The bombing of Jewish kids on the streets of Tel Aviv by Palestinian teenagers, the destruction of Palestine by Israeli tanks, the devastation of Bethlehem and the shedding of blood on Jesus' birthplace are nothing more than the normal wages of democratic government. Election-year politics brought on this latest round of violence, and it will probably recede when Sharon or his successor is comfortably installed in office.

Sharon has always made his political living on anti-Arab bigotry. To maintain his status as a wartime leader, he provoked violence on the other side, and the other side obliged him. He has improved his popularity with the Israeli electorate by ten points, to 75 percent, since he sent tanks into Ramallah, and he has a commanding lead over all comers, despite a challenge on the right wing from one of his predecessors in office, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Arafat, for his part, enjoys an 80 percent approval rating among his constituents. It would evaporate promptly if he ever gave the speech Bush demands, repudiating the young bombers as criminals. His nation sees them as selfless patriots carrying out the will of God.

Here are two races that lived peacefully on this land in ancient times, when war was a sacrament, and in modern times they kill each other in the interest of domestic partisan politics. It's enough to leave you doubting the advantages of democratic institutions.

I never thought I would ever hate anyone more than I hated Richard Nixon. What a rat he was. His bloodiest crimes, ostensibly to stop communism in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Angola, and a half-dozen other hapless nations, were an expression and exploitation of American arrogance. The crimes he committed to gain and retain power turned the executive branch into a racketeering outfit, and our "government of laws" was damaged irreparably by his escape from justice.

Then came Ronald Reagan. Phony, unctuous, ignorant, narcissistic, and gullible, he acquired and held political power by questioning others' loyalty. He didn't kill as many innocents as Nixon, but he took greater pleasure in it, and I hated him more than I ever thought I could hate anyone. I never made it to the end of any speech he ever gave, so acute was my visceral reaction to him.

Then came Daddy Bush, as bloodthirsty a son of privilege as ever soiled the Oval Office. Our Army had to plow the bodies under in the slums of Panama City, where Bush waged war to wreak vengeance on his old CIA-buddy Manuel Noriega.

Thousands of miles away, on the "Highway of Death," the road from Kuwait City to Baghdad, Bush had our air warriors kill thousands of unarmed travelers indiscriminately, to top off the last days of his war (the first one ever to have catchy nickname, to my knowledge). He made me gag, I hated him with such a burning passion. This level of abhorrence could certainly never be equalled.

Then came Clinton. We knew he was a coward, and we knew he was a cheat, and we put him in anyway. He raised money from the most corrupt elements of American business, a matter of common knowledge and public record, and we voted for him (I didn't). He cheated his way to the nomination, spending most of his TV dollars slandering his Democratic opponents, and we voted for him. He'd used every office he'd ever held to score with chicks, openly, and we voted for him. He exposed himself in private, but he exposed us in the full light of day. Bimbo nation.

We didn't know Clinton was homicidal, but we should have. Draft-dodger that he was, we should have expected him to use our armed forces irresponsibly. He did, destroying life and property in more countries than Bush and Reagan put together, and he did it to distract attention from his crimes against us.

He had to be vindicated, of course, to protect the stock portfolios of millions of American households. Clinton taught me to revile my neighbor, even as I reviled him. I couldn't look at him, and I still can't. I'd spit in his eye before I'd shake his fulsome hand, and I wouldn't have believed I could hate another human being with such fury and conviction.

And then came George W. Bush. First, what the heck is he chewing? He's got his mouth going all the time, making these faces like something smells, and it's hard to believe most people don't find him as personally offensive as I do. We marvel today at the queer mannerisms of Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, and we wonder how people could have failed to notice that they were nuts. Then you look at George, and you realize that he's just like those two psychos, strutting and preening like a bird in heat.

