July 8, 2000, The Straits Times (Singapore)

MASS MEDIA TABLOID BABY By Burt Kearns, Celebrity Books/ 490 pages/$44.99

YELLOW journalism, gutter press, rabid tabloid -- call it sticks and stones beaming into homes but make no bones, it is here to stay; by whichever means, at whatever price, whoever's ass it has to fry, to keep itself alive.

Take it from Burt Kearns -- he was at the heart of its darkness.

And Tabloid Baby is his testimony to its madness. For Kearns not only worked a spell in Fox's sleaze-bang programme A Current Affair, he was also a producer at rival Paramount, with its own tabloid-branding Hard Copy.

Once upon a black-and-white prime-time, the TV reporter delivered news straight enough for an eight-year-old, modest enough for his Grandma. There was a distance, there was a code, there was an understanding the camera stopped short of bedroom doors. Yes, there was also truth.

All that was tossed, and lost to the winds, in the late 1980s.

No longer was news streaming from the mouthpieces of big boys like ABC and NBC, but dozens of TV stations coast-to-coast, each chasing ratings to the skies. And then, there was Mr Rupert Murdoch.

Mr Murdoch seized control of Fox and immediately set about upsetting the American broadcast applecart. He set free "his band of pirates" on the Upper East Side -- newspaper boys from Sydney hammered on the anvil of sleaze.

One man in particular was tasked to kickstart A Current Affair -- a hard-nosed, hard-edged Aussie named Peter Brennan, "the happiest warrior in television". It was at his feet that Kearns learnt, and relearnt, all the tricks of the trade.

Operating out of a bar opposite his office, Mr Brennan gathered four merry men around him -- the self-styled Wild Bunch that shot from the hip, aimed below the belt and took no prisoners with news or drink.

Kearns' job was to ferry and translate their ideas, hashed and thrashed over drunken sprees, into a usable form for the newsroom.

Harebrained though it might sound, there was method yet to the mayhem, "and it wasn't as simple as mixing sex, violence, celebrity and Elvis".

Kearns distills the formula into three simple rules:

• "Let the imagination run wild, uncensored."
  How else should you report Steven Spielberg's divorce -- and Kate Capshaw moving in for the kill -- but through snippets of his movie Jaws? (As a result, Spielberg swore never to make another movie for Fox!)



• "A combination of strict facts and undeniably true embellishment."
  Should one more phone call refute a rumour, don't do it! Steaming half-truths are better served fresh and eager from the mill.



• "Be it Hollywood or Washington, there was little we took seriously."
  What better way to announce Lisa Presley's pregnancy than to use an Elvis impersonator?

Like a boy presented a new toy, the team ripped the wrappings of every gossip, rumour and innuendo, gazed into its soul and razed it like a Monty Python bonfire.

But do the ends justify the means? Ethics, to these cowboys, "is a county outside London" -- no qualms about paying criminals for exclusives or buying over secretly-filmed sex videos of stars. All for a percentage-point inch on the Nielsen ratings.

Which begs the question: what is news but that which TV producers leave out of the viewfinder? Conveniently, Kearns sidesteps the issue of his moral accountability, dismissing it with a glib oxymoron: "We were only lying so we could tell the truth." Instead, he chooses to spend time and expend lines recounting escapades and episodes from a decade of tabloid excesses.

Such as his close encounters with the rich and (in)famous. Some are funny, like bumping into Mick Jagger and David Bowie (in a dress, no less!) on a remote Caribbean island -- a sighting which confirms, to his mind, that the duo shared more than just a duet once.

More often than not, these vignettes add nothing to the book but simply leave a trail of crumbs that read like so much name-dropping. So what if he spotted Keanu Reeves in a filthy overcoat stomping into a bar?

And strangely, for someone schooled and skilled in the brevity of TV scripting, Kearns allows his book to run askew. At a hefty 490 pages, Tabloid Baby is neither a treatise on TV nor an outright autobiography. In trying to tend two heads at once, Kearns splits the narrative at its heart.

For instance, his lowdown on which producer ended up in which show which ended in a showdown which ended with which producer ending in a liedown with which producer. Does anyone outside La La Land care?

Yes, we get the drift that the media circus goes around, comes around. But tracking his fellow professionals' musical chairs, in love and war, is just trivial pursuit -- inane, insipid, uninspiring for the uninvolved. What the tome surely needs is a Texas chainsaw editor.

As a memoir, Tabloid Baby is a few fig leaves shy of "an uncensored account", as its tagline trumpets. Like the bleeps and electronic masking of breasts on his shows, Kearns often marshals self-censorship to his aid.

When it suits him, he lets you examine his scabs and scars. But when he senses we are likely to flinch -- such as a drunken orgy with Slash of Guns 'n' Roses -- a wink is as good as a hint of what was, and might have been.

How ironic that his words, which squeeze a living out of sleaze, should relent on his own life! What ultimately saves Kearns' book from being self-serving is a newshound instinct that cuts to the chase, so close to the ground that it trembles still: "Is this really the true face of news, a psychiatric ward where everyone points video cameras at everyone else and all news sources are for sale?" Alas, image is all, and all is imagery.

Willy-nilly, unwittingly, unwillingly, Burt Kearns and his tabloid mates must bear the blame. They found Pandora's box in the gogglebox, and pried it open.

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