With Another Celebrity Arrest, the Circus Returns to Town

“Deja vu all over again,” boomed malaprop-ing talk show host Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel during a Thursday evening of media ranting and hyperventilating after has-been actor Robert Blake had been taken into custody by Los Angeles police in connection with last year’s murder of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.

Yes, all over again, for hadn’t the public walked this plank before when O.J. Simpson was charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and Ron Goldman, en route to landing in a vast, turbulent sea of media frenzy?

Just when you think these 24-hour-news fruitcakes can’t possibly get worse, more indulgent or more absurd in covering breaking, high-profile crime stories to the exclusion of events more meaningful, something like Thursday night explodes onto the screen.

At an LAPD press conference touching on the cases against Blake and his handyman/bodyguard Earle Caldwell, CNN reporter Frank Buckley mentioned the possibility of authorities being faulted for a “rush to judgment.” They were rushing to judgment?

Before Blake even had been booked at Parker Center, a familiar assembly line of spewing heads on CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC was rolling forward irrevocably, arguing from every conceivable angle the legal case against him they initially knew hardly anything about. Only CNN’s Charles Feldman--a first-rate journalist and seasoned crime specialist who had been on the Blake story since its inception a year ago--provided measured, fresh reporting about Blake.

Not that this story won’t be fascinating on a titillating level and surely worth covering to some extent. But unfortunately, it will likely be covered to a colossal extent, destined to assume a swollen life of its own that the media will then use to justify their over-coverage that first planted the seed. In fact, this pregnant belly already began growing Thursday night.

Even as Blake was still handcuffed in the back seat of an unmarked white police car fighting rush-hour traffic on the 101 Freeway, these premature questions, leading to wild speculation, were being asked on TV:

* What will be the defense strategy of his lawyer, Harland W. Braun?

* Would Braun ask for a change of venue?

* What about jury selection?

* Would Blake’s trial be televised?

* If cameras are banned from this courtroom, is an appeal by the media possible?

* Will Blake take the stand in his own defense? “I’m sure we’ll chew about that,” said CNN legal guru Cynthia Alksne. Why not? They chew about everything.

“It’s just wonderful that, before he’s even been charged, we can talk about the prosecution and the defense,” groused MSNBC legal analyst Dan Abrams, his sarcasm indicating he’d had enough of this meaningless swill. At last, a sane voice cautioning restraint. Then Abrams went on and speculated about the prosecution and the defense, as he did again Friday morning on NBC’s “Today” program.

How loopy was much of the coverage?

So loopy that Fox News Channel got even Geraldo Rivera on the horn. “What’s likely to have happened recently to allow this arrest to happen now?” Hannity’s Fox co-host, Alan Colmes, wanted to know. It would have been a reasonable question had Rivera been in Los Angeles. Or in the U.S. Or in the hemisphere. But he wasn’t. He was speaking by satellite from Beirut, where, as a war correspondent covering the Middle East conflict, he was as distant from the L.A. crime beat as Blake was from the streetwise cop he played on ABC’s “Baretta” in the mid-1970s.

But what, Rivera shrink? “Any number of a myriad of possibilities,” he responded to Colmes. “I can only assume ... “ In fact, he was not the only one on this 24-hour-news landscape making assumptions based on scant data.

Typically, CNN’s Aaron Brown spent much of the evening playing the role of Anchorman Buckling Under Self-Doubt while publicly beating himself up for doing what he was doing, then going ahead and doing it anyway.

“How are the media gonna cover this?” he wondered, throwing open the door to this glass house. Didn’t he get it? He and CNN are the media. Yet his fixation on self-examination throughout the evening made it appear he was having some kind of out-of-body experience.

Addressing the camera, Brown warned about overplaying the Blake story that he and CNN were overplaying by blowing off much of the day’s other news. “The country’s at war, on your side of the camera and on mine,” he reminded us. “We ought to keep that in mind.” It sounded like he was admonishing viewers for watching the over-coverage that he immediately extended by weighing the potential impact of Blake’s tough-guy image. “Can you inoculate him [so a jury can distinguish] between what he is and what he has played?” he asked attorney Alksne.

A bigger question: Who would give these guys a slow-down inoculation?

The network morning shows, too, were all over this sucker Friday. “Slim and none,” Court TV anchor Catherine Crier said on CNN Friday about the chances of Blake’s account of how his wife died being truthful. The rush to inflate is bound to accelerate, too, for coming in prime time Monday is the long-ago-taped ABC special “Contact: Talking to the Dead,” in which medium George Anderson purports to chat with Bakley from beyond, as her mother and sister listen in. And darn, she doesn’t say who pulled the trigger.

What were the chances of this story quieting down?

You’d have to say slim and none. How big was it Thursday night? So big that KNBC dispatched its Big Dippers into the night for live stand-ups on the street. It had Colleen Williams co-anchoring the 11 p.m. news in front of the Studio City restaurant outside of which Bakley was fatally shot in her car, and Paul Moyer co-anchoring outside the main entrance of the swanky Hidden Hills community where Blake had been taken into custody.

Arrested at his own house, which he bought for $1.3 million, CNN reporter Thelma Gutierrez had said when posted there hours earlier.

At his wife’s house, reported Hannity.

At his sister’s house, several stations reported.

At his daughter’s house, anchor Harold Greene correctly reported on KCBS-TV, after his station had earlier gotten it wrong.

When Blake had been collected from the sprawling ranch home, it was crucial for Los Angeles news choppers to provide live overhead coverage of the police car as it edged toward downtown. Why? You could never tell, Blake might try to escape.

After scooping everyone with a live phone interview with Blake’s lawyer Braun, as he was in his own car traveling toward Parker Center, CNN’s Larry King homed in on the freeway traffic holding up the police vehicle carrying Blake.

King asked Feldman why there was no siren. In fact, the siren was TV.

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