Without Skipping a Beat   

The media frenzy over Princess Diana was quickly succeeded by the media frenzy over Marv Albert.

The hand-wringing over the excessive coverage of Princess Diana's death had barely begun when sportscaster Marv Albert, quite reluctantly, took center stage.

By now the pattern is a familiar one: The media massively overplay a story, generally one with tabloid or pop culture elements; they wallow in guilt and shame for allowing things to get so far out of hand; then, when the next Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding or Lorena Bobbitt saga comes along, they start the process all over again.

But this time there was barely a cooling-off period.

Princess Diana was buried on September 6. "There was a time, immediately after the tragedy with Diana and the funeral, that journalists everywhere seemed to take an oath that for some period of time they would stay away from excessive, intrusive, sensational coverage of the private lives of public figures," says Marvin Kalb, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.

It proved to be a short period. Sportscaster Albert's sexual assault trial began in Arlington, Virginia, on September 22, and the frenzy began anew.

The trial, replete with lurid details about kinky sex, attracted the sixth largest amount of airtime on the nightly network newscasts during the week of September 22, according to The Tyndall Weekly. After Albert pleaded guilty and was fired by NBC, USA Today played the story at the top of page one on September 26, above a piece about the IRS pledging to clean up its act. The same day, the Washington Post ran three stories, one on page one, and a column about the scandal.

While tabloid-style journalism inundated the mainstream media, the actual tabloids were hardly caught napping. The New York Post treated the first day of the trial the way the New York Times covered the Persian Gulf War, with page after page of Albert copy. In one breathtaking stretch, it ran a sidebar on how attractive ABC's Peter Jennings was to women, and how much he liked them. The hook? Defense lawyer Roy Black had said in his opening argument that the woman who charged Albert with attacking her had bragged of relationships with a number of celebrities, including Jennings. (Jennings said he didn't know her.)

*ome critics remain unconvinced that the trial of a sports announcer, who while well-known to sports junkies is hardly an A-list celebrity, was cause to jettison the post-Diana restraint.

"A sportscaster bites a woman on the back and forces her to perform oral sex: This is the biggest story of the day?" asks Los Angeles Times media writer David Shaw. "We beat our breasts in public and say we're different from the paparazzi, but there'll be no changes. We enjoy it."

ün today's fevered environment, the media may need it. "The Marv Albert story sort of took over the slot that now exists in much of the media for the tabloid frenzy," says Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz. "It's hardly coincidental that the Marv story exploded just as Diana was fading."

Former New Republic media columnist William Powers cautions against citing the Albert affair as evidence of the "tabloidization" of news. "This was not a case of scurrilous whispers to a tabloid," he says. "It was shocking charges [against] a prominent person. We tend to lump stories of bad journalism with stories of seamy content. This wasn't bad journalism. It just happens to delve into sex and private doings."

Still, the episode illustrates the extent to which the boundaries have been pushed. "The Marv Albert trial shows when there's a clear temptation to go the route of kinky journalism, journalists – even the very best – can't quite resist," Kalb says.

The juxtaposition of the two stories seemed to shine a spotlight on the excessive nature of the Albert coverage. While many would argue that far too much ink and airtime ultimately were devoted to Diana's death and its aftermath, few would deny that the death of the much-admired princess, a figure with tremendous resonance for many people, was a major story.

Geneva Overholser, the Washington Post's ombudsman and the former editor of the Des Moines Register, says she was "not uncomfortable with an enormous amount of Diana coverage. People were moved by her death. Whereas," she adds, "the sexual exploits of a sportscaster are not that compelling." Overholser says putting the Albert case on the front page is simply titillation and that she finds it hard to justify the mainstream media's presentation of the case as major news.

Bob Steele, an ethics specialist with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida, agrees. In the case of Diana, he says, "it was meaningful coverage with a phenomenal tragic element." But while the Albert story had newsworthy aspects, he adds, "the tone and degree were out of proportion."

