It’s reason that’s missing on cable

And then Bob Costas said no.

Maybe you didn’t hear about it. There’s so much news to keep track of, after all, what with Paris Hilton maybe or maybe not getting married, Angelina Jolie maybe or maybe not sleeping with Brad Pitt and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs announcing to a breathlessly waiting world that henceforth he will be known simply as “Diddy,” because the “P” was “getting between me and my fans.”

So maybe you missed Costas’ modest stand for principle. It seems he was scheduled to guest-host Larry King’s program on CNN on Thursday before last on a night when the agenda included yet another discussion of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager who disappeared in Aruba.

When he found out the program’s planned focus, Costas asked the producers if they would find another topic. They refused, and Costas declined to do the show.

“I didn’t think the subject matter of Thursday’s show was the kind of broadcast I should be doing,” he said in a written statement. That’s as specific as Costas has chosen to be in explaining why he wouldn’t do the show, which leaves plenty of room for conjecture. You’ll pardon me if I take advantage of it.

See, I like to think Costas was mindful of the racial and sexual bias inherent in the news media’s recent fascination with missing persons cases. If you are not white, young, female and pretty, you can go missing all you want, CNN won’t come looking for you. There will be no anchorpersons setting up camp at the place you were last seen, no morning show interviews with your tearful parents, no urgent updates even when there is nothing to update.

But most missing persons don’t fit the media’s preferred pretty-white-damsels-in-distress profile. Most are men, a large percentage are black, and the majority, like the majority of any group, are of average appearance.

LaToyia Figueroa is the exception that proves the rule. She’s the pregnant Philadelphia woman – later found murdered – whose disappearance received a measure of media attention after Internet bloggers pressured media to address the institutional bias of their missing persons coverage. Figueroa was, glory hallelujah, black. She was also young, female and pretty.

You might call that progress. I’d choose other words.

But for all that, I hope Costas was thinking about more than bias when he declined to do the show. I hope he was also passing judgment on the movie of the week mentality that has overtaken TV news, this obsession with news as story arc, complete with thrilling premise, attractive protagonist, surprising plot twists and satisfying denouement.

It has always been part of the news business, I suppose, this thing of making people’s miseries into soap operas for the rest of us. But it feels as if it’s reached a suffocating zenith in recent years, as if between Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, the runaway bride and dozens of others made famous because they were victims or fools, between a new trial of the century every week and constant bulletins on troubled Hollywood marriages, news media are drowning us in a tide of tabloid triviality.

“Pure white sugar, addictive and without nutrition.” That’s what Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, called it last year in the Washington Post. I can’t improve on that. Hey, I like an occasional Twinkie as much as the next guy. But can we really live on them? Shouldn’t the news be about the things that affect us, instead of just those that titillate us? Shouldn’t it satisfy more than our need to gape at car wrecks?

I like to think Costas would say yes and that’s why he told CNN no. Not that it made a difference. They got another host and the show went on as planned.