The day of the locusts is over.

With Terri Schiavo's death yesterday, cable news channels quickly folded their tents to get back to Michael Jackson.

Who would have thought we'd welcome the return of a celebrity trial for child molestation?

But then, few TV spectacles in history have achieved the grotesque and shameless proportions of the Schiavo story.

From the close-ups that relentlessly zeroed in on Schiavo's gaping mouth to the O.J. Simpson-like video of a white van bearing away her body, news coverage has been a lascivious feast of gruesome details.

Forget about Janet Jackson and bleeped expletives. This was obscenity.

Maybe the same Congress that's been so quick to pass laws raising fines for television indecency should look into it — except they'd be just as culpable, having jumped early on the Schiavo bandwagon in order to excite the masses.

Like many purveyors of filth, cable news tried to cloak its titillating purpose under merit.

National polls were conducted on a daily basis, begging viewers to register an opinion and so help justify 24-hour coverage. Bloggers were dragged in to offer proof that the groovy new world of online media was deeply engaged.

The involvement of all three branches of government, however spurious, provided TV with an institutional excuse. Does anyone think CNN and Fox would care about Schiavo otherwise?

Please. We're not such dopes out here in television land that we don't recognize the media's attempts to distance themselves from the political scrum while utilizing it.

On Fox News Channel yesterday morning, one host posed an inconsequential but telling conversation-starter: "When the nation gets swept up in a story like this, do we look to the president to lead us?"

Perfect: One sentence that neatly summarizes journalism's tendency to wrap itself in the asbestos coat of populist sentiment and official authority while pretending to be just a bystander at the conflagration it helped create.

You can't have it both ways, as CNN's Wolf Blitzer demonstrated in an interview yesterday morning with James Dobson of the conservative group Focus on the Family.

As Dobson predictably attacked the judiciary's refusal to allow re-insertion of Schiavo's feeding tube, he said, "I think it will open the door to the killing of those who are inconvenient for one reason or another."

I waited for Blitzer to pick up on the obvious aspect of this statement: the broader pro-life message. Instead, he began nitpicking over constitutional checks and balances.

Why didn't Blitzer ask about the obvious exploitation of Schiavo for other agendas? Perhaps because to do that would call attention to the media's own role in that exploitation, as Dobson, no fool, would have quickly noted.

Or maybe journalists are just that out of touch. The most useless tangent of the entire Schiavo saga was the obsession with how much damage various Republicans did to themselves by interfering in the case when the majority of Americans were opposed.

If you subscribe to the notion that the media are liberal, this may have struck you as wishful speculation. Frankly, I think it was the just TV's usual inability to cope with the human side of a story and so to take refuge in scorekeeping.

Television's attempt to tackle the cultural angle was similarly inept, if not pandering. Having recently discovered the growing power of the religious right after many obtuse years, journalists are eager to show they can "get" it (and perhaps cultivate a new demographic).

It's purely happenstance, I'm sure, that those sensational images of people shoving their children forward with cups of water and carrying placards with messages about "cracked and bleeding lips" made up such a huge part of the daily video.

Left out of the equation was how much the groups keeping vigil for Schiavo reflected the religious right as a whole. By the same token representation, we could have inferred that the Rev. Jesse Jackson's visit was on behalf of all African-American ministers.

Television's coverage of the Schiavo saga was not altogether without merit. Network news managed to boil down the essentials, provide fact-checking and keep the gratuitous footage to a minimum in their evening half-hours.

Cable news was a horror show. Maybe 24 hours is too much time to kill when you're dealing with death. I've said a few stupid things at hospitals and funeral parlors.

Of course, there's a different reason for cable's seeming inability to combine context with on-the-spot coverage. It's called ratings. If you can milk viewers by forcing them to watch first the event and later analysis of the event, why not keep the two elements apart?

The postmortem to Schiavo's life will be just that. When cable news returns to examine the autopsy report and the question of her consciousness, it would do well to perform a similar dissection upon itself.

kmcfadden@seattletimes.com