In Court, a Family Tragedy Milled Into Kibble and Circuses

It was a beautiful day, Monday was, but that’s not news.

It was a busy day, too, and that is news. Twice that day, everybody got hustled out of Terminal 2 at LAX for non-bombs. (One was a tin of cookies.) Teachers at three Valley elementary schools showed up for work to find their classrooms trashed and torched. A pair of Orange County men went to court for supposedly pocketing 26 million bucks they raised in the name of veterans, firemen and AIDS patients.

And on its way to the front page of this newspaper was a headline about life after 9/11: “Many search for meaning and reinforce ties to loved ones. But will it last?”

I got your answer right here.

No.

Evidence? How about a block of TV news vans, parked grill to taillight outside the criminal courts building in downtown Los Angeles, all lined up for the manslaughter/murder trial of the San Francisco couple who adopted some Aryan Brotherhood con and whose big dogs killed a small woman in the hallway of their apartment building. You probably know the trial as the “dog/sex/mauling death case.”

Is it big news? For San Francisco, yes indeed, which is why L.A. is hosting the trial: saturation coverage by the Bay. But is it big news for the rest of California? The country? Not in my notebook.

You want some real news? California has an election in six days, for governor, insurance commissioner, secretary of state, members of Congress, and a park bond measure. Orange County votes on that El Toro airport thing, again. Gary Condit gives it a try, again.

You want shocking stories about dogs and humans?

A couple of miles from the courthouse is a city animal shelter, where another week of killing is underway. L.A., just the city, kills a thousand--a thousand--dogs and cats a week because humans trashed them: didn’t feed them, vaccinate them, keep them from breeding more throwaway creatures. There’s horror for you.

Headlines have already been made here in Division 53. In the 1970s, two Native American activists were sent to trial in the murder of a cabbie. Emily Harris, first runner-up in the Miss SLA contest, sat at the defendant’s table. Those trials had news heft, some political content, however overheated.

This is a family tragedy being milled into kibble and circuses.

So now we have Camp Canine. It isn’t Camp O.J., that caravansary of satellite trucks and computer cables and coffee cups, but neither is this the O.J. Simpson case.

We the Media--me included--expended wall-to-wall hours of air time and hectares of newsprint on O.J., and we sussed out some Redeeming Social Value to justify it: the potency of celebrity, the perfidy of the LAPD and, if there happened to be a frisson here and there of sex and silicone, it was sanitized through the dignity of the Superior Courts of California.

What is the probing societal issue here? That prison gangs are dangerous? No kidding. That unneutered dogs are more aggressive? Knock me over with a Milk-Bone.

Even old courthouse hands have been surprised by the reporter stampede. The first “overflow” listening room since the O.J. case, five floors above Division 53, has been opened for reporters who can’t get seats in court. (No TV permitted except for opening statements, closing arguments and the verdict.)

In the courtroom, 27 news outfits have reserved seats. On that list are People, the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Post, local TV stations and newspapers, Rolling Stone, and a gay magazine.

The crime reporter from Dog Fancy magazine has not yet surfaced, but Glamour magazine (“for young women interested in fashion, beauty and a contemporary lifestyle”) wrote about this case at length last summer (“Could it happen to you?”)

For a newspaper, this can be a small story in a big section. But those rare and precious minutes of TV news air time are the most valuable virtual real estate in LA. And today is the last day of sweeps month. I don’t need to draw you a picture, do I? And even though the judge has excluded any testimony about bestiality, there’s always the titillating line, “The judge has excluded any testimony about bestiality.”

Good TV reporters, who are legion in this town, must hate this: Sorry, ace, gotta yank you off that health-care expose you’re working on. Go cover the dog/sex/mauling death case today.

News is by definition the unusual. It’s not the stuff of the front page that millions of kids go to school every day without being shot, that thousands of planes take off and land without being crashed into buildings.

This case is unusual by every standard. But there are standards, and there are limits, and if we haven’t reached them yet, we can sure see them from here.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].