He's still criminally responsible, in my view, notwithstanding his obvious mental defects. He knows we have laws, but he refuses to obey them. He's transparently dishonest, winking, cocking his cute little pinhead, smirking disingenuously, and Americans love him for it. He kills without mercy, sarcastically, and this, too, thrills us. Like his predecessors, he's our creation and the quintessential expression of our national determination as it exists today: to return to a state of blissful ignorance and incessant self-gratification.

I open the newspaper every morning hoping to read that divine justice will have caught up, during the night, with our latest sociopathic leader, but, alas, my breakfast is ever sprinkled with disappointment and bitterness. I'm sure I shall never hate as I hate this subhuman scrap of filth we call "Mr. President."

If you've ever tried to get press coverage for a newsworthy event, you know that local news minutes are strictly rationed. If you get 30 seconds for a parade, a public meeting, a dedication, an opening, an academic accomplishment, or a disaster involving fewer than three people, you will be very lucky. Often enough, a cameraman makes a tape that never airs.

So with all this competition for coverage, why is there so much clutter in the local news broadcast, stuff that's neither local nor timely? How is it that a critical meeting on your city's charter gets 15 seconds, but two minutes are devoted to a new treatment for anorexia? That a celebrity wedding 3000 miles from you is covered at length, but 20 burglaries within a quarter mile of your house don't even rate a mention? That the doings of the actors--or even the characters--on "The West Wing" are covered as news while actual events of state are ignored?

The reason is that real journalism is expensive, while pseudo-journalism of the kind practiced by broadcasters is cheap. To tell the story on the city charter, a reporter must conduct some research, attend meetings, pay attention, take notes, analyze policies, and perform other time-consuming and effort-consuming work to inform readers. To cover a string of burglaries, the reporter must interview victims, buttonhole law enforcers, and challenge officials, all to produce four or five paragraphs. And then there's the risk. If the reporter fails to get the story right, people are underinformed or misinformed on important issues of public policy

In covering a celebrity wedding, no work is necessary. There's film of the event, a press release with ready quotes, and an entire library of stills and footage. It doesn't make much difference what the newsman says about it, because it's an event of no public importance, and the consequence to the citizen of being underinformed or misinformed is trivial.

The broadcast newsmongers have any number of ways to screw you out of real news in favor of cheap substitutes, and they seem to be coming up with new methods all the time. They are determined to fill that space with anything but timely reports of important events. Look at some of the tactics they resort to.

"Did the Sox win?" the sports guy asks, 15 seconds before the station break. "Was Pedro able to get it together? How's Nomar's wrist holding up? Jim will have it all for you after these messages!" Fifteen seconds shot, and you're no better informed afterwards than you were before. You got no information on a topic that's slated for coverage later in the broadcast. From the broadcaster's point of view, it filled the space with recycled matter that it got at no additional cost. Free is cheap.

The 15 seconds could have been spent on some other event, but instead the "journalist" used it to put you in suspense. Is that the journalist's job, to dangle the news in front of you without letting on to what actually happened?

I suggest it's unethical for a reporter to withhold a report for the purpose of holding an audience. The practice violates every canon of news reporting, from the mandate to use informative headlines--not "Who Won?" but "A's Win!"--to the Who-What-When-Where paradigm. Nothing could be lower than to deprive the news consumer of factual reporting for the purpose of committing a violation of journalistic ethics.

Is there anything cheaper than a retrospective report of today's weather? And what could be more useless? And yet the broadcasters go on at length about weather that's already happened. They report temperature differentials of a few degrees from geographical points only a few miles apart. They even ring little bells and blow little whistles to celebrate the confirmation of predictions made the day before. And they editorialize about the weather, in case viewers don't know whether to be in favor of rain or against it.

Even cheaper are scores and films from the day's sporting events. To gauge the true value of sports news, consider the frequency with which people concern themselves with last week's scores. The time spent on weather and sports is time taken away from the coverage of actual events.

