Cameras in court feed Laci frenzy

Summertime, and the livin’ is sleazy.

Or at least that’s the way it’s bound to seem, if you take your notions of life from one or more of America’s 24-hour cable news networks and their courtroom cameras.

Inhabitants of the real world may still be curious about where, if anywhere, Saddam Hussein stashed those weapons of mass destruction or, for that matter, his own sorry hide. Here at home, there must be people concerned about what amounts to a death a day among the American and British troops left to police what Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld unshakably assures us is not an Iraqi quagmire. Somewhere, there may even be television viewers who wonder why the coalition’s postwar reconstruction effort was so ill-planned that it ultimately may make Baghdadis nostalgic not only for the Baathists, but also the Mongols.

Osama bin Laden? Don’t ask.

Israeli-Palestinian peace? Forget about it.

What the world needs now -- according to the people at Fox News, CNN and MSNBC -- is more Laci Peterson.

What it demands, in fact, is all Laci, all the time.

As the Washington Post pointed out this week, in the six months since the young Modesto housewife and mother-to-be disappeared on Christmas Eve, the nation’s major newspapers each have done just a handful of stories on the case. The Times, her home state’s largest paper, has followed the story incrementally, but has run only three stories on its front page.

Meanwhile -- despite the brief hiatus imposed by the war in Iraq -- the 24-hour news networks have run wild.

Put aside the hours of air time they’ve given over to live broadcasts of every legal proceeding connected to the indictment of her husband, now accused killer, Scott. Ignore the gruesome, blow-by-blow reports on how the bodies of Peterson and her unborn child were recovered from the sea. Forget all the live press conferences by what seems like every single member of both Laci and Scott’s extended families, as well as all the volunteers who futilely searched for her. Discount the on-the-scene analysis from the usual cadre of on-camera “legal experts.” All these, at least, have some tenuous connection to what can be called news.

Consider, instead, the clearest symptoms of cable news’ mania of the moment, the chat shows: Since the first of the year, according to the Post’s compilation, the Peterson case has been featured 79 times on Greta Van Susteren’s evening program on Fox News, 40 times on MSNBC’s “The Abrams Report,” 38 times on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes,” 38 times on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” 37 times on Fox’s top-rated “O’Reilly Factor,” 34 times on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and 20 times on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Nor is this solely a preoccupation of the cable news competitors. According to figures compiled by the Tyndall Report, an industry newsletter, the Peterson case has been the second-most-reported story on the morning news shows broadcast by NBC, CBS and ABC. During the past six months, NBC’s “Today” has devoted fully 2 1/2 hours of coverage to this single story. Only the war in Iraq received more attention.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when thin shreds of shame still clung like irritating rags to the TV news executives’ vestigial consciences. Then, they felt compelled -- when pressed -- to insist that this sort of blanket coverage was somehow vaguely in the public interest. When Steve Brill went about the country forcing television cameras into the courtroom, thereby transforming criminal trials into soap operas, and Court TV into a staple of basic cable, he virtually wrapped himself in the 1st Amendment.

It was all about educating the public and the public’s right to know.

No need for any of that anymore; today, a refreshing Gordon Gekko-like candor prevails among 24-hour news heavies.

In the current issue of Vanity Fair, for example, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly flatly says, “We do Laci Peterson every 15 minutes and the numbers go up.”

Monday, Fox News executive producer Bill Shine told the Post, “It’s a compelling story with many angles that people, judging from the ratings, seem to be interested in. I’m responding to the ratings....There’s a serial quality to the story that has lent itself to the nature of 24-hour news.”

If we want to reflect on what the nature of 24-hour cable news has become, consider who some of their major competitors on the Laci Peterson story have been. For example, there’s the Globe, a supermarket tabloid that paid the dead woman’s father $12,000, according to Vanity Fair, for the family’s pictures. Then, there’s Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who gleefully informed Fox’s Van Susteren that he hopes to purchase topless photographs of massage therapist Amber Frey, Scott Peterson’s onetime lover. (Her reported asking price is $100,000.)

There’s something else that lends itself to the 24-hour news cycle’s insatiable maw: pictures. In part, the cable news operations’ saturation coverage of the investigation into a pregnant Modesto housewife’s disappearance was fueled by anticipation that they were laying the groundwork for an even greater ratings prize: live television coverage of a good, long summer-doldrums-filling murder trial.

As Gordon Gekko said, “greed is good.” The investment looks like it’s going to pay off. In the months since the war in Iraq wound down and Laci Peterson’s story assumed its current prominence, Fox has virtually doubled its ratings lead over CNN in nearly every time period.

The truth is, however, that without gripping live pictures from the courtroom, TV news would lose interest in this tragic case as quickly as it downgraded its coverage of the Iraq situation when there were no more embedded reporters to send back live footage of firefights.

If the cable news organizations actually believed that there is a compelling public interest in covering Scott Peterson’s trial, they could send journalists to the courtroom to report on the case. There is, in fact, a great deal at stake in that Northern California courtroom -- serious things, like the life and liberty of a man accused of a crime and what justice can be obtained for a dead woman and the child she will never raise.

What should not be at issue are the ratings of television news networks and the profits they bring their owners. Without live television images, the cable networks’ interests wouldn’t be a part of this equation, which is why the Laci Peterson frenzy is the latest piece of evidence in the ever-growing case for getting TV cameras out of our courtrooms.