Gossip, Rumors: Calling All Media

Here’s a hot tip for the National Enquirer, the Sun, the Globe and the Star: I screened A&E;’s “Gossip: Tabloid Tales” with Elvis Presley and a two-headed alien with breast implants, after which we cut out someone’s heart and stomped on it.

And about Janet Reno having Mick Jagger’s baby ...

Whether guilty pleasures or a blight, tabloids have been spewing lurid sensationalism in the U.S. for more than two centuries. They arrived with satin breeches and the Constitution in an age when newspaper writers called themselves “newsmongers” and slandering scandal sheets didn’t bother labeling opinion.

It’s a real hoot here watching more recent juicy and exotic headlines of tabloids roll by, along with Walter Winchell, Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, Confidential magazine and celebrities battling paparazzi carnivores. A real hoot, that is, if you weren’t one of their victims.

All fun aside, however, rumor and innuendo in 2002 extend far deeper into the media abyss than this fringe press and others mentioned here, including the New York Post, the more proper People magazine and even the Matt Drudges and similar blowhards of the Internet who play Russian roulette with hearsay. When mainstream TV decides to tackle tabloids, however, a medium it inevitably omits is mainstream TV--the newsmagazines and especially 24-hour news networks, which too often emblazon speculation, loose talk and other titillating fare across their marquees.

It’s true that the Enquirer led the pack (and as a bonus, broke some legitimate stories) in frenzied reporting of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial in 1995 for the killings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman. Gossip columnist Liz Smith correctly titles this episode “the greatest media overkill” since newspapers convicted Bruno Hauptmann of murdering Charles Lindbergh’s small son even before the case went to the jury.

But mainstream media, most notably CNN and MSNBC, also fed at that O.J. trough day after day, week after week, and kept their snouts in slop all the way through the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr., en route to the escapades of Gary Condit and post-Sept. 11 days of speculating endlessly and often emptily about Osama bin Laden.

That is classic tabloid. As is talk radio, where the ranting ideologues who often command these airwaves inflame and skew issues to fit their own political and social agendas. Which is exactly what they accuse other media of doing.

Some locals also wear that tabloid mantle, notably KCOP-TV, which operates L.A.’s only 10 p.m. newscast scored to music. On one occasion this week it headlined: “Real live vampires among us,” giving cause to drive a stake through the brain trust that put this youth-targeted, format-driven news program on the air.

This being KCOP, the topic was ultimately narrowed to “vampire sex.” That was followed shortly by another “story” featuring a “mating science expert” and others pondering the sexual meaning of touching. For slow-witted viewers requiring a visual aid, the newscast went to a close-up of a hand moving playfully toward a male erogenous zone.

And in a tabloid-esque hour supported by scary music Wednesday night, ABC’s premiering magazine series “20-20 Downtown” exhumed an old case about missing young girls, shamelessly pointing a finger, without evidence, at a man who has denied being involved in those disappearances and has never been charged by police.

Yet TV and radio are ignored by A&E;’s mostly soft two-hour documentary, which more or less winks at the excesses of tabloids while defining them narrowly, giving their writers and editors a stage to praise themselves and presenting those profiting from these papers as arbiters of media ethics.

You’ll be gagging, for example, when Bill Clinton’s ex-girlfriend Gennifer Flowers asks rhetorically, “What is fame without dignity?”

Poor baby. In her case, says this documentary from MPH Entertainment, she peddled her dignity, along with her story, to the Star for $150,000.

Just as the new, improved Monica Lewinsky--now a camera-ready purse designer seeking out and profiting from the media she once fled--is being paid in money and publicity by HBO, which showed her off to visiting TV critics this week to promote its March 3 documentary, “Monica in Black and White.” Wanna buy a bag?

Enough of that, however, for neither print nor electronic tabloids are the ailment most threatening today’s media and, by extension, menacing the entire republic.

Potentially more lethal are ever-increasing corporate mergers that eat away at diversity by consolidating media communications into fewer and fewer hands, while a pliant Federal Communications Commission and its chairman, Michael Powell, give a giddy thumbs-up to further loosening ownership rules.

Yes, giants like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and AOL Time Warner appear poised to carve up the media planet like Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Just to remind you, though, the buck also stops here. Tribune Co., which owns this paper, also owns bozo-ridden KTLA. Now did I write “bozo-ridden” to demonstrate my independence, or because I meant it?

Tribune also owns a chunk of the WB network, whose just-premiered shows “JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment” and “Glory Days” I gave positive reviews. Because I truly liked them, or because blood is thicker than integrity?

You see the problem. Whatever my answer, you have reason to doubt it.

And by the way, this incestuous web is growing ever more elaborate with revenue-hungry entertainment networks now again welcoming programs created by corporate sponsors--a terrible idea--that hope to resume the creative control they had in TV’s infancy.

It’s true that Hallmark Cards’ “Hall of Fame” is one TV franchise whose generally impressive resume has not been tainted by hands-on involvement by its parent company. Yet having sponsors directly involved in the creative process is fraught with as much peril as corporate big shots nosing into the editorial process.

A similar link is already in place in sports, where corporate underwriters have been deploying college football bowl games as their logos (the Culligan Holiday, galleryfurniture.com, GMAC, Sylvania Alamo, Tostitos Fiesta, FedEx Orange, Nokia Sugar and Wells Fargo Sun bowls, for example). And we may be only a step from the Hoover Cleans Carpets Better Than Other Vacuums Bowl.

Here’s something potentially more troublesome, though.

If this paper’s corporate sibling, the WB, does follow through on announced plans for a prime-time program in March created by Ford Motor Co. to showcase its line of SUVs, won’t that, in effect, make Times employees who cover TV Ford’s quasi-partners? If we write nice things about the show, will readers wonder if there are Fords in our futures?

On the other hand, what is a new car without dignity?

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

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“Gossip: Tabloid Tales” premieres Sunday night at 8 on A&E.;