Subject: Television:  The Magic Circus 
Date: Published: 11/18/91 (114 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    LEISURE & ARTS:
    Television:  The Magic Circus
    ----
    By Dorothy Rabinowitz

    Though it's well over a week since the news broke that
 Magic Johnson is infected with the AIDS virus, the media orgy
 of commentary, tributes, lamentations and general frenzy is
 only now showing signs of letting up.  Throughout this
 reportorial delirium we have been confidently and incessantly
 assured that Johnson's announcement will educate or shock
 complacent heterosexuals, and otherwise drive home lessons of
 profound importance to the health and welfare of the society.
    It's hard to remember any event, particularly any sad one,
 more freighted with hogwash and fevered claims about its
 benefits to society.  Had anyone told us 25 years ago that the
 future would bring an invariably fatal venereal disease, and
 that persons, particularly famous persons, stricken by this
 disease would be celebrated as heroes, what would we have
 said?  What would we have said, told that a beloved athlete's
 announcement that he has the virus would be enough to send
 his status zooming to stratospheric heights, and also bring
 forth tidal waves of media tributes to his valor?  We would
 have laughed.
    No one is laughing now, in the midst of the breathless
 speculations and proclamations of a new day dawning for AIDS
 consciousness, thanks to Magic Johnson.  A week at the center
 of these fevers was enough, not surprisingly, to unhinge
 Johnson himself; that became clear when he announced that, as
 long as anyone had to contract AIDS, he was glad it was him.
    He was glad, he went on to say, because he could be an
 effective spokesman for safe sex and because what happened to
 him could serve as a lesson to the young.  This was the media
 message of the week.
    In fact, the real lesson likely to emerge from this entire
 event has little to do with Magic Johnson and the HIV virus.
 More of an exhibition than a lesson, really, this event
 showed -- not for the first time but with, in this case,
 extraordinary clarity -- the making of a media-created
 phenomenon.  In the stupefying bombardment of nonstop piety,
 cant and wildly proliferating absurdities rocketing at us
 from television screens and front pages this past week, we
 saw unfolding before us a drama entirely manufactured by
 media hullabaloo.  The actual dimensions of the event that had
 inspired all the rocketry -- word of the likely doom of a
 renowned young athlete -- disappeared into the mists.
 Broadcast journalists packing the nightly news with
 commentary and interviews did the same, while pretending that
 they were mere messengers transmitting the news.
    The truth was, of course, that the reporting that took up
 the better part of all newscasts for two days running -- the
 details of shock and grief that supposedly had paralyzed the
 nation, the young, the old, statesmen and all the ships at
 sea -- was largely the creation of the newsrooms.  Reporters
 rushed to schools, neighborhood basketball courts, to solicit
 evidence of trauma.  Anchormen hyperventilated as they told of
 the impact of Johnson's announcement, in terms suggesting
 that the nation had been left prostrate by grief.
    That's not to say that word of Johnson's infection didn't
 cause sorrow and shock; it is to take note of the
 media-orchestrated grief that occasions like this seem to
 breed.  Over and over, the newscasts about Johnson flaunted
 synthetic emotions, expressions of shock produced on cue for
 reporters waiting to hear them.
    With the growing frequency of these media-made emotional
 benders, with grief counselors rushing into the schools in
 the advent of every misfortune, this may soon become a nation
 of people unable to tell when they are having a real emotion
 (as opposed to one visited on them or that they are expected
 to have).  Can any sane person actually believe the picture of
 reality put forward by journalists -- that young people the
 nation over were shattered by sorrow over this news?  Over and
 over the TV reporters put microphones up to the mouths of
 schoolchildren and extracted the answer they wanted, that
 they indeed had summoned.  The invariable answer of these
 interviewees was that, yes, they were in shock, they were
 horrified.  They then recited the week's official mantra,
 i.e., "If it could happen to Magic it can happen to me."
    Imagine, then, the impact of all this orchestrated grief
 on schoolchildren.  The masters who once lorded it over
 Eastern Europe (and who still run North Korea) were aces at
 producing mass demonstrations of grief over some fallen state
 hero.  But what the masters of the newsroom produced by way of
 orchestrated grief last week (though not inspired by
 totalitarian impulses) might have put Ceausescu himself to
 shame.  No claim was too excessive to make for this event.
 Daniel Schorr told the National Public Radio audience that
 the country had not suffered such a shock since John
 Kennedy's assassination.  Mr. Schorr was not alone in making
 this bizarre equation between Johnson's illness and the
 murder of a president.  Nor was he unusual in believing what
 he said.
    In a classic case of self-induced hypnosis, the network
 powers-that-be appear to have bought their own story about
 the titanic impact Magic Johnson's illness will have on AIDS
 education and sexual behavior.  Not coincidentally, the Fox
 Network a few days ago announced it would accept ads for
 condoms.  Not wishing to hang back at this historic moment,
 CBS is now "reconsidering" its ban on condom ads; NBC is also
 rethinking its ban.  ABC alone, as of now, anyway, is standing
 firm against condom ads.
    Undoubtedly there were, somewhere, some journalists,
 television journalists included, who recognized the Magic
 Johnson media circus for what it was:  a private tragedy
 inflated beyond measure, whose human face now lies buried --
 like that of many another anointed great symbol -- in humbug.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]