An infinitessimally small proportion of the broadcast news audience owns stock in a blue-chip company, and yet stock quotes are now part of just about every local news broadcast. That's because they're free. And they look like money, expressed, as they are, in dollars. Instead of getting an actual story, the

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Cheap News (continued)

newsmonger can plug some numbers into a computer program and fill the screen for 10 or 15 seconds with information the average viewer wishes he had some use for.

One of my local stations inserted a news item about a barbecue held to benefit a summer camp sponsored by the station. There were some local celebrity guests to interview there. The station staged a news event around a project meant to improve its own public relations. Only slightly less crass are affiliates' reports from the sets of network prime-time entertainment programs. "Tonight on ER: Dr. Green gets a brain tumor." There's usually a local angle: " Bob Whipple of Wethersfield, who actually has a brain tumor , will be watching with interest. We're here in Bob's living room . . ." Not only is this stuff cheap. It's also worthless.

Most channels now run a regular health and fitness feature. It's not because there's lots to report locally on this particular beat. It's because they get free stuff to put on. Tapes come in regularly promoting one or another pill, treatment, procedure, or device, and the stations run them shamelessly. They look like local features, and they often have a space for the local reporter to interview a local doctor, or even a space for the local reporter to appear to replace the original interviewer. The maker of the tape gets prominent placement in the news, and the station gets free filler.

When they run out of free stuff, they often fill this spot with common sense advice on prenatal care, diet, or personal hygiene. Canned reports, not just on health, but on commercial ventures, new technologies, personal finance, home maintenance, and similar concerns might consume five to ten minutes of a half-hour broadcast. They're cheap, but they aren't news.

Will the eleventh of every month stand in perpetuity as an occasion to spend 30 seconds of news time remembering the events of September 11, 2001? Give the newsmongers their way, and it will. They can fill the space with stock footage, entertain their audience, and expend not a penny's worth of journalistic effort. Notice the frequency with which anniversaries are marked in news reports. It's because they are cheap. As events, they are manufactured out of whole cloth, by and for the benefit of newsmongers.

Talk about free stuff. You get numbers, analysis, quotes, conclusions, and implications, all prepackaged by the pollster, who is usually trying to promote the point of view "proved" by the survey. No journalistic work is involved. Just read portions of the press release. These "news" items are seen mainly on national broadcasts--the networks manufacture them in their own polling mills--but you can catch them on local broadcasts, too, especially in election season.

Elvis Presley. Jonestown. Harry Potter. Challenger. Monica Lewinsky. My Lai. Princess Di. Saddam Hussein. Elian Gonzalez. Any reference to a celebrated person or event is welcome if it's still fresh, as all of the foregoing were in their time. What makes it news for weeks or months beyond the date of the event is that news consumers are still interested and continue to give it their attention.

What the press did to that Cuban child, brutal and illegal, stands as an excellent illustration of the use of celebrity in broadcast news. His doings had no news value whatsoever, but the reporters were there like vultures to film him in every possible pose. To use him to titillate their audience. Talk about child labor. His parents weren't consulted, and he didn't get paid, and they exploited him like chattel.

Give the news editor a story with a reference to a contemporaneously famous person or event, an item containing the words "ground zero," for instance, and he'll be compelled to run it, even if it's entirely content-free.

It should come as no surprise that cheap news has prompted large segments of the broadcast news audience to stop caring about real events, to the point that they are no longer able to satisfy the fundamental requirements of citizenship. Even so, in the quest for cheaper and cheaper space-fillers, newsmongers are unabashed and unapologetic.

And why not? News consumers make no demands on them. The air waves are ours. We could hold broadcasters accountable, but we choose not to. People can call the station when it treats them to worthless filler, but they don't. They do call when somebody says something not nice about the Pope, but deliberately incomplete reporting is seldom challenged. A station that bills its news as "local and late-breaking" could be held to its warranty, but that seldom happens.

What does happen is that people lose confidence in the credibility of the newsmongers and the truth of what they report. This makes it all but impossible for them to function as citizens, and it will eventually destroy the republic. A proud legacy will have been squandered to cover the hidden costs of cheap news.