vision and insight.

In a way, though, much of television is its own mad city.

And who’s ultimately to blame? Well, just as the predatory nasties of “Mad City” could not thrive without audience approval, about anything goes in real-life newscasting precisely because members of the public put up with it. By watching, they applaud.

One result is that the few dissident voices of reason within the system lose whatever leverage they have, just as Robert Prosky’s old-fashioned news director in “Mad City” (“Our viewers don’t need to see the blood”) gets trampled in the stampeding for risky theatrics by Alan Alda’s big-shot national anchor and Dustin Hoffman’s defrocked former network TV reporter, who will cut any corner in his dash back to the big time.

And what is the big time these days?

It includes mass mobilization of TV resources for Monday’s day in court of English au pair Louise Woodward, who in Cambridge, Mass., was set free in front of a global TV audience by Judge Hiller B. Zobel after he reduced her offense to involuntary manslaughter, finding that her second-degree murder conviction in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen was a “miscarriage of justice.”

Again linked at the hip, the big three of NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’ Dan Rather were on this story throughout much of the day. Locally, in fact, the live coverage of Zobel granting Woodward her big break in two installments--first reducing her offense and then, three hours later, the sentence reduction to time served--was available on nine channels. Given the way TV renders all things equal, the event seemed as significant as one of those police chases that local stations turn into Russian roulette by rushing to cover them live.

Live, that is, with all the pratfalls and pitfalls. On Monday, that included the Fox News Channel having Eric Shawn, its man outside the courthouse, read Zobel’s detailed ruling to the camera cold, immediately after it was handed to him. It was harrowing, and you could almost hear the sweat rolling off of poor Shawn’s brow as he thumbed through the document with the camera on him, reading portions, then searching some more.

Finally: “We have just about a minute. We wanna get near the end. Uh . . . uh . . . uh.” Then silence, as he read to himself while the TV audience watched. Then, at last, mercifully, the lightbulb clicked on above his head. “Ah, here we are!”

And there we all were later when network after network split the screen for the judge’s announcement of Woodward’s freedom, showing her supporters in her hometown of Elton, England, responding euphorically with loud cheers as if their soccer team had just won. One of them was asked by a reporter how he could be certain of Woodward’s innocence. “Is that the face of a murderer?” the Elton man responded.

It had come to that. Woodward must remain in Cambridge pending the outcome of the prosecution’s appeal of Zobel’s reduction of her sentence. If and when she does get home, though, a ticker tape parade surely will be waiting.

On TV, in celebration of the November ratings sweeps, chauvinistic ticker tape parades are well underway. KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” has already done its obligatory in-depth chat with Oprah Winfrey, celebrating under the guise of news her daytime talk show that precedes the news.

And on CBS Sunday, “60 Minutes” aired a profile of Martha Williamson, executive producer of “Touched by an Angel,” the hit series that immediately follows the newsmagazine. The piece omitted mentioning recent public protests by one of the show’s stars, Della Reese, about getting a smaller pay raise than co-star Roma Downey. But “60 Minutes” deserves the benefit of doubt here, given that Williamson’s achievement in giving TV some religion is a genuinely big story, and “60 Minutes” has no history of favoring its own.

*

Not so KCAL-TV Channel 9, where the angel touching Jerry Springer this week was news anchor Pat Harvey.

Harvey’s two-part series on Springer, whose notoriously bottom-skimming syndicated talk show airs on Channel 9 at 11 p.m., following the news, was touted in a large newspaper ad featuring a photo of Harvey and four fellow news anchors below one of Springer, as if he were their Godfather.

Springer is a former Cincinnati mayor and news anchor who has spent recent years getting in touch with his inner child. It was only last May that Carol Marin resigned her job as nightly news anchor at NBC-owned WMAQ-TV in Chicago in protest of the station’s hiring the Chicago-based Springer to do some commentaries during that ratings sweeps month. Springer made two appearances before bowing out.

Marin, whose co-anchor, Ron Magers, quit soon after she did, said then that hiring Springer “was in disrespect to our loyal audience and in disrespect of the serious journalism that many in the newsroom have engaged in over the years.”

*

What a difference an anchor makes. Although not making Springer a commentator, Channel 9 demonstrated a lack of ethical standards by having Harvey celebrate him under the banner of news on two of its 10 p.m. newscasts. Either she didn’t realize that her station-serving, Springer-adoring series was inappropriate or she didn’t care that it was, neither of which speaks well for her.

Harvey told newscast viewers Monday that she went to Chicago “in search of the real Jerry Springer.” You know, the one whose shows, as her series gleefully noted, have such titles as “I Cut Off My Manhood,” “My Girlfriend’s a Guy” and “Give Up Your Sexy Job.”

And don’t forget “Klanfrontation,” a chunk of which appeared in Harvey’s series, with a guy in Ku Klux Klan robes being lectured sanctimoniously by Springer (“In the United States of America, we all belong, not just you”) before getting into a fistfight with Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League.

It’s the “polite racists” who are dangerous, “not those crazies on our show,” the suddenly thoughtful Springer, some of whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust, told Harvey. Then why have the “crazies” on his show? Naturally, Harvey didn’t ask.

She briefly mentioned the Marin incident and allowed Springer to dismiss it cavalierly. Harvey: “What did she call you, the poster child for the worst television has to offer?” Springer: “I was honored. To be on any poster is nice.” That was followed by off-camera laughter, seemingly from Harvey.

Part 2, Harvey promised, would reveal where Springer “finds those wild guests for his show. And don’t forget, you can watch the Jerry Springer show weeknights at 11 o’clock right here on KCAL.” Talk about your shilling.

Monday’s Springer topic, by the way, was “Bachelorette Party Fights.” You see, Jay bitterly opposed his fiancee, Tanja, having a raunchy pre-wedding bash like the one her brother was throwing him. And, boy, was he steamed when Jerry showed footage of a “bachelorette party” that Tanja’s friend had already thrown her behind his back. And no wonder, for there was Tanja licking whipped cream from the body of a male stripper. When the stripper himself turned out to be a guest, Jay tried to slug him. “All right,” cautioned Jerry. “Settle down.”

No one was settling down Tuesday night, based on promos for that show featuring a gal who looked like a guy getting into a shoving match, and a woman with gargantuan breasts getting into a fistfight with a Klansman.

This is the talk show that Channel 9 has symbolically grafted to its news.

In the Costa-Gavras film, Dustin Hoffman’s character ultimately appears to see the light. That’s where the two mad cities part.