<i> Hounds Hunt With the Pack</i>

I’m feeling my pulse. It’s beating.

So it must be a character flaw that I’ve no interest in the adulterous flings of Gary Condit, now the globe’s most famous smiling face. I don’t care how many affairs he allegedly had or whether he lined up these consenting adult females like beer cans and chug-a-lugged them one by one, two by two or six-pack by six-pack.

That includes the affair he is supposed to have had with Chandra Levy.

I don’t care how they met, where they met or what they did when they met. I don’t care how she felt about him or how he felt about her. I would care if the Washington, D.C., police said that Condit was a suspect or even a central figure in her disappearance, but in fact, they’ve publicly said that he’s not.

I would care, also, if I lived in the California Democrat’s congressional district of Ceres. I’d vote him out because he’s a sneaky hypocrite, huffily mounting a holier-than-thou soapbox on family values, then apparently going his own nasty way. But I’m not a constituent.

He should be exposed, of course. But that’s history. Unless I’ve imagined all of this, his extramarital fun has been X-rayed by TV and print again and again and again. Once was enough. I no longer care.

What does any of it have to do with Chandra Levy vanishing?

Now Levy and her suffering parents I care about, although, quite honestly, not nearly as much as I did, having been desensitized by TV’s overkill, this daily tonnage turning them almost into abstractions. Oddly, the more I hear and see of them, the more distant, the more unreal they seem, as if they were characters in a play with no last act, being watched from the last row of an amphitheater. The more they’re talked about, the more their brains are read from afar, the more their pictures are shown on TV, the less any of it sticks.

Go figure. What else could it be except a character flaw?

Actually, I blame it on TV.

Because I’m paid to observe these coconuts, I watched last week, jaw dropping, as the 24-hour news-and-scandal networks jumped all over and bear-hugged that tip about Chandra Levy’s body being buried near Fort Lee, a military base in Virginia. Saner minds at CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC had to be skeptical. Yet these networks launched themselves as wildly as Scud missiles, going for minute-by-minute coverage and mobilizing their talkers for two days of knee-jerk sound bites that continued even after the tip was revealed as a hoax.

Then came the spin, as if going haywire were an achievement that benefited knowledge.

CNN tease on Friday: “Where is Chandra? We don’t know where she is, but we now know where she is not.”

You know I wouldn’t make this up.

It’s only a short leap from that to assigning a story investigating all the places Chandra hasn’t been seen--that would narrow it for the cops--and interviewing interns who haven’t slept with Condit.

Anyway, the Fort Lee hoax got the revved-up chin strokers at CNN and the Fox News Channel going on the properties, the nature, the very essence of tips: When is a tip good? When is a tip bad? When is a tip a hoax? When is a hoax a tip?

No one had the guts to say what was what: We have seen the hoax, and it is us.

Did they learn their lesson? These amnesiacs? Child, you jest. They’ll be off and foaming again if someone calls with a tip that Chandra is buried in Grant’s tomb.

Cary Grant’s.

Joining us with some insight on that ...

Yes, I’ve been watching it all, including Larry King and his regular panel of sock puppets as well as Fox News Channel’s screaming “VANISHED” headlines, gratuitous “News Alerts” and daily insta-vote questions so insipid that I won’t be surprised when viewers are asked if they believe Chandra Levy was abducted by Bill Clinton.

And 70% answer yes.

On and on it goes, sometimes funny, more often maddening, as in King’s regular Levy/Condit hour Thursday night, when substitute host Roger Cossack welcomed some of King’s regular panelists along with Lisa DePaulo, author of a juicy Chandra article in Talk magazine; and Anne Marie Smith, about 14 minutes through her 15 minutes of fame after alleging a long-running affair with Condit.

Circumspection is a hit with this crowd about as much as arsenic. With Cossack anointing DePaulo’s article “the final and ultimate word” and CNN fishing out a headline advertising “New facts in Levy case,” the hour was throw-up time from start to finish. And what a finish, with Democratic politico Julian Epstein slamming the discussion’s prurience, and Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos ordered by DePaulo to “shut up” after ridiculing her titling the case “a love story gone awry” and cut off by Cossack when asking Smith for the relevance of her remarks.

“I get to ask the questions,” Cossack snapped before thanking Smith for being “gracious enough to come on here.”

Forget Geragos’ question; the one I wanted answered was how Cossack hid his lobotomy scars.

Based on her exposure on CNN and elsewhere, DePaulo will be the media’s Chandra guru for days to come, probably en route to one of a dozen book deals this story will yield. I haven’t read her piece, but some of the points she stresses on TV amount to speculation and unsupported hypotheses.

That was TV as usual.

Thursday’s program went especially sour, though, when both Smith and DePaulo plucked from the wings and dragged into the spotlight Condit’s wife, Carolyn, by making comments about her physical health that were an appalling violation of her privacy that should not have been telecast.

Is everyone at CNN nodding off? Condit is one thing, but what has his wife done to earn these storm troopers crashing her privacy, beyond being married to a guy with a zipper problem?

Levy/Condit a love story gone awry? You decide. Media gone awry? You know the answer.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.