Kay McFadden / Times staff columnist
Dismal Iowa caucus coverage was just the tip of the iceberg

	PAUL SANCYA / AP Presidential hopeful Howard Dean's speech after the Iowa caucus fulfilled TV's need to shape news events into high-pitched drama.
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You could almost hear the sighs of relief from newsrooms earlier this week.

The nation's analysts and anchors may have sounded as if they were praising the campaign run by Iowa caucus winner Sen. John Kerry.

"In politics, this is what overnight success looks like!" trilled MSNBC's Kelly O'Donnell, in chorus with all the networks that insisted on feigning surprise, despite reporting Kerry's surge a week ago.

But they mainly were congratulating themselves, which is what it's come to in TV journalism.

Kerry's victory wasn't just occasion for trotting out comeback clichés. It also vindicated the media's obsession with electability as chief plank in the Democratic platform.

And electability — however practical to some voters — gets television off the hook. It enables the blow-dried battalions to emphasize their greatest strength — handicapping — and veer away from complicated issues.

Howard Dean's now-infamous speech after his third-place finish obliged in a different way.

It fulfilled TV's need to shape news events into high-pitched drama, while lessening the burden of dissecting a candidacy in terms more complex than "anger issues."

	AP Some have speculated how far CBS went to land this interview with singer Michael Jackson.

Less fortunate was Sen. John Edwards, the Carolina Panther of politics. The Northeast-centric media clearly hadn't studied his play book, which is why Edwards' second-place finish yielded marginal air time, unless you watched C-SPAN.

Richard Gephardt's withdrawal got more coverage because it gave media mavens a chance to show how gracious and compassionate they could appear after constantly reporting poll numbers that helped kill his bid.

Ah, simplicity. Let's give a cheer for whatever TV can do to help winnow the field, narrow our choices and shed the burden of those low-rated, policy-oriented debates.

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect an industry driven by numbers to be capable of reporting a presidential race in terms of anything besides numbers.

Still, if hourly poll results, the minuscule Iowa caucus and the coming New Hampshire primary become as overblown as Nielsen ratings, isn't it logical voters will wind up guided to the presidential equivalent of "American Idol?"

Even by its own slipping standards, this has been a bad week for the institution of television news: bad reporting on primary night and bad ethics elsewhere.

Wednesday's New York Times brought revelations of a memo in which NBC executives appeared to offer to yank a "Dateline" investigation into Michael Jackson, provided Jackson sold his special to NBC.

An NBC spokesperson denies the apparent quid pro quo, claiming the "Dateline" piece wasn't up for preemption, just "a scheduling change which would have moved the 'Dateline' piece out of its original time slot and into a later date.' "

NBC's denial comes on the heels of CBS' denial that it packaged the airing of a Jackson music special with a Jackson interview for "60 Minutes." The deal included a payment for the special and not, CBS insists, for appearing on "60 Minutes."

Do network executives really think American viewers are so stupid that we can't see the business connection between news and entertainment?

Maybe they do. After all, they insist there's no correlation between declining news viewership and declining news quality — just more competition.

Yet faced with that competition, they virtually refuse to understand it.

Just as newspapers denied the impact of television for decades, so does television news largely confront the Internet with fear and cultural miscomprehension.

The Dean campaign is a case in point. Besides applying dismissive nicknames like "Deanie Babies" to his young supporters, TV news consistently gives the impression they're a bunch of lonely, overeducated geeks rallying online to score sex through a political cause.

Yep, that Internet — it's so wacky, anyone can make an end-run around television for news and information. (Not to mention the MP3 music version of Dean's speech, which is a hoot.)

Television news' yearning for the easy life — one where everything can be categorized with a single theme or adjective — was apparent in Tuesday's coverage of President Bush's State of the Union address.

Paula Zahn of CNN played host to a variety of guest commentators, including conservative William Bennett, to whom she nodded in apparent blank agreement with everything from "He's a big president" to "He's not afraid of the third rails" of office.

More hilariously, Zahn asked about Bush's near-endorsement of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. "Can that play both ways with the electorate?"

I have no idea what she meant, but she did have a theme: "bitterly divided," which was injected into every other description or question.

On the other hand, if you're looking to reduce your television selections rather than your candidate selections, MSNBC makes it easier.

The third-place cable news channel is running a series of promos that include this one: "President Bush: Imus watcher."

One suspects President Bush vets a lot of news-oriented talk programs. Taking his call to Don Imus as a tacit endorsement of the show is on a par with "George Washington slept here," and oh, just a wee bit compromising from a news perspective.

Like so much of the fluff that characterizes news, much of Tuesday's coverage focused on pre-speech pageantry: the order of entry, the obligatory applause, the all-important presence of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

The expert analysis afterward wasn't noticeably pithier. Anchors tended to tell us things we could see for ourselves, as when CNN's Aaron Brown noted much of the event was stage-managed.

ABC's Peter Jennings swiftly ticked off the items that Bush hadn't mentioned, such as Osama bin Laden and the space program. Nice job, except the average citizens CNN drafted from the University of Toledo mentioned the same items.

Possibly the worst TV moment — aside from the Democratic response from a robotic Nancy Pelosi — was when NBC's Tom Brokaw attempted to yuk it up with guest Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

Stewart rarely flops, but this was like watching someone attempt comedy while slowly being vacuum-sealed. He may even have stopped breathing at some point, probably while waiting for Brokaw to think up his ripostes.

In an election year, what do we need TV news for? I'm beyond wonder.

Kay McFadden: 206-382-8888 or kmcfadden@seattletimes.com

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