On TV they run with the bull

Danger is television’s business. TV gives warm, slobbery bearhugs to thrills, conflict and action -- even when they’re manufactured -- and it loves a good scare.

Take the pre-fight “fight” between female pugilists Laila Ali and Christy Martin at a recent televised press conference to promote their Aug. 23 pay-per-view bout in Gulfport, Miss. What fury, what frenzy, what pandemonium, what wild swings by Martin, what hair-grabbing by Ali, who is Muhammad Ali’s daughter.

What a load of staged hooey.

Yet it made cable’s news channels and local newscasts galore, just as Muhammad Ali’s fight-promoting fake tirades were embraced by the cameras when he was still a floating, stinging colossus in the ring. CNN, for example, used the Martin-Ali footage to tease its oft-repeated story built around that footage, offering a double-dab of low burlesque each time it aired. In Los Angeles, KNBC-TV ran it and then hashed it over during Fred Roggin’s sportscast, even though he all but labeled it a publicity stunt for the cameras. As if that mattered.

It’s just that easy to manipulate this branch of media, most notably when it’s a willing participant in the process.

When you think about it, however, is this brand of whipped-up discord in variance with the combat-for-cameras muggings of CNN’s “Crossfire” and other TV clashes that are beamed to America, billed erroneously as news? Or the pathetic attempt by “60 Minutes” to draw blood with Clinton-Dole?

On TV, conflict is not just a means to an end. It often is the end.

Take, also, what’s happening in July with the annual runs of bulls and human idiots through the narrow streets and alleys of Pamplona, Spain, yielding pictures of chaos that have appeared in newscasts and newspapers everywhere.

And no wonder.

Take a deep breath and imagine what it’s like: the potential for confusion while hurtling full speed through these fenced-off urban warrens. The potential for falls, for bumps, scrapes and bruises. The potential for blood. The potential for injury. The potential for terror. The potential for loss of life.

Yup. And it’s pretty bad for the humans too.

As if anyone should care about them. Unlike the bulls -- stampeded toward the ring and the grim fate ultimately awaiting them from sword-thrusting matadors -- these galloping Beavises and Butt-Heads are not compelled to participate in traditional mayhem said to date back to the 16th century.

There are better ways to get an adrenalin rush than risking getting gored as a rite of passage. Yet with actual suffering and danger such a fierce reality, with people tormented and killed across the globe from Liberia and the Republic of the Congo to Bakersfield and Meridian, Miss., these brain-shrunk daredevils make a game of misery and seek it out as an emblem of machismo.

If they are so determined to put themselves in harm’s way, they should consider doing it for a worthy cause, at least. Something other than personal thrill-seeking.

In a sense, these bull-runners are in the same club as those who pursue fortunes on TV by subjecting themselves to faux menace or perils they volunteer to face when lured by big bucks. These adventurers are their own Pamplona, in venues ranging from that CBS behemoth “Survivor” and its hordes of progenies to NBC’s gag-out, gross-out “Fear Factor,” a freak show especially big with the advertiser-coveted 18-34 male crowd.

Viewers want it, NBC airs it here, from acrophobics dangling from choppers to claustrophobics enclosed in sweaty coffins to horrified contestants shimmying up a telephone pole in the rain, then standing atop it and leaping to a trapeze.

Like Terry Southern’s billionaire practical joker Guy Grand, who has Bostonians diving for dollars into a giant vat of manure and urine in “The Magic Christian,” this series affirms just how far many will go to make a buck.

Hope you caught some of these kids valiantly attack a slice of pizza made with live worms and fish eyes on Monday’s “Fear Factor.” So many episodes, so many memories. How about Holli courageously eating horse rectum for dollars? Darlene bravely chomping on reindeer testicles? Someone else showing real grit by bobbing for rings in 50 gallons of cow blood?

Talk about terror.

At once turning profits and stomachs, “Fear Factor” is back on the Las Vegas Strip this week, taping terrifying new challenges for a two-hour special for this fall.

Most of today’s choreographed, falsely titled “reality” shows are guilty of nothing more than sham and banality. There’s something especially repellent about others, the ones inviting viewers to empathize with participants facing low-grade hardship, discomfort and humiliation, usually of their own making, at a time when much of the world convulses in real pain.

By the way, CBS brought back a harrowing new “Big Brother” this week. The host is again Julie Chen, news anchor on “The Early Show,” wearing the same face on “Big Brother” that she did while briefly with a U.S. combat unit as part of the CBS News team covering the war in Iraq.

Unconcerned about blurring news and entertainment, CBS must have felt that covering war would prepare Chen for covering the combat and angst of “Big Brother,” where this week a female occupant of the Game House dissolved in tears when learning the group would be sharing the place with former boyfriends and girlfriends.

You wanted fear? This woman was feeling it. Where were Laila and Christy when you really wanted them, to punch her out.

Get a life, people. Get a grip.

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