Reality TV in a World of Strange Bedfellows

Oh, what a tangled web . . .

From the skyscraping towers of ultimate power to TV’s pavement dwellers who take their cues from these corporate heavens, the nation’s media/entertainment village is nothing if not a tightening, incestuous knot of interests.

The smaller fry are some of the programs we watch on TV. More about them shortly.

But at the highest level are the corporations owned by corporations that are cousins of other corporations that are buddies of other corporations.

Rupert Murdoch, for example, controls a global sprawl ranging in the U.S. alone from the Los Angeles Dodgers and TV Guide to everything bearing the Fox name. And the omnipresent CNN News Group is part of a Time Warner Inc. empire extending to the WB network and nearly everything with the name Warner in it, plus Time Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, HBO, TNT, TBS, cable stations galore and probably your corner grocer.

In such an age of cosmic bigness, the potential for conflict of interest is more vast than ever.

This conga line of self-advantage was never uglier than in 1995 when “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman was preparing the CBS show’s infamous whistle-blowing piece on Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. The story was ultimately killed by attorneys for CBS, which was headed then by Lawrence Tisch, whose family controlled the tobacco firm of Lorillard Inc., which was negotiating with Brown & Williamson to acquire several cigarette brands.

Yikes!

Just why the tobacco story was aborted (it ran later only after much of the hidden CBS dirt surfaced) is addressed in a coming theatrical movie, and is still in dispute. Yet the aroma speaks for itself.

On Friday, meanwhile, three new board members announced by this paper’s corporate parent, Times Mirror Co., included Sherry L. Lansing, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Group of Paramount Pictures Corp., whose movies Calendar reviews and whose sister company, TV’s toddling UPN (United Paramount Network), is part of my beat.

I guess that makes us colleagues.

By the way, have I told you lately how much I adore UPN’s “Love Boat: The Next Wave,” and loved “The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer”?

Closer to earth, meanwhile, TV’s crossed wires are sometimes evident--as in newscasts promoting their stations’ or networks’ entertainment fare--but often are so deeply buried in the telecasting process that you need a Geiger counter to find them.

Unspoken pacts abound, for example, on such talk shows as CNN’s “Larry King, Live,” whose reliance on VIPs and other big names to attract viewers means that King won’t ask them tough questions for fear they won’t return if agitated. And if they won’t return, reads this scenario, one night King’s show may not return.

Nowhere is the potential for collusion more profound, however, than on the slew of syndicated and other “reality” series that monitor police, fire and emergency personnel, all of them springing from the advent of Fox’s still-running “Cops” in 1989.

At their noblest, such series convey to viewers just how diligently these agencies perform on behalf of the public. And sometimes at great peril, evidenced by the number of LAPD officers who have died in the line of duty recently.

The Larry King syndrome applies here, too, nonetheless, for how truthful and realistic can these “reality” series be, given the strong likelihood that they will air nothing that would anger and sever access to their subjects? No access, no show.

That includes “L.A. Detectives,” a series on the Arts & Entertainment network whose subject is the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The department’s “editorial review” of “L.A. Detectives” appears quite binding. Its agreement with the producing company, Maxwell Productions Inc., allows it to “order the deletion” of material “likely to result in legal action against” the department or anything showing an employee “committing a violation of the law or a significant department policy while on duty.”

In other words, if a no-no is caught on tape, don’t expect to see it on “L.A. Detectives.”

That also applies to “LAPD: Life on the Beat,” the syndicated series whose agreement with the LAPD gives the police department “the right to view and comment on each step of the production for any material the department believes inappropriately or inaccurately portrays” LAPD activities or personnel. This is not “creative control,” the agreement says, but “input to ensure an accurate portrayal.”

The kind of “input” by outsiders that no reputable news organization would accept.

“Life on the Beat” is a defendant in a pair of court cases that relate to its coziness with the LAPD.

One that I wrote about in a series that ran in Calendar on Nov. 29 and 30 was initiated by Bob and Marietta Marich of Houston. They claim in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court that “Life on the Beat” invaded their personal grief in 1996 by taping an LAPD officer informing them by long distance of the drug-caused death of their 27-year-old son, Michael, in his Hollywood apartment.

The phone call was in a segment that “Life on the Beat” ran in 1996, one that also showed graphic footage of Michael’s body (with face blurred and name omitted) against the wishes of the Marichs.

The 1st Amendment is a wide umbrella, and the Marichs have appealed the dismissal of their suit against the show’s producers, MGM/UA Telecommunications Inc. and its subsidiary, QRZ Media Inc. They’re also suing the city of Los Angeles in U.S. District Court.

Whatever the Marichs’ fate in court, the issue of collusion between such shows and their subjects will loom indefinitely.

It turns out that issue is also the basis of a second lawsuit filed in 1995 against QRZ Media and the city. This one, which I didn’t write about, was brought in District Court by Sheldon Mitchell of Los Angeles regarding a 1995 incident on the Venice Beach boardwalk when he was taken into custody by LAPD officers in what he claims was a false arrest and illegal use of force. Mitchell, a 29-year-old junior high school teacher who was never charged, claims a “Life on the Beat” crew with LAPD officers taped him being handcuffed, forced to the ground and pepper sprayed for allegedly resisting arrest, but that QRZ Media subsequently destroyed that tape to protect the police.

The accusations have been denied in court.

Would “Life on the Beat” protect the cops to protect its show?

If “Life on the Beat” happens to bump into a Rodney King-type incident, for example, would its viewers ever see it? The answer seemed to come Sept. 14 when Mitchell’s lawyers deposed Dave Bell, president of QRZ Media.

According to court papers, when asked if footage of Rodney King being savagely beaten by LAPD officers “met your criteria” for the series, Bell replied: “It’s irrelevant to my program.”

What is relevant to “Life on the Beat,” apparently, is everything that puts the LAPD in a good light and keeps the show operating.