Naked Truth: CNN Fits Thompson Like a Glove

Many of us were stunned to learn recently that nude photos of Andrea Thompson were circulating on the Internet.

This was a credibility issue, after all. Thompson had just been hired by CNN as an anchor for its Headline News channel after a year or so of prepping at a station in smallish Albuquerque, following an acting career that since 1997 had her playing Det. Jill Kirkendall on ABC’s “NYPD Blue.”

Naturally she was on CNN’s short list. What better spot for an actress than in front of a camera on a national newscast? So you might say that getting tabbed by Headline News was a triumph of cramming, her Cliff Notes course in journalism paying off.

Of all the luck, however. There on several Internet sites are those revealing poses of Thompson in a magazine and some Italian movies, including her full frontal nudity in “A Gun, a Car, a Blonde” from 1998. On the other hand, it could have been worse for CNN. The nude photos could have been of Larry King.

Oooooooh, gross!

But get serious. Nude shots or not, Thompson’s working for Headline News is hardly revolutionary or even unfitting, given that a serious-journalism pedigree is not a prerequisite for anchors on a channel that requires them only to read a TelePrompTer without falling off their stools and injuring their lips.

Or even on CNN, sadly, especially these days as it wanders ever further from its roots, redefining itself as a 24-hour talk-and-opinion channel and getting ever chattier with such babbling trifles as “The Point With Greta Van Susteren” and “The Spin Room” with Bill Press and Tucker Carlson.

After cutting hundreds of jobs earlier this year and facing sagging ratings, CNN is clearly not the force it used to be, and looming ever larger is the challenge from its kick-butt younger competitors, MSNBC and especially the Fox News Channel.

Fox’s more-famous-by-the-day Bill O’Reilly and his snappy interview hour, “The O’Reilly Factor,” come into play here. He is an obnoxious, opinionated caped predator who leaves his coffin nightly to sink his fangs into a smorgasbord of guests. Yet he is not only a more fearless questioner but infinitely more informed than the host of CNN’s own main interview show, “Larry King Live.” Guests facing O’Reilly get a real workout, not a sponging, and it will take a stake through the heart to stop him.

That surely isn’t “The Point,” the flashy King lead-in that CNN is positioning as its Anti-O’Reilly by having the aggressive Van Susteren, an attorney who also co-hosts CNN’s legal series “Burden of Proof,” step it up even more on her new show. That means ending each half-hour with her (big graphics) FINAL POINT.

This is all sail with no wind, the level of discourse bottoming out recently when Van Susteren asked over-the-hill former heavyweight boxing champ Evander Holyfield,, who’s been talking comeback, what he would tell Al Gore if he wanted to make a comeback. The reply had something to do with having a big heart.

That banality is matched by “The Spin Room,” an e-mail-splattered half-hour of low-IQ schmoozing with Press, who also holds down the left on CNN’s “Crossfire,” and bow-tied Carlson, the network’s conservative young snot, all building toward (big graphics) THE SPIN OF THE DAY.

Speaking of the spin that Thompson is too much of a news lightweight to hang with this CNN crowd, was it not King himself, during one of his shows some years ago, who was kissed on the lips by Marlon Brando?

CNN is standing behind Thompson, meanwhile, despite her embarrassing full exposure. On ABC, she just played a detective, after all. Her soon-to-be colleague, Headline News prime-time anchor Lynne Russell, is one.

Says Russell’s CNN bio: She works 10 hours a week as a private eye in Atlanta and is a reserve deputy sheriff and martial arts expert who also works as bodyguard to visiting film stars and celebrities.

CNN still can come through impressively on occasion, with both stories and hirings. About the same time it signed Thompson, it also hired for its London bureau Sheila MacVicar, an experienced foreign correspondent inexplicably let go by ABC News.

Thompson wasn’t recruited in a vacuum, however. She is on the payroll because Jamie Kellner, who recently went from heading the WB network to heading CNN parent Turner Broadcasting, says he wants famous faces to compete with the Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

Put an entertainment guy in charge of news, and this is what you get? Perhaps. Yet Kellner didn’t invent newscasting’s charisma strategy.

Set in 1981, for example, “Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City” opens on Showtime Sunday with Laura Linney’s character pressing to become a news reporter at the San Francisco station where she now works as a costumed daytime movie host. She’s rejected for news not because of being unqualified but because the station’s research shows she’s not a favorite of viewers. In other words, no chops as a personality.

Research is the word. The anchors you see everywhere are products of research telling their bosses that you like them or believe them, their credentials or noncredentials as journalists notwithstanding. When the research goes south, so do they.

TV news has always been predicated largely on personalities, in fact, from local stations pitching their news teams as viewers’ caring, extended families--the fatherly male and sisterly female anchors, brotherly sports guy and uncle-like weather caster, for example--to networks advertising their own top news stars as perfumed gods whose aromas alone could part the Red Sea.

Take Walter Cronkite, everyone’s Mt. Rushmore of network news. Many feared he was abandoning the business to heathens when he retired from “The CBS Evening News” two decades ago. Cronkite’s omnipotence was built partially on something almost intangible, though. He had been around plenty as a reporter, covering one big story after another. Yet it wasn’t his prowess in that realm but his resonant voice and comforting presence on camera that earned him epic stature and billing as the nation’s most trusted man.

And take “60 Minutes,” the first and unquestionably best of the newsmagazines, yet a ratings champion not just because of excelling journalistically on occasion but also because of viewers being drawn to its superstar correspondents for who they are and how they are showcased.

You can bet that scenario is on CNN’s radar too, the difference being that 21 years after its visionary inception, its stars increasingly are commentators, not reporters. In fact, there is probably as much opinion on CNN today as news.

Forget Thompson. This emperor is wearing no clothes.

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