All-news networks sank to new lows

By Carl Heintze

I find myself both fascinated and appalled by CNN's coverage of the death, funeral and whatever of John F. Kennedy Jr. Fascinated because I can't imagine to what new lengths the all-news network will go to keep the television screen filled with something, anything, that has to do with the story and appalled by the bad taste and morbid depths to which it plunges every day in covering it.

For example, on the day the ashes of the victims of the airplane crash were consigned to the Atlantic Ocean, we were treated to pictures of the distant Coast Guard vessel on which the ceremonies were taking place. Now and then this distant view was interrupted by a CNN reporter who looked faintly seasick on a smaller vessel forced to hang around at a distance from the Coast Guard vessel. The cameraman who accompanied him may well have really been seasick by the time the pictures he transmitted bobbed up and down every few minutes.

Back in the studio (to which we flashed every once in a while--people do get tired of viewing a gray ship in a gray ocean doing nothing) the network's "Burden of Proof" program cast aside all semblance of concern for the law. ("Burden of Proof" had its heyday during the O.J. Simpson trial and has been desperately seeking some kind of network niche ever since.)

The "Burden of Proof" crew treated us to a learned discussion of funerary urns, how ashes are tossed, poured or whatever from them, presumably because someone would want to know how the ashes of the three plane-crash victims got into the ocean.

This ranks right along with the same program's learned discussion of whether fiber-optic cables were capable of carrying President Clinton's taped testimony to the Capitol accurately. CNN seems positively aggrieved that the Kennedys and the Bessettes managed to cremate and return to the deep the remains of their children in only a day. This somehow robbed the network of at least another week of speculation.

About the only thing remaining to the pundits who pass judgment on most everything on CNN were two questions: One, did JFK Jr. do a foolish thing by flying to Martha's Vineyard on his way to the wedding? (Sure he did.) And two, isn't it unusual to use a government vessel to spread the ashes of a non-veteran on the ocean? (Maybe, but in this case, who cares?)

Well, I suppose it is to be expected. Ever since the Gulf War, which CNN reported in detail, the network has been looking for some justification for its intense scrutiny of any particular story. The O.J. Simpson trial came along as a godsend and when President Clinton's foolish behavior in the pantry off the Oval Office got into the public domain, CNN fell all over itself with its terrible taste, endless speculation and instant experts on most everything.

The network has become a prisoner of its own ingenuity. It no longer can simply report a story. It has to keep it alive; it has to look at every conceivable angle, no matter how obscure, certain that there's someone out there watching who wants to watch trivia.

Along the way, CNN and MSNBC and the Fox Network have made television junkies of us all. We tend to think there's always a camera wherever something new, different, terrible, wonderful or whatever is happening. Beginning with the arrival in most American living rooms of the Vietnam War, usually on the day the events in it happened, we have come to think of news not as news, but as entertainment.

It has become increasingly more difficult to separate reality from imagination in this kind of world. Just as CNN has become a prisoner to this instant view of a world that may or may not exist, so have the creatures like JFK Jr. become a part of this never-never land.

JFK Jr.'s claim to fame was his father and mother, both of whom arrived about the time network television reached fruition. The little boy saluting, the little kid under the desk, were part of this unreality.

His parents existed as much in our imagination as they did in reality. And when they disappeared in tragedy, it was the playing out of a world which existed as much on the television screen as it did in real life.

I don't think it is a healthy world in which to live. In spite of CNN's attempt to make every story like the JFK Jr. plane crash universal by covering every aspect of it, the fulminations of a group of editors somewhere in Atlanta (who seek with ever greater desperation to keep our eyes on the television screen at all times) have placed us in a fantasy land.

The real world has become a collection of cliques and we are in danger of becoming an integral part of that cybernetic existence. There is a real world out there somewhere, but it's not on CNN. It's not on MSNBC either, or the Fox Network. I'm not sure where it is, but I hope somehow, someday, we get back to it before it's too late.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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