Network Shocker: A JonBenet Story With Actual News Value

Time to update that old cliche about there being two things we can count on, death and taxes. Make it three.

The third is that during May and other ratings sweeps months, someone on TV will face a camera stonily and ask who killed JonBenet Ramsey.

Never underestimate much of the public’s taste for the tawdry, and much of the media’s zest for delivering it. Since her unsolved murder in Boulder, Colo., just after Christmas in 1996, 6-year-old JonBenet has been enlisted posthumously in the cause of ratings again and again. Her ugly death has assumed a life of its own, and peeling back thick layers of this coverage to its rotted core becomes a primer in media excess alongside the McMartin preschool debacle in the mid 1980s and the more recent rakings over of Richard Jewell and Elian Gonzalez.

The challenge for media is rarely in defining news, only in prioritizing it.

The exotic nature of JonBenet’s murder made it newsworthy to a limited extent. If she had been African American, poor and unphotographed, though, her death would have been a footnote outside of Boulder instead of a continuing banner headline.

Instead, TV devoured and fattened on it, largely because she was a white “beauty queen” and her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, were wealthy and ripe for suspicion. Just as crucial, networks and stations had access to home movies of curled and rouged JonBenet performing as a miniaturized adult at kiddie pageants, footage that could be used ad nauseam to wallpaper stories about her murder well into the 21st century.

So cynicism was in order when hearing that NBC’s “Today” program would open the May sweeps with its own weeklong “exclusive” on JonBenet.

Oh, brother. It sounded like another case of using the camera to break old news, just one more effort to profit from a tragedy whose final chapters had not been written since a Boulder grand jury’s decision not to indict the Ramseys for the murder of their daughter.

But whoa!

This was anything but the usual rehash and quickie sound bites by the numbers framed by hysterical speculation and rumormongering. Centerpiece of last week’s “Today” series was former Colorado Springs homicide detective Lou Smit, the investigation’s rebel with a cause.

A veteran of 200 murder investigations, Smit was brought in to work on this case by the Boulder County district attorney’s office three months after the murder. He ultimately came to believe that JonBenet was slain by an intruder, not by a member of the family, as Boulder police appear to believe. And also most of the public, thanks to the media coverage.

Katie Couric, among TV’s strongest interviewers, questioned Smit on tape and accompanied him back to Boulder for a walk though the spacious, now-vacant Ramsey house where JonBenet died in the basement. How they gained access wasn’t mentioned.

Couric said the “never before televised” crime scene, investigation and graphic autopsy photos that Smit used to bolster his “intruder theory” on “Today” were retained by him when he left the JonBenet probe after 18 months because his views were being rejected. The materials were used in his presentation to the grand jury two years ago.

Interviewed, too, was Steve Ainsworth, a veteran Boulder County sheriff’s detective who largely echoes Smit’s conclusions and also left the case, Couric said, because he wasn’t being heeded.

The 66-year-old Smit was Couric’s main man, though, in slow, methodical fashion walking her through the evidence as he perceived and interpreted it, including his belief that the killer was a “sadistic pedophile” who used a stun gun on JonBenet before garroting her.

Smit has publicly accused Boulder authorities of “tunnel vision” in focusing their investigation only on the Ramseys. The alternative scenario he presented on “Today” has surfaced before too. But never in this way, apparently, with Smit being interviewed at length on TV and making his points meticulously with powerful visual aids that included close-ups of JonBenet’s neck with the nylon cord still around it. It was grisly, but not gratuitous because of being essential to illustrate the points Smit was making.

Couric said the Ramseys had not seen the photos but were aware they were being shown on TV.

She said that offers to appear on the program were rejected by the district attorney’s office, Boulder police and Steve Thomas, a former Boulder police detective who wrote a book implying Patsy Ramsey murdered her daughter in a rage over a bed-wetting incident. Thomas and some Boulder police officials are being sued for libel and defamation by the Ramseys, who remain under what police call “an umbrella of suspicion.”

No cops, no D.A.s? Credit Couric for playing devil’s advocate by challenging Smit with opinions conflicting with his, and also for citing attacks on his credibility that included calling him a “delusional old man.” In a medium where good interviewing is rarity, Couric ranks with the very best, one reason being that she actually listens to those she interviews.

Nonetheless, this JonBenet account was often as one-sided in favor of the Ramseys as most others have been against them. Desperate for an “independent voice,” the show awkwardly grafted to the end of Friday’s installment an interview Couric did with author Lawrence Schiller. It was Schiller’s book on the JonBenet case that became a CBS movie, “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town,” that he wrote and directed.

Schiller was a curious choice for balance, for Smit alone was depicted favorably in the movie. And in doing it for CBS, Schiller himself joined the exploiters by laying out JonBenet like a slab of meat, in effect, to be sacrificed on the altar of the Nielsen ratings.

That aside, the “Today” series was mostly exemplary and a role model for others who will be traveling this familiar road in the future: When returning to the JonBenet case, advance the story, and do it responsibly, instead of rehashing it just to be sensational.

As for prioritizing news, however, Friday’s lead story on “Today” was about the last episode of “Survivor II,” affirming that nobody is perfect.

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