It’s News to TV’s Breathless Anchors

If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.

--Orson Welles as publisher Charles Foster Kane, ordering

his reluctant editor to inflate a baseless story in “Citizen Kane”

His manner, and the newscasts in which he works, are overbearing. Think fingernails clawing a blackboard.

But give Joel Grover credit for aggressively tackling topics that matter.

Grover is the KCBS investigative reporter who got famous here by using a hidden camera to expose kitchen filth in Los Angeles restaurants. His latest crusade is an alleged Medi-Cal fraud that he and KCBS this week are calling “California’s million-dollar rip-off.”

It’s not only provocative, but highly worthy, featuring seemingly incriminating secret video to bolster Grover’s charge that “many doctors are recruiting medical patients just to bilk the system.”

Medical patients with nothing medically wrong with them, Grover first reported during the 11 p.m. Sunday newscast.

Next night he was shown out on the street using the footage to confront some of his subjects (“You told this patient to lie! Why did you do that?”) while claiming that the state health department “knows all about” the alleged fraud but blames its own faulty computers for its failure to halt it. But now. . . .

“We’re going after this with a vengeance,” vowed Gov. Gray Davis.

Never underestimate the ability of KCBS to run a good thing into the ground through shrill excess, however.

It turned out, for example, that KCBS anchors, too, were plenty teed off about this scam that Jonathan Elias assured viewers from his soapbox, “everyone seems to be talking about now.” Everyone on KCBS news sets, that is.

The county’s allegedly dysfunctional computers “just seems like a lame excuse,” a seething Elias barked on the air.

“It would seem to be a classic case of nobody worrying about this money because it’s nobody’s money,” bristled his outraged co-anchor, Ann Martin.

Grover nodded smugly.

Fox would have titled this “When Anchors Go Wild.”

Of course, that was not the only Monday night report to horrify these highly concerned KCBS citizens. Also rocking them was a fast-breaking rumor about the “shocking secret recordings” of Elvis.

Oh, nohhhhh. It’s always something.

“Wait till you hear what allegedly went on at one of his concerts,” Elias gasped while the off-camera Martin was probably patting her fluttering heart, so great was the shock.

These “new secret tapes,” as she subsequently called the audio recordings, were of Elvis supposedly having a “temper tantrum.”

Roll tape. And yes, thankyouverymuch, there it was, an Elvis-like voice seemingly from the past, cursing at reports that the King used drugs.

Although stunned by these bleeped sound bites, those pros Elias and Martin were somehow able to gather themselves and continue, as viewers were told, finally, that this “bootleg tape” was obtained through the Internet and “may be no more legitimate . . . than an Elvis sighting.”

Or at KCBS, an ethical journalist sighting.

Although everything about Grover screams tabloid, for example, he looked like Edward R. Murrow compared with another “special assignment” that KCBS paired him with Sunday night.

The reporter was Drew Griffin, and his story was hatched by KCBS solely for the dishonest ratings goal of connecting its 11 p.m. newscast to that evening’s Part 1 of “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town,” the CBS miniseries about the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey.

If the miniseries was shoddy and cynically opportunistic, Griffin’s story and its promotion were doubly so.

“Startling new news in the JonBenet Ramsey case!” trumpeted a KCBS promo at station break in the docudrama.

This “startling new news” turned out to be a claim by a “Pennsylvania criminal analyst” who, Griffin reported, had examined the JonBenet ransom note for Boulder police and concluded from it that her slayer was her mother, Patsy Ramsey.

This was more shocking even than Elvis’ temper tantrum because a grand jury, after looking at all the evidence, failed to indict anyone in the slaying.

Anyway, Griffin said this guy told him that Patsy Ramsey was a “heavily religious born-again Christian who . . . used a misdirected faith and obsession for her daughter to commit a heinous crime.”

Griffin wrapped this “startling new news” by quoting the attorney for JonBenet’s parents saying “no one has linked Patsy Ramsey to this note.”

Bummer.

But wait. Griffin said he was heading for Boulder to report a “new lead, the one piece of evidence that could bring the killer to justice.” That lifted the anchors’ spirits.

“So it’s not over yet,” said Martin.

“Not quite,” said Griffin.

“Long overdue,” said Elias.

But bummer again. Viewers would have to wait because this “new lead” that Griffin mentioned Sunday night would not become newsworthy until tonight, following Part 2 of “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town.”

Even this, though, was not as shocking as a segment of KTTV’s “Getting Away With Murder” news report two weeks ago when reporter Tony Valdez tied Orson Welles to the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.

His source for this groundbreaking indefensible smear was a woman, identified as Short’s childhood friend, who said that she was slain and her body severed in half while Welles was filming “The Lady From Shanghai” here. Equally revealing was a photo of Welles and a makeup artist examining a mannequin’s head that, Valdez said, had been “slashed from ear to ear.”

There was more, for the woman said that although Welles and Short were not known to have met, they frequented the same restaurants. Could it be he didn’t like her table manners?

Still more: The woman said that Welles had applied for a passport “the very same day” that Short’s killer had mailed an envelope containing her physical effects to the cops.

Gulp! And get this. She said Welles had “applied to a mortuary school.” Valdez, shrewdly: “That’s intriguing because the killer drained every drop of blood from Elizabeth Short’s body.”

The Finger of Guilt was already on Welles when Valdez added these “final oddities.”

One was Welles’ passion for magic and that “the highlight of his stage show was cutting a body in half.” The second was that he and Rita Hayworth, his wife and “Shanghai” co-star, were arguing during the filming. “What is less known,” Valdez added, “is that whoever killed the Black Dahlia also applied henna to her hair and to her eyebrows, giving them a distinctively reddish color.” Yikes! RITA WAS A READHEAD!!!

In other words, Valdez deduced from the data before him, Welles “could have been a viable suspect.” But of course, he wasn’t a suspect. And isn’t a suspect.

oh.

Well . . . what about Elvis? What was he doing in 1947? Startling, isn’t it, that on the “new secret tapes,” Elvis never denies killing the Black Dahlia.

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