Some media analysts see marketplace pressures fueling the growth of sensational coverage. "Partly because we're suffering shrinking market shares, news organizations..are under pressure to build ratings," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Adds Powers, "Generally the media is profit driven and picks up on stories people like to tell each other about." The competition among news outlets drives the media to play heavily what Powers calls "watercooler talkers."

The bottom line? "Any week some sleazy story will grab the lion's share of attention, whether it deserves it or not," Kurtz says. The dissipation of Diana stories "threatened to leave about 72 cable talk shows with nothing to talk about."

üven in such a tabloid-tinged age, the amount of tawdry detail from the Albert trial that found its way into news pages and onto the evening newscasts was astonishing. Graphic accounts of panty wearing (by Albert), toupee flinging and back biting were enough to prompt one reporter forced to cover the trial to say, "It's ridiculous that this situation generated the kind of coverage it has."

The X-rated reporting turned off many readers and media critics. "The Post printed seamy details of [Albert's] sex life on the front page," Overholser says. "It was tawdry to me." Says Powers, "It was rather appalling language on the front page."

Brooke A. Masters, who covered the trial for the Post, defends her reporting. "There were plenty of things we didn't [print]," she says. "There were whole sections of testimony we didn't get into." Editors, she says, decided on how much detail to include after debating how much readers needed to know.

Mark Jurkowitz, the Boston Globe's media writer, says that it was those kinky details that heightened media interest in Albert. Asserting that we are living in a culture that revels in the discomfort of others, he adds, "The sexual weirdness aspect made it a big story."

Real tabloids, like the New York Post, had a field day. It celebrated the trial's opening day with five pages devoted to "Ménage À Marv." The lead was chock full of the most salacious descriptions of Albert's sexual proclivities. But those descriptions q/ickly became fodder for the mainstream media.

ýWhat was once the occasional waver into the tabloid gutter has been institutionalized for much of the media," says Kurtz. "We put our hearts in stories about trials because we can dress them up with legal terms and pretend they're socially redeeming. What we're really interested in is who's wearing the panties."

Not everyone played the story big throughout the trial. Interest crested at the dénouement, when the Los Angeles Times, for example, carried an Albert story on page one for the first time.

The Albert contretemps briefly became local news in Dallas when a surprise witness testified Albert had bitten her in a hotel room there. Dallas Morning News National Editor Pam Maples calls the story a "talker," but says that a perfunctory question about whether to run something about it on the front page was rejected. "There was never a strong sentiment the story should be on page one," she says. It moved from sports to inside the A section when the trial began and got a page one refer toward the end.

Daisey Harris, acting national editor of the Boston Globe, says the paper covered the trial on page three of the A section. While Albert broadcast pro basketball games for NBC, he was long known as the voice of the New York Knicks and had a higher profile on the East Coast. "People here know him," Harris says.

At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, says Assistant National Editor Mark Ward, "we had direction for Marv Albert to play in sports." A page one skybox with a mug shot teased into sports the day after Albert's guilty plea, but, says Ward, "it was not A section news – it was sports news."

The Los Angeles Times relied on wire reports until a sports staffer wrote a front page story on the guilty plea. "It's hard to say if he's well-known here," says National Editor Norman Miller, but the surprise guilty plea and the fact that the story had evolved into a huge topic of conversation pushed it out front.

Despite some unsettling aspects of the coverage, some critics find merit in prominently covering the Albert case. Poynter's Steele says such stories have a place in the mainstream: "High profile cases bring attention to issues that are undercovered."

Says Ralph Barney, editor of the quarterly Journal of Mass Media Ethics, "I'm not quite as uncomfortable with either Marv Albert or Diana as some would be. It provides me – as a private citizen – with valuable information."

The bad news is that the Albert extravaganza may have set a precedent. "An embarrassment has set into the industry," says Kalb. "When another Marv Albert comes along, it will be covered extensively. The media is incapable of ignoring it." Barney agrees. "I don't see this ceasing," he says. "That's probably the tragedy of this."

So how can the cycle be broken? "It will go on until such a time when the leadership of American journalism – anchors, editors, publishers – all say enough is enough," Marvin Kalb says. "I don't know when that will be."