Is this the cable news we deserve?

AUGUST can be a giddy month for the press: Space yawns, little happens, a disproportionate amount of experience goes on vacation.

The holidays can be similar, but traditionally there’s sentimentality and nowadays -- thanks to Fox News and the religious right -- the war on Christmas to fall back on when you just have to print or air something.

August lacks those cultural props, and so weird things can happen.

It would be comforting to believe that this vacuum -- or perhaps collective heatstroke -- explains the JonBenet Ramsey madness that has consumed so much of the news media over the past two weeks. Unfortunately, this month has produced plenty of distressing, tragic and significant news. That makes the explanation for this sorry frenzy all the more disturbing, because it involves notions that already have corrupted the cable news operations and, now, threaten to spread more widely.

Poor, sad little JonBenet Ramsey.

With her golden pre-Raphaelite hair and glisteningly inappropriate makeup, she has smiled from millions of television screens over these past few days, at this point more an icon than a real child. Forever 6 years old and now 10 years dead, she is the diminutive patron saint of all the lost and mysteriously murdered white girls who have fueled cable news’ descent into tabloid journalism. Without her, there could have been no Laci Peterson or Natalee Holloway.

Nor would there have been a moment quite like the one that occurred last Tuesday when Larry King -- who hosts CNN’s highest-rated prime-time show -- paused during an interview with JonBenet’s dead mother’s sister, looked into the camera and asked:

“Do you think there’s a media frenzy?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

A few minutes later, as cable passed the prime-time baton from one host to another, Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and CNN Headline’s Nancy Grace simultaneously launched their programs with -- you guessed it -- JonBenet Ramsey. It was the perfect tabloid trifecta.

THE ostensible occasion for all this journalistic necrophilia was a brief Los Angeles court appearance in which the latest “suspect” in the Ramsey killing waived his right to contest extradition to Colorado. One suspects, in fact, that at least part of cable news’ fascination with this latest event has to do with the creepy, made-for-television appearance of John Mark Karr, the fugitive from child pornography charges who oozed out of his Bangkok hovel and into our collective consciousness a little more than a week ago. If you called Central Casting and said, “Send us over a child molester,” you’d send him back as too obvious. (Just as an aside, do you think nobody would have remembered this guy if he’d been hanging around the Ramsey house that Christmas?)

King, Van Susteren and Cooper -- though probably not Grace -- know perfectly well that their story selection that night had nothing to do with news and everything to do with ratings. It’s easy to see why. In the claustrophobically competitive world of cable news, everybody knows that missing girls move the ratings needle upward and none further than JonBenet.

As one cable producer said last year, “Look, I know it’s crap, but when we do Laci Peterson, the ratings go up. It’s that simple.”

The night this latest twist in the Ramsey story came to light, all three cable networks’ ratings went up, but MSNBC -- which preempted its regular prime-time shows to go with JonBenet exclusively -- went up the most. Moreover, a poll taken over the past week found that more than half of those surveyed said they were interested in the Ramsey story and that the interest was highest among older viewers, who constitute the largest share of cable news watchers.

So what’s wrong with delivering news -- even faux news -- in which people are interested?

Nothing.

In fact, if you don’t do it, you go out of business. But if it’s all or most of what you do, and if you only deliver on the lowest common denominator along the whole range of interests normal viewers or readers have, you’re not a journalist. You’re a pander -- and people instinctively know the difference and make the distinction. You can see that at work in cable news’ overall audience size: While playing the tabloid game moves the ratings needle in relation to all the other shows doing the same thing, the overall audience for cable news continues to decline. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that although 38% of Americans said they regularly watched a cable news channel in 2004, only 34% say the same thing this year.

But the ultimate rebuke to his sort of trivial sleaze was administered this week by CNN itself. Just 24 hours after Tuesday’s absurdity, the network aired an excellent and extensively reported two-hour documentary on Osama bin Laden hosted by Christiane Amanpour. You remember Osama bin Laden, the guy who killed thousands of our fellow Americans and is lurking out there still, plotting further murder and mayhem? He may not be blond, female or missing, but it turns out a lot of people are interested in him too. More than 2 million of them watched Amanpour’s documentary, which made it the network’s most watched show this year.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere and it can’t be learned too soon because some of the trends that have degraded cable news are spreading into other segments of the news media, often borne by “consultants” who spread the bacillus of bad ideas the way the Norwegian brown rat once dispersed the Black Death. As the Economist reports this week, the consultants now advise newspaper groups that “coverage of national and international news is ... a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next. This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters .... People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.”

But is that really all -- or even most -- of what they want?

The answer to that question will become more urgent, as more journalism is delivered online. That will give newspaper proprietors the ability to do what broadcast executives have been doing for years -- measure the raw popularity of their report, story by story.

What might the consequence of that be?

As the Economist reports, Brian Tierney, the business executive who recently bought the Philadelphia Inquirer, was impressed when he “noticed that a popular item on the paper’s website has been a video of Mentos mints causing a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. ‘We should do more of that,’ he says.”

Mr. Tierney, meet Ms. Amanpour.