Bono, Brinkley and Befuddlement

Welcome to the temple, that great stew of information known as television, whose huddled masses are increasingly clubby and homogenous, where knowledge and propaganda converge, where the vital and the trivial unite, where the important and the less important coalesce.

And where it’s easier and easier to become confused.

One day Sonny Bono is a relatively obscure Republican congressman, the next he’s buried on live TV as a national hero.

One day Republican Susan Molinari is addressing America as a congresswoman, the next as a CBS News anchorwoman.

One day Democrat Geraldine Ferraro is co-hosting CNN’s “Crossfire,” the next explaining her latest candidacy for the U.S. Senate.

One day “icon of the American airwaves” David Brinkley--that’s how he’s defined by his publisher in his 1995 memoir--is holding forth for ABC News, the next on behalf of Archer Daniels Midland Co.

More about former music star and Palm Springs Mayor Bono shortly. Let’s stay with Brinkley for a moment. Actually, three months separated his retirement from ABC News and his resurfacing on TV as a product pitchman. It just seems like one came right after the other.

“I will still speak straight and true--I’ll never change that,” he vowed in his first commercial for the agricultural commodities giant, sounding like Eva Peron comforting the lower classes from which she sprang. “But now I will bring you information about food, the environment, agriculture--issues of importance to the American people and the world.”

Which, of course, was what he should have been doing as a newsman.

The commercials are running on Sunday morning news programs, including “This Week,” the series that carried his name when he hosted it for 15 years. ABC News correctly took the precaution Jan. 4 of having Cokie Roberts, who is now co-hosting the series with Sam Donaldson, remind viewers that Brinkley is now out of journalism and employed elsewhere.

An ABC spokeswoman said any subsequent Archer Daniels Midland spots with Brinkley also will be accepted and aired. The firm is a longtime sponsor on “This Week.”

Look, you would have expected Brinkley to exhibit more sensitivity in this area after retiring from ABC News. Buy a skyscraper, produce movies, write romance novels, do anything but shill as an authority figure on TV, where lines already are so blurred that viewers may not easily separate the new Brinkley from the old Brinkley.

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Yet his half century as a journalist doesn’t disqualify him from such employment. As long as he remains a former journalist, he can do pretty much what he wants, including trading off of his reputation as a sardonic anchor and commentator to deepen the pockets of his new employer, Archer Daniels Midland. There’s precedent. Maxwell House hired Linda Ellerbee as a TV spokeswoman after she had ended her career in TV news, former network newscaster Faith Daniels is making commercial spots today, and CBS News inexplicably has let “Sunday Morning” host Charles Osgood do commercials.

And on the other side of the street, former Sen. Bob Dole began making TV commercials not long after getting clobbered in his bid for the White House.

Will Brinkley’s reputation in news help sell Archer Midland Daniels to the public? It shouldn’t, one having nothing to do with the other. But if it doesn’t, the firm has made a bad investment.

It was Bono who was being sold to the public much of last week, TV coverage of the California congressman’s fatal ski accident and the infinite retrospectives of him rising like a thundering drum roll en route to his funeral in Palm Springs on Friday.

Los Angeles stations will never be accused of understatement. The funeral was carried live by five stations here, and also by CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC, which feasted on this story day after day, hour after hour, as if nominating Bono for Mt. Rushmore.

Some assigned to this live beat Friday themselves seemed almost puzzled about the fuss. “Some people say he wasn’t the greatest singer, he wasn’t the greatest songwriter,” CNN’s Charles Feldman said to a Bono fan who had traveled to the funeral from afar. “So . . . what was it about him?”

At KTLA-TV Channel 5, Sam Rubin seemed to struggle for the right words while asking a reporter in Palm Springs for enlightenment. “Can you draw a comparison? This seems unlike anything I’ve seen for someone such as this.”

Someone such as this, indeed.

Now this has nothing to do with Bono personally. His death was, of course, tragic. He made some nice music. He had some success in TV. He started a film festival in Palm Springs. He was elected to Congress. By all accounts, he left behind visible footprints and a family that loved him, and was a very nice guy whose self-effacing humor eased tensions. The outpouring of emotion toward him in Palm Springs and elsewhere surely was genuine. And his ex-wife Cher’s emotional eulogy Friday was one of those rare moments of TV that resonate with love, heartfelt devotion and sincerity. A big-time lump in the throat.

However, if much of TV newscasters’ circumspection was cranked into the ground last year along with Princess Diana, the rest was buried with Bono.

What Bono hadn’t achieved in life, he was achieving Friday in death. On MSNBC, someone was describing him as “a rising star on Capital Hill.” On the Fox News Channel, someone was calling him “the man who made a defining moment in music and politics.” And on KCBS-TV Channel 2, Larry Carroll was anointing Bono as “America’s performer, America’s leader, America’s Sonny.” And the beat went on.

If Cher’s description of him was accurate, Bono himself would have put the kibosh to all of that.

Unfortunately, TV’s kiboshers have been eclipsed by newscasters who think of themselves as wearing flowing white robes while making pronouncements that echo across the heavens. As if giving voice to the biblical, KNBC-TV Channel 4’s Kent Shocknek said his farewell to Sonny Bono this way: “Now it has come to this.” It certainly has.