A Skewed Look at the Nature of This ‘Beast’

Television’s 24-hour news cycle--pioneered by CNN and extended by the Fox News Channel and MSNBC--has been defined in this very space as a ravenous monster that must be constantly fed.

Think “Jaws.” Think Rush Limbaugh.

Now comes fictional WNS in “The Beast.” Why is this round-the-clock news network called The Beast? “It’s always hungry,” freelance magazine writer Alice Allenby (Elizabeth Mitchell) hears when dropping by for a job interview with arrogant media baron Jackson Burns (Frank Langella) en route to stardom as a TV news reporter.

Which takes about, oh, two days.

In other words, life is a jump-cut here, and events are as sped-up in this drama as in the accelerated news phenomenon it portrays with a self-conscious, heavy hand, giving shrill resonance to issues that some media observers (blush) have been citing for years.

The most fundamental of these--the frightful merger of human and machine intelligences--was noted much more creatively in “Max Headroom,” a science fiction satire that ran briefly on ABC in 1987, and especially in the British movie from which it was spun.

Computer-generated Max existed in a futuristic society in which turning off TV was illegal, just as the live, omnipresent cameras of WNS are rolling continuously because Burns finds boring “the standard three-act news story” and aches to “feed it out there raw” so that even his reporters are being observed in close-up by the public.

“I want them to see us struggle with the truth the way they struggle with the truth,” he tells Alice. “We’re interested in the process here . . . not just the result.”

It’s a fatuous conceit, as if the public would or should want to see media struggling with “truth,” poor babies, a focus elevating them and their concerns above the stories they’re covering.

Televise the process? Throw everything out there and hope some of it sticks?

Possibly the first time that concept was publicly applied to journalism in a big way was in 1980, when NBC News goofed in some of its rushed live reporting during the GOP National Convention, then justified these aired mistakes by saying it had shown America a story “in progress.” Talk about gobbledygook. You’d have thought NBC’s correspondents were Max Headrooms, roaming the convention floor while cybernetic imprints of their own memories and experiences appeared on the screen.

No one at the time knew that the future was being foreshadowed. What seemed outrageous then--akin to telecasting a reporter’s surface impressions and raw, unsubstantiated notes--is now almost routine in this “live” era of instantaneous TV reporting, when the monsters include voracious talk radio and when rumor and wild speculation are defined as news and shoveled at the public gratuitously.

The nightmare extension of this came on Election Night 2000, when the story in progress turned out to be the wrong story on all the major networks, one that potentially could have influenced who would be the nation’s next president.

Today’s news stimuli are as visceral and fleeting as the compressed commercials known as “blipverts” in Max’s realm. This makes the old-fashioned way of reporting--withholding information until facts are straight--sound quaint.

As does Kario Salem’s “The Beast.” The panoramic WNS fishbowl includes even its own Los Angeles headquarters, where everyone is scrutinized by 24-hour news cameras under the big brotherly gaze upstairs of a faceless voyeur named Harry whom Burns calls “God.” In a future episode, Harry faces an ethical, if not moral, dilemma when noticing on his closed-circuit screen that a fugitive mad bomber is mingling with news staff members. Because this guy “hates the media like he hates the devil,” should Harry let the WNS folks downstairs know he’s there?

“When do we put down the camera?” Harry wonders. “When is it time to interfere?” There, there, Harry.

It’s a complex question, one pertaining to a journalist’s loyalties that, “The Beast” notes, was asked of Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace and other pros in a televised Socratic dialogue some years ago. And is asked, in various ways, of journalists everywhere. But the issue is trivialized here by the synthetic way it’s framed.

Totally into this freaky WNS milieu, meanwhile, is Reese McFadden (Jason Gedrick), a kick-butt, in-your-face anchor-reporter who early in the premiere warms Burns’ heart by shooting someone the bird in full view of America.

“The camera is God, it demands a performance,” says Burns.

Alice is at first repulsed by him and his notion that she should have a televised live chat on Death Row with a murderer shortly before this twisted fiend is strapped into the electric chair. The very idea. How could Burns even suggest such a cockamamie thing to someone who had just told him her heroes are Woodward and Bernstein?

It takes only minutes for the seduction to take hold, though. As Alice scans the dizzying, high-tech WNS newsroom and feels its pulsating energy, her eyes light up like twin monitors, and a star is about to be born.

A print journalist with the skills to instantly star on camera? FBI agents invading a network newsroom to haul off two of its stars on live TV as the rest of the staff chants “Attica, Attica”? An execution’s telecast arranged by Burns with the snap of his fingers? I don’t think so.

No one could take seriously any of it--not these vastly overdrawn characters and melodramatic Death Row sequences, not that bomber getting hired at WNS without detection even as his image appears on monitors for all to see. Were Reese and the others too busy being raw and real to notice?

Yet the fusion of media form and content that “The Beast” stresses surely cries out for serious discussion. As does the rationale Alice gives for televising an execution, a moment of clarity in a series that arrives, coincidentally, when the nation is buzzing about Timothy McVeigh.

“If 71% of the American people say they’re in favor of something, they ought to know what it is,” she says. “You believe in the death penalty, America? Well, here it is, take a look.”

* “The Beast” premieres Wednesday night at 10 on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14-S-V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for sexual situations and violence).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.