If Only the Message Matched the Medium

Too much of television consists of breaking old ground, its cutting edges appearing mainly on its technology.

Thus, soon-to-come High Definition Television (HDTV)--whose many more lines per TV picture produce greater clarity--will be diverting only until its newness wears off and viewers realize that they’re seeing nothing more than sharper images of the same old same-old.

For example, would more vivid pictures make the following more meaningful?

“Foot pursuit! Foot pursuit! Foot pursuit! Foot pursuit!” That was Bob Pettee just before 6 p.m. Wednesday, piloting the KNBC-TV Channel 4 news chopper above some guy frantically hoofing it across UCLA’s Westwood campus in the blurry darkness.

“Is that him or is that a policeman?” inquiring mind Paul Moyer wanted to know from the anchor desk.

In other words, they were unclear themselves about what they were showing in this winding down of one of those familiar high-speed police pursuits that are regularly televised live by transfixed Los Angeles stations.

Even when they don’t know with certainty who is being chased by cops or why. That was the case during the 15 minutes that Channel 4 beamed live chopper pictures of this absurd, repetitious spectacle--one car fleeing from another past slower traffic--occurring mostly on the 405 freeway.

But they did know it was exciting. Pettee: “Wait a minute, now! Wait a minute, now! He’s getting off!” Could it get more thrilling than this?

The chase was later joined by KABC-TV Channel 7 and KCBS-TV Channel 2. The latter made videotape of this “hot pursuit” its 11 p.m. news lead. Channels 4 and 7 also gave big 11 p.m. play to the story, which, as it turned out, concerned the flight of three males suspected of breaking into cars. Stop the presses! Or whatever they do stop in TV newsrooms.

This is a perversion of what live TV and choppers should be used to cover, such as raging wildfires and other breaking stories meriting instant wide exposure. Instead, the technology continues to be squandered on illusions of relevance, those meant only to quicken pulses by costuming the routine as high drama, at the expense of covering worthier news.

Channel 4 anchor Colleen Williams apologized to viewers at 6 p.m. for stories that got bumped by the live chase coverage. She promised they would appear “tonight, or if not, perhaps tomorrow.” Unless another chase intervened.

*

Elsewhere on the redundant front, the subject again was naturally 6-year-old murder victim JonBenet Ramsey. “Are we hearing all we need to hear?” a Fox News Channel anchor asked a resident of Boulder, Colo., Wednesday, somehow keeping a straight face. Come again? She might as well have been asking a hemorrhaging hemophiliac for blood.

Like, maybe it was time for the Globe or someone to publish pictures of JonBenet’s parents wearing Bruno Magli shoes? It’s getting just that loopy.

Here comes even the mainstream herd, aiming its cross-hairs now at beauty contests for kids. “What do beauty pageants do to little girls?” ABC’s “20/20” asks in a story on the topic scheduled to air tonight. And a local radio voice was insisting the other day that the tightening vise of pack reporting on this slaying was welcome because it exposed the evils of kiddie beauty pageants, just as throwing a light on domestic abuse became an instant rationale for the media madness whipping up the O.J. Simpson murder case. The implication of this argument is that JonBenet’s parents, even if not guilty of her murder, at the very least put her in harm’s way by having her compete with other adult-like miniatures in child beauty pageants.

As if these kids were being knocked off regularly, and pedophiles and other horrific creeps who prey on children misbehave only when their small victims are sexily permed, rouged and lipsticked like tiny Miss Americas. What rot.

There’s hardly an hour on television these days where on some channel facts of the JonBenet case aren’t being regurgitated by someone, usually a compassionate mind whose deep sighs identify personal grief over her loss, but who is probably secretly overjoyed to have something juicy to send across the airwaves. Yes, if only HDTV were here right now and able to visually sharpen this crush of coverage.

NBC’s daytime “Leeza” joined the chorus Thursday, but had the wisdom, at least, to round out the program by featuring parents of murdered young persons whose deaths, unlike the slaying of JonBenet, have surfaced on the media landscape only as small blips, if even that.

“I happen to be the wrong color, and I don’t have enough money,” said an African American dad whose toddler son was slain last year.

“If my son was given the same media coverage [as Ramsey], his murderers would be arrested today,” said the mother of a 19-year-old who was shot three times in the head a year ago. “He was a human being. His life should have the same value.”

The same worth, also, as Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis, whose murder in Los Angeles had camera crews speeding to the Sepulveda Pass crime site and the family’s Pacific Palisades home Thursday morning for elaborate live feeds, as if the TV star himself had been slain instead of a young man who until now had been virtually unknown. Yet his murder made him as famous this week as his celebrity father, earning him a banner headline to at least temporarily rival JonBenet’s.

Logic and reason often get trampled in the stampedes to cover such crimes. The “new developments in the murder” of JonBenet touted late Wednesday night on Channel 2’s “Action News,” for example, turned out to be the latest sidebar to get swollen far out of proportion: the arrests of two men said by police to have swiped and sold JonBenet crime scene photos to that raggiest of tabloids, the Globe. Now their mugs are everywhere on TV with JonBenet’s, as if they were her slayers and America’s Most Wanted instead of having been accused of being relatively benign photo leakers and shabby opportunists.

Never one to shrink from in-depth coverage of minutiae, Channel 2 also ran some of an “exclusive” CBS News chat with one of the men.

Were we hearing all we needed to hear? The question was farcical. Yet shouldn’t you get yourself a television set with stereo sound to hear the latest overblown waxings from Boulder even better?