Mass Media

Attention all technophobes! Those of us who still can't program our VCRs need to brace ourselves. It's about to get a lot worse. Personally, I think I'm being shoved out onto this information superhighway on a tricycle. The other day, I was on a plane with one of the journalistic brethren from ABC who had one of those fancy new laptop computers with the bells and lights and whistles, and he was showing me all the groovy things it can do. (It faxes!) So what do you have? says he. Well, says I, you know I work for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and we're not quite on the cutting edge yet (I wasn't about to tell the guy that the paper's entire telephone system crashed last week)

I don't know when Lisa Phillips discovered the media culture, but I remember when I did - about five years ago, in the pages of my daily newspaper, in a story about an automobile accident. As I recall the particulars, several cars had collided rather spectacularly on an expressway. A family in another car drove past the scene seconds after the crash, and members were interviewed as witnesses. A young girl in that car was quoted as saying that she knew the accident was real - that is, that it was serious business - "because it looked just like television.

Regardless of the outcome of the Rodney King trial, one thing is certain: The role of the media will be hotly discussed and blamed by some people for influencing the verdict and fanning the embers of another riot. This should not come as a surprise. Every civil disturbance of any consequence has both fueled the public's curiosity and need for information and provided the grist for the media's mill. The mass media's vigorous pursuit of its mission is called into question. Recall that following the 1960s riots, the Kerner Commission, which investigated them, issued scathing indictments against the mass media.

America: land of second chances. Quarterback Michael Vick has just gotten his second chance, signed Thursday by the Philadelphia Eagles after 18 months in prison on a dogfighting rap. Now he's going on CBS's 60 Minutes tomorrow (7 p.m., CBS3) to talk with interviewer James Brown - and to deliver a somber, earnest apology. It's a great American tradition: Redemption by Mass Media. One excerpt has Vick saying this about his illegal dogfighting: "It was wrong, J.B. And, you know, I feel tremendous hurt behind what happened.

IS IT POSSIBLE that one of the main reasons the mass media don't pursue corporate lobbying in Washington with anything resembling the way they pursued the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or even "Memogate," which resulted in Dan Rather's leaving as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," is because, by some accounts, corporate media companies spend more money on this type of lobbying than any other industry group? Richard Margolin Hoboken, N.J.

I commend Claude Lewis' recent column "A distorted view of black teenagers. " The points he raised about the insidious stereotyping of black teenagers in the mass media were very incisive. As president of the board of the Family Planning Council, I know that pregnant teenagers come from all walks of life. It is very disturbing to see the same old stereotypes depicted in the media now that teen pregnancy has become such a prominent issue. Pregnancy is not "typical" of any one group of teenagers but is, sadly, typical of all teens.

Word reaching here has it that Los Angeles radio station KRLA recently fired its on-air personality, Bob Hudson, for wisecracking that the rocketship Challenger blew up because the crew was free-basing Tang. In the national capital, no one, perhaps because they understand the penalty for political blasphemy, is telling Challenger jokes on the air, but they're telling them at bars, restaurants, cocktail parties, wherever friends meet. Whenever a new Challenger joke is told, the listener first replies that he never heard anything so tasteless in his life, then bursts out laughing.

The Soviet legislature passed a bill yesterday to guarantee press freedom and eliminate censorship, ending a tradition of state control of information that predates the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The new press law should permit dozens of struggling independent newspapers and journals to function legally, acquire offices and compete for access to normal printing facilities. "The law is the first in the history of the Soviet state to give detailed guarantees of the freedom of the press and the rights of journalists," the official news agency Tass said.

Starting tonight, the federal government will be doing something different to fight illegal drug use by young people: paying to air antidrug spots on prime-time television. The Office of National Drug Control Policy is launching a $195 million-a-year campaign to create and run ads on TV, radio and movie screens, in newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet. The antidrug effort will debut as the 15th-largest currently running advertising campaign in the country - outpacing those by American Express, Nike and Sprint.

Daytime talk shows are undoubtedly one of the most popular yet derided forms of mass culture. Characterized as trashy, sleazy and even pornographic, talk shows are parodied on TV commercials and sitcoms, in comic strips and newspaper columns, in everyday parlance and discourse. Producers are called "talk show pimps," while guests are known as "freaks of the week" or "nuts and sluts. " Their willingness to cry, laugh, shout, bicker and fight on television is said to epitomize the degradation of American culture.

