Easier to Digest, Harder to Swallow

Black Monday.

Panicked, terrified doomsayers saw only gloom, calling it an October massacre, a crash, a dive, a plunge, a fall from a cliff, a steep slide, an epic devaluing, a cosmic catastrophe, a lethal dose of mayhem, a vast cloud darkening the landscape. But enough, already, with the pessimism.

Frankly, Monday evening’s reformatted “live, local and late-breaking” news debut on KCAL-TV Channel 9 was not that scary. That’s what desensitization does to you.

In any case, just look at the benefit. Finally, news you can dance to.

Actually, omit the big graphics and the pulsating musical scoring of occasional stories, and you had pretty routine TV news, choppier and breezier than the three-hour news block that it replaced, but nothing distinctive or dramatic.

In somewhat abbreviated form, it was the usual news, weather and sports, the coverage ranging from some adequate packages on the stock market thunder to a Venice Beach shooting--live, local and late-breaking--to fleeting digests of other news across the U.S. and the globe.

A real hoot, for example, is “Covering Your World.” Monday’s segment was a total of 45 seconds (with music) on happenings in Colombia, Canada and France. No wonder Americans, in general, are such dopes about the universe beyond their shores.

Yes, this is definitely news for the younger, callower, TV-bred crowd.

If TV were a stock exchange, you’d have to say that the news market was in sharp decline--not in quantity, but in quality, with blue-chippers down and no rally in sight, and with those reliant on it as a primary source of meaningful information destined to lose their shirts.

Some of us are so incredibly musty that we can recall a time when newscasts were crammed with stories that meandered languidly for as long as--think of it--90 seconds (as some occasionally did on the previous Channel 9 news block). We’re so old and infirm that I’m surprised Channel 9 did not seek an injunction to stop us from watching its new, swifter, heart-stopping, “live, local and late-breaking” news. Why, even taped to our chairs with blankets covering our brittle knees, we could injure ourselves just from tuning in. Or at the very least, wet our diapers from all the excitement on the screen.

Yet leaping nostalgia--just look who KCAL’s owner, the Young Broadcasting station group, has brought back as one of Channel 9’s revolving anchors. Yes, it’s none other than his royal snowy whiteness, Jerry Dunphy--hardly “the dean of broadcast journalism in Southern California” that Channel 9 is claiming, but surely the region’s Dean Martin of anchors, at age 77 still one of the best news readers in town and able to croon copy from a TelePrompTer with the best of them.

TV news is increasingly a composite of marketing symbols. So it’s a measure of this age of communications flimsiness that the mere presence of Dunphy, a veteran anchor but hardly a true journalist, can create an impression that Channel 9 is bullish on substantive news, even as its new “live, local and late-breaking” product projects the opposite. Fact is, in comparison, Dunphy is now looking pretty good.

From the desert to the sea.

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TEAM WORK: “Team” remains the operative marketing word in local news, from “team coverage” to “news team” to the consultant-driven “I Team” investigative units that have surfaced at stations across the U.S., including KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles.

Now Channel 2 has added another “team.”

It’s the “U Team” or--full title--the “U Team with useful information,” in striking contrast, one is led to believe, to the content of other Channel 2 newscasts.

Catching the “U Team” on Channel 2’s morning news this week kept you in touch, for example, with the latest in gardening, shaping up your arms and combating that unsightly cellulite.

What exactly is the “U team”? Think of Martha Stewart as sextuplets.

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THE J TEAM: Syndicated talk-show host Jenny Jones approaches some of her guests the way a polar bear does a seal surfacing at an ice hole.

She affirmed that in an interview with Jane Pauley for “Dateline NBC,” when the chat turned from Jones’ just-published autobiography to her 1995 taping of an episode on “Same Sex Secret Crushes,” which never aired but which has become a symbol of talk shows thoughtlessly playing Russian roulette with lives.

Three days after Scott Amedure disclosed to Jonathan Schmitz on the show that he had a crush on him, an apparently humiliated Schmitz bought a shotgun, drove to Amedure’s home and shot him to death. It was revealed later that Schmitz had severe emotional problems, about which Jones and her staff testified they had no knowledge.

Jones continues to insist that she and her show in no way contributed to what happened. According to a transcript of the interview released prior to Tuesday night’s scheduled “Dateline” broadcast, Pauley asked Jones whether, in light of Schmitz’s history of suicide attempts, she now felt he should not have been booked.

Her heart as frosty as a deep freeze, Jones replied: “The people that came on the show with him were his friends. They thought he was well enough to do the show.”

Jones went on to insist that Schmitz had not been humiliated by Amedure’s on-camera revelation and that, in hindsight, she would do nothing differently in regards to checking Schmitz’s background. “We do the same kind of show,” she said. “We check the guests out the same way. . . . We haven’t changed a thing.”

Pauley asked Jones if she would do another show on “Same Sex Secret Crushes.” Jones: “Absolutely. I think it’s a great topic.”

A beautiful human being, right? Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael may be the biggest talk-show clowns on television, but at least their shows didn’t result in any fatalities.

Yet.