New Show, Same Old Chung

Who says the news isn’t funny?

--CNN promo for Monday’s premiere of “Connie Chung Tonight.”

“Break a leg,” said “Crossfire” fill-in host Dee Dee Myers. She was publicly wishing luck to CNN’s new hotshot minutes before the debut of “Connie Chung Tonight” on the once-dominant network that now trails Fox News Channel in ratings for cable’s 24-hour news venues.

Instead, Chung’s show seemed incapable of breaking even a sweat in its maiden hour.

If television had a three-strikes law, Monday’s criminally bad premiere alone would have made Chung a lifer. Add to that a couple of strikes later in the week--plus Chung setting a record for saying “exclusive” during a three-day period--and you had a tossup about whether her show was a work in regress or progress.

After a gaudy CNN buildup anointed her Goddess of News, Chung’s opening week as CNN’s latest designated savior so far has ranged from dismal to pretty good.

Tuesday brought Chung’s amiable interview with Luciano Pavarotti, taped at his Italian villa, where he disclosed to her, exclusively, his plans to retire in three years. Very nice. If he changes his mind, she can return in 2005 to also hear that, exclusively.

Her third night, meanwhile, affirmed why she probably won’t win many in-house booking wars with softballing Larry King, unless she changes her way of operating. King offers hard-news and controversial guests something Chung can’t and won’t.

A free ride.

She was Connie on the spot Wednesday, for example, with a combative satellite interview of Michael A. Newdow, whose lawsuit yielded that day’s hot-button ruling by a federal appeals court that the words “under God” made it unconstitutional to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

Her grilling of him was sharp and provocative, but not out of bounds. “Are you proud to be an American?” she asked Newdow, who said that he was.

He didn’t back down, nor did she.

Late in the hour, by the way, Chung handled it coolly when a fire alarm twice halted her live interview with a Sports Illustrated writer, each time causing her to abruptly break for commercials. It was ... bizarre. The alarm went off a third time just as she was going playfully in depth with the “Women of Enron,” three former employees of the fallen energy giant who posed for Playboy after losing their jobs.

“What the heck were you doing when you agreed to do this?” Chung asked in chatty morning-show style that showed how likable she can be in some situations.

But not always. When one of these stunners was asked how she felt about the tanking of her Enron stock, she replied: “Buyer beware.”

Which applies at times to “Connie Chung Tonight.”

Take Monday night’s show. Puh-leeeeeeze! It got off to a bozo start with Chung’s low-yield interview of Colorado wildfire suspect Terry Barton’s brother-in-law. That was billed, misleadingly, as a chat with Barton’s “family.”

He told Chung what his wife had told him that Barton had told her. It was that definitive. Chung introduced the segment, moreover, by announcing that he believed “it was all an accident.” Instead, he subsequently told Chung the fire was accidental “if she started it.” A crucial difference.

Much worse was Chung’s listless taped interview in Milwaukee with Paul Weiser, the 28-year-old whose name was given to police by “Dear Abby” columnist Jeanne Phillips after he sought advice from her about dealing with his sexual fantasies regarding little girls.

At hour’s end, Chung said she was unsure whether Phillips acted correctly in violating Weiser’s trust by outing him to the cops. Oh yeah, like Phillips should have kept silent and just hoped this guy wouldn’t act on his desires and harm a child.

All right, that was Chung’s opinion. She’s entitled. But earlier came this:

“Suddenly a man who never touched a child was looking down the barrel of a life prison sentence,” Chung announced dramatically in a live tease for her chat with Weiser before a commercial break. Afterward, she added that he “faces the possibility of life in prison on child pornography charges.”

Come again? That was either sloppy or intentional deception to hold her audience.

As Chung herself subsequently reported in a voice-over during footage of her with Weiser, he was placed on eight years’ probation and required to spend a year on electronic surveillance after pleading guilty to possessing child porn.

This debacle was capped later by guest Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s TV news-mocking “The Daily Show,” joking about coming on with Chung after her stories on the wildfire and Weiser. He asked, “You gonna bring the pedophile back in?”

Bring in a comedian, you get comedy.

It remains to be seen just how tough a house viewers of this show will become. Chung is not at CNN because of her journalism, after all. That was evident Tuesday when she went “one on one,” as CNN advertised it, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell about President Bush’s Rose Garden speech urging Yasser Arafat’s ouster from Palestinian leadership.

Powell had the interview pretty much his way, meeting Chung’s early attempts to break in with a filibuster. And he finessed it without answering when she asked him when Bush would call on Israel to go beyond freezing construction and instead dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The question she later asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in Jerusalem--who would succeed Arafat?--was the key one she should have asked Powell. Powell had addressed it in other media interviews that day, along with another issue she failed to raise after he told her that the administration would work with a new Palestinian government “democratically brought through elections”: What if Arafat was reelected?

Chung is a veteran whose lengthy resume includes news anchoring in L.A. As this week affirms, however, there is nothing magical about her on camera. At her best she is witty, pleasant (smiles easily, relates well to some guests) and a plucky (although not always effective) interviewer who got a bad rap for her disastrous sit-down with California Rep. Gary Condit (a howitzer couldn’t have penetrated stonewalling Condit that day). She also is generous with her staff, notably giving producer Betsy Goldman on-air credit Tuesday for landing that heavily promoted Pavarotti interview.

At her worst, Chung is just not very good.

As if CNN, the nation’s pioneer in round-the-clock TV news, could care. It spent years reporting news pretty much the old-fashioned way, doing rather well from time to time until bad Bill O’Reilly and Fox’s cheeky news kids began outgunning CNN in the ratings.

This is one chorus line of stars outstepping one another, for cable news channels are now full, giddy adherents to the personality syndrome that their older broadcast counterparts and local newscasts have nourished for decades. As the theory goes: If you like the presenter, you’ll like and watch the newscast. Everything else falls away.

CNN assumes that Chung--after high-profile stints at CBS and ABC--enters this arranged marriage with a fat dowry of Nielsens that will help thwart the advance of Fox and a potential challenge from below by the new talkier, louder, zanier MSNBC. If that happens, CNN will be pouting about Chung’s flaws all the way to the bank.

So here she is, fronting a show that mimics other cable newscasts in sporting a full tabloid look, this one encasing its star in big, whooshing graphics that rank her first in visual clutter if not audience size.

Chung’s newsreader is Anderson Cooper. Moved from CNN’s “American Morning With Paula Zahn,” Cooper is available too as host of ABC’s “The Mole.” He was also picked by CNN to substitute this week for 7 p.m. “NewsNight” anchor Aaron Brown.

Carrot Top was not available.

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