America: land of second chances. Quarterback Michael Vick has just gotten his second chance, signed Thursday by the Philadelphia Eagles after 18 months in prison on a dogfighting rap. Now he's going on CBS's 60 Minutes tomorrow (7 p.m., CBS3) to talk with interviewer James Brown - and to deliver a somber, earnest apology. It's a great American tradition: Redemption by Mass Media. One excerpt has Vick saying this about his illegal dogfighting: "It was wrong, J.B. And, you know, I feel tremendous hurt behind what happened.

By Courtland Milloy What killed Michael Jackson? This autopsy does not require a scalpel. A mirror will do. "He had the nose of a black male, and he didn't want one," Scott L. Spear, chairman of the plastic-surgery division at Georgetown University, told me. "He was a black man who wanted to look like a white Diana Ross. " That's not a cut - just a clue. Spear's diagnosis: acute body dysmorphic disorder, from the Greek dys , meaning "bad" or "ugly," and morphos , meaning "shape" or "form.

Amy Jordan is director of the Media and the Developing Child Sector at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania I am a fan of the Bravo TV program Top Chef, in which charismatic young chefs compete week after week by creating inspired dishes for a panel of easy-on-the-eyes judges. Sometimes my 13-year-old daughter, Julia, watches with me, rooting for her favorite chef. Recently, she also figured something out about the commercials aired during the show.

Betty Friedan's death gives us the chance to revisit a contentious time and her own role in making it that way. Her groundbreaking book, The Feminine Mystique, drew millions of women to the cause; her own ambitions, her self-aggrandizement, and her insistence on defining the cause in her way drove other millions away. Other movements claimed Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. The women's movement deserved someone of equal stature. Friedan was not she. What Friedan was, however, was a commercial writer.

IS IT POSSIBLE that one of the main reasons the mass media don't pursue corporate lobbying in Washington with anything resembling the way they pursued the Monica Lewinsky scandal, or even "Memogate," which resulted in Dan Rather's leaving as anchor of the "CBS Evening News," is because, by some accounts, corporate media companies spend more money on this type of lobbying than any other industry group? Richard Margolin Hoboken, N.J.

CAN WE declare a moratorium on the moralizing about the life and loves of LaToyia Figueroa? According to police, a remorseless killer whose treachery is matched only by his stupidity has been charged in the wanton murder of this woman and her unborn child. Fortunately, this homicidal doofus didn't have enough sense to pour pee out of a boot. If he hadn't come up with the brilliant scheme of offering an acquaintance a few hundred dollars to provide a body bag and a pick-up he might still be at large.

Hamilton? Adams? Franklin? Been there, done that. It's absolutely old hat as far as one group of historians is concerned. When the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) met in Philadelphia for its annual conference last month, overexposed founders turned up, but only from an angle. They did not, as in mass media and popular book publishing, tower over their time period, marble statues sucking up all available media air while somehow remaining immobile.

Kausfiles (Mickey Kaus) www.kausfiles.com David Cay Johnston's Sunday front-page New York Times story on the very rich shows (a) they've gotten richer and (b) they've gotten big tax cuts. What he doesn't answer is the important question on the relationship between (a) and (b), namely how much richer would they have gotten if they hadn't gotten the tax cuts? . . . When I looked at this question in the early '90s, the answer was pretty clear: The rich were growing richer due to changes in the underlying economy (e.g.

Presidential candidate Dennis J. Kucinich is complaining that political reporters have slapped a voter-advisory "can't win" label on him and have given his presidential aspirations short shrift. This, the four-term Ohio congressman says, is unfair. His campaign press secretary, David Swanson, said some members of the national media thought it was their responsibility, not the voters' job, "to narrow the field. " The mass media, he said, are trying to marginalize Kucinich and belittle his chance of winning.

TATTLE has no idea what's on Michael Jackson's computer (although we bet we'll know soon) but we know what's on Jackson's Web site. A declaration of innocence. "To my fans, friends and family," Jackson wrote on the newly created Mjnews.us. "As you know, the charges recently directed at me are terribly serious. They are, however, predicated on a big lie. This will be shown in court, and we will be able to put this horrible time behind us. "Because the charges are so serious, I hope you all will understand, on the advice of my attorneys, I will be limited in what I can say about the situation.