CNN gears up the giddy machine for ‘Person of the Year’ showcase

Take the latter hypocrisy, with Fox news personnel commanded to remind viewers relentlessly their employer is “fair and balanced.” If it were so, Fox would run companion rebuttals noting it is not “fair and balanced.” They would immediately follow claims by its anchors that Fox is “fair and balanced.” That would achieve true fairness and balance, don’t you think?

Speaking of self-serving devices, though, nothing tops the Arts & Entertainment network’s annual “Biography of the Year” award.

Well, we are living in an epoch of gratuitous awards by the kadzillions, the latest to join this crowd being the Video Game Awards that cable’s TNN plans to televise next year.

But A&E;’s award ranks with the loopiest.

This year’s “Biography of the Year” winner, touted in a recent special that A&E; penciled into its schedule twice? George W. Bush. Not the president as “American of the Year” or “Texan of the Year” or even “Bush of the Year.” Nope, “Biography of the Year.”

Say what? That would be like “Frida” director Julie Taymor praising the late Frida Kahlo herself as 2002’s movie “Biography of the Year.”

How can someone of flesh and blood get tabbed “Biography of the Year”? Easy, when it’s a publicity device. Easy, when the main purpose is not to honor that person but to celebrate the uneven, often thin and perfunctory “Biography” series that has become A&E;’s signature program in the crowded universe of cable.

And get this. A&E; says its top executives and series host Harry Smith personally gave Bush his “Biography of the Year” goodies in a ceremony at the White House. He must have been thrilled.

Tied for second just behind Bush, by the way, were Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. If they had won, would Smith and his bosses have jetted there for the official handshakes? And what of the “Beltway sniper suspects” who finished eighth in the A&E; voting, just ahead of Halle Berry and Martha Stewart. Would the awards ritual have taken place in their cells?

A&E;’s 8-year-old “Biography” award is a callow babe here. The granddaddy of this group -- and the faux news event of the year -- is Time’s “Person of the Year.” The 2002 announcement came Sunday, 75 years after its origin as Time “Man of the Year.”

Although made a national institution through sheer, knee-jerk exposure in all U.S. media -- including this newspaper and others -- “Person of the Year” is nothing more than a shrewd marketing strategy to sell the magazine and its ad space. It’s almost uniquely specious in our culture.

Which makes CNN’s giddy reporting of it -- don’t forget Walter Isaacson was Time managing editor before becoming chief executive of CNN, and that both companies are owned by AOL Time Warner -- one of the media’s great synergistic charades.

How giddy is that reporting? Last year, CNN took to the streets to survey pedestrians about Time picking former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (who was also A&E;’s “Biography of the Year” in 2001).

This year, with corporate chauvinism again roaring through its veins, CNN went further. On Sunday, it scheduled to run twice a “special report” capturing Time’s behind-the-scenes deliberations inside the magazine’s Rockefeller Center headquarters. As if this were a papal succession and throngs had gathered outside to await smoke from the chimney.

The advance PR blurb: “CNN sits in with the editors of Time, including the magazine’s managing editor, Jim Kelly, and brings viewers an exclusive look at who makes the final cut -- who doesn’t and why.”

Get out!

This qualifies as news, only if you define news as anything that happens, like paint peeling, skin wrinkling and the sun rising and setting. In fact, a bunch of editors reaching consensus on who they believe most affected news is not itself news. It’s opinion, and reporting it as news is another example of messengers making themselves the message, in this case Time creating and distributing its own story about itself with the generous assistance of its CNN kin.

It’s one thing for critics and columnists to create “best” and “worst” lists for readers’ diversion, quite another for someone to give weight to those wee footnotes and opinions by inflating them into hard news headlines.

It doesn’t end quite there. Just as ABC’s “World News Tonight” used to squander a bit of its precious Friday news hole on silliness titled “Person of the Week,” CNN is copying Time these days by having its “Connie Chung Tonight” program anoint a “Person of the Day.”

And given how fast news accelerates across the media landscape these days, coming soon may be a Person of the Hour. If so, it will be reported here first.

Fair and balanced.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes. com.