This is TV news?

HAVE YOU HEARD that authorities have arrested someone thought to be involved in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey?

I'm being facetious, of course.

Can there be anyone in this entire country who doesn't know that might-be murderer John Mark Karr has been flown back from Thailand and is being held in connection with the 1996 killing?

Or that, on the airplane trip, Karr wore a red short-sleeve shirt and black tie, sat without handcuffs in a business-class seat, had some champagne, a beer, and a glass of white wine, and nibbled on fried king prawns and roast duck?

Beyond an abstract hope that Ramsey's murderer is brought to justice, I have little interest in this story, in part because I wince at the TV coverage; there's something ghoulish about the inevitable photos and footage of the long-dead little girl made into a disconcerting child-woman by pageant frippery.

And yet, it's a story you simply can't avoid, and I don't mean just on the tabloid TV entertainment shows or the cable talk shows, but on the prestigious network news as well.

Take last Thursday, for example. On that day, US District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program was unconstitutional. Taylor's ruling means that the National Security Agency's communications-monitoring effort is finally beginning to get the judicial scrutiny it needs.

But had you turned on the TV expecting that important story to top the nightly news, you would have been greatly disappointed, for that was the day TV coverage of Karr really got rolling. All three major networks led with the latest development in the decade-old case. By my count, some five minutes of broadcast time had gone by before they began shifting to other stories.

Let's be honest: Newspapers have overplayed this story as well, though they have also adopted a more skeptical approach to Karr's self-incriminating comments.

TV, however, has truly gone overboard.

On Tuesday, when Karr appeared for a brief, minor court hearing in which he waived his right to fight extradition to Colorado, CBS thought the story more consequential than Iran's long-awaited response to the UN about its nuclear program. ABC's nightly news cast was only about eight minutes old when the network launched into its own report about Karr. Why, that made NBC seem almost restrained in waiting about 20 minutes before turning to Karr coverage.

``It's an embarrassment," says Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University's School of Communication. ``This case is totally irrelevant to the life of the nation."

Not only that, but there actually are serious events taking place in the world -- events that should be explored more regularly and thoroughly by news organizations with international reach.

Although a cease-fire has ended the war between Israel and Hezbollah, whether the UN can cobble together a workable peace-keeping force remains in question. President Bush insisted this week that the United States will not leave Iraq ``so long as I'm the president," that there is a ``robust" security plan for Baghdad, and that if ``we leave before the mission is done, the terrorists will follow us here."

Those assertions come just two weeks after top US generals conceded Iraq could slide into civil war, and even as on-the-ground reporters such as Time's Aparisim Ghosh and Vanity Fair's William Langewiesche have painted grim pictures of a country dissolving into chaos.

So why do we find ourselves subjected to an overload of supposed news about the decade-old Boulder murder? Network news executives surely know this story doesn't deserve to lead a serious newscast, or even occupy a prominent place in one. But it's an easy matter to cover, and they have obviously decided they can attract and hold viewers by making the lurid case a news staple. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that their bottom-line judgment amounts to this: Many of our viewers can't separate the important from the trivial -- and they will change the channel if we do that for them.

Certainly this episode is another damning demonstration of just how much tabloid TV values have subverted network news judgment. Last spring, when CBS disclosed that Katie Couric would become the next anchor of the CBS Evening News, the announcement triggered some discussion of whether a morning-show personality like Couric had the gravitas necessary for the weighty post.

Given what the networks have shown us lately, I hardly think we need worry.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com