UPN 13’s News for Dummies

Television is so gloomy at 10 p.m. that it’s swell having an hour of madcap comedy to lighten the mood. That’s where KCOP’s nightly “UPN News 13” comes in.

A newscast for lobotomies:

You get booming, zooming graphics and fast cutting for easily bored viewers who find 10 seconds an eternity. You get catchy titles from “Street Team” to “News Wrap” to “Night Beat” to “The Buzz in the Biz.”

You get, with nearly every story, wall-to-wall music, usually rock--the equivalent of a movie score designed to shape perceptions by creating a sense of urgency. In other words, this is an hour for happy toes who like dancing to news.

You get Hal Eisner, Kristin Lang and other goosed-up reporters who could make even the phone book sound calamitous.

You get faux hip lingo identifyin’ police as “cops” and droppin’ the “g” from every “ing.”

You get crime and sex galore.

You get thick style smothering a thin Frisbee of content designed for viewers much younger than the audience that usually watches news.

So I’m thinking it’s me. Maybe this is one magnificent news program whose attributes I’m too old and musty to recognize. As a test, without revealing my biases, I showed two videotapes of “UPN News 13” to a class I teach at USC and asked these 27 film students (ranging in age from 19 to their mid-20s) to write a critique of it. The snickering I heard as they watched alerted me to the worst: My callow students did not appreciate UPN having all the Buzz in the Biz and Street Teams all over the Night Beat.

When reading the critiques, my suspicions were confirmed: complete ridicule. Wrote one student: “I felt like I was watching a music video.” He was.

Calling the newscasts “shallow and unimportant,” another student complained that “young people are not taken seriously, and their intelligence is completely underestimated by the older generation.”

Said another: “I now know never to turn to UPN 13 for news.” Yes, but what about watching for farce? Where is a laugh track when you want one?

A sample of other comments: “Ridiculous,” “dull and pointless,” “idiotic,” “painfully asinine.” And also this: “Anyone with a high school diploma is much too educated to watch it.”

Kids--you just can’t please them.

I didn’t tell these students that “UPN News 13” somehow won a 2001 Emmy naming it the city’s best daily news program longer than 35 minutes. They wouldn’t have believed me, and after promising them that anchors Rick Chambers and Lauren Sanchez were not from “Saturday Night Live,” my credibility with the class was already low.

This newscast is not exactly a fountain of erudition. A wag on the Internet swears he once heard glossy Sanchez pronounce the silent “p” in “corps” and the silent “p” in coup. I’m not interested. I’m diverted by the teleprompter being reflected in her lips.

I’ve been worrying about KCOP’s evening newscast lately. Just recently I heard Chambers say “police” instead of “cops.” And out, apparently, is my favorite part of the newscast that had an OUTA HERE banner sharing the screen with the anchors during their farewell story.

I fear a lowering of standards.

“UPN News 13” is not entirely laughable, its overemphasis on street crime and other mayhem, for example, joining much of TV news in creating public hysteria far out of proportion to the real threat. University of Pennsylvania researchers long ago identified this media-driven condition as a “mean world syndrome” that keeps Americans in perpetual fear.

Take a “UPN News 13” hour that aired this week, for example, when eight of the first 10 stories were about crime.

Like most of its counterparts, “UPN News 13” also feeds U.S. provincialism by all but ignoring global news that is not about violence.

The message to viewers is that we are the center of our universe and, with few exceptions, nothing much of consequence happens outside the U.S.

I was encouraged, though, to see the station air a story this week about a Bangladesh man who eats poisonous snakes.

How dumb is this news operation? So dumb that the centerpiece of a recent hour was an expose of “L.A. werewolves.” Lang interviewed one of them, and it was plenty scary. Not the werewolf, her.

This “story” was a mandated tie-in with “Wolf Lake,” the UPN series that precedes the news. It was only one more instance of the kind of unethical cross-promotion stories that local news stations work up. Only recently, “UPN News 13” reran unchanged, as if it were new, its 2001 story on shopping advice from the cast of the UPN series “Girlfriends.” Management apparently regards it as a classic that deserves to be rerun annually.

Meanwhile, Sanchez this week did the in-depth voice-over for “Breakfast Blunders,” and Unit 13 reporter Phil Shuman blew the lid off bargain sunglasses, learning from a wholesaler in Venice Beach that they were being deceptively labeled by the manufacturer in China. Meaning, of course, the Street Team will soon be all over Beijing.

Shuman wasn’t finished, returning Thursday to report the awful truth about 99-cent condoms. “What are you getting for 99 cents?” he began. “Unit 13 wanted to know.” Roll tape, start condom music. Shuman to manufacturer: “These are not close-outs, these are not seconds?”

In fact, the entire newscast should have worn a condom.

Its Big Story lead bared everything about teen cheerleaders getting “rah-rah raunchy.” UPN was so jarred by its own disclosure that it was compelled to repeatedly shoot close-ups of teen flesh just to affirm its existence.

As they say, it’s a dirty job ....

The station’s burden would not be lifted, though, for soon children of porn stars were being interrogated in a story so weighty that Chambers himself had to cover it.

Back on the Body Beat, meanwhile, Unit 13 cameras stayed tight on the breasts and crotches of women who were improving their conditioning by “strutting their stuff like strippers.”

Only anchor pros would be able to segue from this to breaking news about an Indian Air Force jet crashing into a bank building in Jullundur, before swiftly moving on to Part 2 of Mike Tyson cursing during an interview somewhere.

Then it was on to Sanchez’s fearless report on kissing. As couples smooched for the camera, a pop shrink wisely cautioned against “thin-lips kissing.” Finally it was back to the plane crash and a somber Chambers: “We’re still waiting for more information.” Yeah, like, was anyone on board necking?

End of newscast, end of column.

OUTA HERE.

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