Dr. Packer Needed in CBS Cancer Ward Now!

I am so glad a journalist as towering and as credible as Billy Packer took the heroic step of calling that tawdry, nouveau-news organization “60 Minutes” for what it is: a cancer on the CBS network.

Heroic? Well, maybe revealing is a better word. Extraordinarily, sadly revealing--about Packer and CBS these days.

Packer’s curious charge, leveled in an interview with The Times’ Larry Stewart, was that, with a recent story on Fresno State’s troubles and past stories highlighting incidents of potential corruption in college athletics, “60 Minutes” is a ratings-driven menace.

And it is a menace--to the new Packerista spirit of CBS.

See, the network spends hundreds of hours all season shamelessly hyping players and putting halos on coaches, and some of that is proper and some of those stories are wonderful.

The end result is a monster, made-for-TV Final Four, and if there is ugliness surrounding the scene, if there are Fresno State players arrested and there is money handed under the table to recruits and there are coaches who sell their souls for shoe logo millions and administrators who choose to look away, well, who needs to hear it?

“60 Minutes” is the best hour of journalistic story-telling ever put on TV. Granted, it is sometimes naive when it reports on sports issues, but it is always brave and the reporting is usually indefatigable.

But, hey, Billy’s got a show to put on!

Here’s the real truth of it, Packer style: CBS is no place for the intrusion of actual journalism into the glorification of its own TV properties, especially the NCAA tournament, which is the crux of Packer’s livelihood as CBS’ college basketball commentator.

Yep, Billy truly speaks with the new spirit of CBS, home of the tape-delayed, poorly packaged Olympics, pseudo-events, shoe company-sponsored announcers and many other glorious adventures.

Let’s face it, Billy is a mucky, modern-day version of Edward R. Murrow vs. Joe McCarthy, Woodward and Bernstein vs. the Nixon presidency, or even Tom Cruise vs. Jack Nicholson (“You can’t handle the truth!”).

Only thing: He’s battling for 100% pander television, and against the search for truth, which, admittedly, can get complicated sometimes.

When you approach this in Billy-Think, the conclusion is astonishingly easy:

No matter that the public cherishes “60 Minutes,” CBS should dump this tired news-telling obsession and fill its Sunday night programming with more enriching fare--such as maybe “The Life and Times of Billy Packer: No Hidden Agendas Here,” or, if we’re super lucky, extra episodes of “JAG.”