On the Elian Watch: The Finger-Wagging

“The crowd swells, the heat intensifies!”--An Elian Gonzalez news tease on MSNBC.

Throat dry. Head aching. Eyes stinging. Ears ringing. Heart thumping.

Watching television can reduce you to a suffering, frustrated wreck who snarls and screams epithets at the screen. That was especially true as last week’s voyeuristic Elian vigil--a where-is-he-now-and-what-is-he-doing newscast version of “The Truman Show”--neared an end as Americans pondered the case’s legalities and the Cuban boy’s highly suspect monologue in a widely televised video.

Even a book tour on TV by the former lead detective in the JonBenet Ramsey case--with him claiming cops bugged her burial plot in hopes of hearing a confession there--has not dented this wall of Elian obsession.

MSNBC and the Fox News Channel have their anchor positions in front of the modest house of Elian’s great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, where the nation’s media have come to play. Inside with his relatives is Elian, when not brought out to frolic in camera view or show himself to the banner-waving, slogan-shouting Cuban Americans in this Little Havana neighborhood where politicians and celebrities have also been showing solidarity and paying homage.

As media pay homage to them.

Actor Andy Garcia gives a speech to the crowd? Put him on. Singer Gloria Estefan gives a speech to the crowd? Put her on. “Remember, Gloria’s father was a Vietnam vet, and when he came from Cuba, he volunteered to go to Vietnam,” MSNBC was told by a man from Spanish-language Telemundo. As if this factoid gave the singer special insight into Elian’s relationship with his own father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez.

All across the TV landscape late Thursday, meanwhile, a choreographed and manipulated Elian, age 6, was sitting cross-legged on his bed in that shocking and surreal home video, wagging his finger at the camera and defiantly telling his “papa” and the globe that he didn’t want to return to Cuba.

You wanted to shout, No mas!

One place this freedom-loving-kid-lectures-Castro-serving-Commie-dad footage didn’t air was “The O’Reilly Factor,” a Fox News Channel interview series whose blunt commentator-host, Bill O’Reilly, accurately labeled the video “propaganda.”

Not that O’Reilly or anyone else covering topical issues on TV will be boycotting all spin. Why . . . they’d go out of business. He was right, though. This was a no-brainer, the problem being that most of TV is unable to resist even obvious propaganda, however destructive, when it’s accompanied by good pictures. “That helpless and no-doubt confused child,” KNBC anchor Paul Moyer observed as his station ran the video Thursday.

By newscasters’ criteria, these pictures were very, very good, win-win images of Elian they could use to their advantage while also expressing shock at their existence and bringing on the usual corps of pediatric shrinks to assess his camera-tailored speech.

Made by Elian’s Miami relatives, the video first aired on the Spanish-language network Univision and was then fed to other networks, assuring blanket coverage and also giving TV fresh footage to wallpaper future Elian stories. For the time being, at least, finger-wagging Elian will be this story’s visual signature.

Just as making the mistake of granting his video TV exposure becomes a big, looping media signature.

Before running the video, which also has been airing on local stations here and across the U.S., the networks should have asked permission from Elian’s father. He wasn’t home in Cuba and inaccessible, after all. He was in Bethesda, Md., cooling his heels while debates raged about whether he should be allowed to regain his son. All anyone had to do was call his Washington, D.C., lawyer, Gregory Craig. You can almost hear the question:

“Would you ask Mr. Gonzalez if we can help the Miami relatives further exploit and use his son as an anti-Castro exhibit by showing this video of him telling his father to take a hike?”

The answer would have been no, of course, which is probably why the question wasn’t asked.

Just as the father wasn’t consulted by ABC News before it beamed Elian to the nation with Diane Sawyer in a taped interview--given extended exposure on “Good Morning America” and “20/20”--that featured shots of her drawing and rolling on the floor with him, presumably to prove that she and ABC News really, really cared.

Yet no one there cared enough to first ask Elian’s only surviving parent if he approved of his son expressing on TV intimate thoughts about his mother’s death through drawings in this appearance that had been pitched to ABC by the Miami relatives, reportedly after NBC had turned them down.

Best case scenario, this endearing little boy’s scars will heal, and he will overcome all of this and grow up strong and emotionally whole, whether ultimately living in the U.S. or Cuba. Another possibility is that when he’s older and can better understand how he was used by the multitudes, he’ll recall his TV stardom at age 6 and be very angry.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.