Press What's in a Middle Name?

By JOE QUEENAN/WEST PALM BEACH

In the world of journalism, there are datelines that burn forever in the crucible of memory: Berlin '45. Little Rock '57. Leopoldville '64. Chicago '68. Now a new one can be added: West Palm Beach '91.

Some 300 journalists, not to mention innumerable tabloid-TV types from shows like A Current Affair and Hard Copy, have converged on this drowsy resort. Local TV news shows, with their marvelous ability to manufacture hysteria, pump images out to the heartland every night, creating the inaccurate impression that the trial is a drama conducted at a fever pitch and that the media coverage is a "zoo." A zoo it may be, but one with very small, very docile animals.

The truth is, from the point of view of the working press, it's generally pretty dull stuff. Hours are spent hanging around the courthouse waiting to be one of the 16 reporters admitted to the drab little courtroom in which the case is being tried. The rest of the time, the hundreds of journalists (including several dozen from France, England, Germany, Spain and Italy) lounge around a makeshift media center watching Court TV, which they could do in their hotel rooms. At one point, a reporter sitting in a room full of 90 journalists, who are watching the trial on dozens of TVs, positions two tape recorders in front of a set, ensuring that she will have duplicate recordings of the television's audio portion. This is not quite the way Woodward and Bernstein brought down a President.

Meanwhile dozens of photographers in the courtyard below laze about, waiting for the defendant or an important witness to come down, ignore them and bolt into a car.

"It's unbelievably boring," says Evelyn Kusserow, a reporter for Germany's Stern magazine, as she sits in front of a TV in the offices of the Palm Beach Review watching public prosecutor Moira Lasch's performance. Minutes later, a camera crew from the German weekly Der Spiegel wanders in, ostensibly to film a roomful of American journalists watching the televised trial. Little do they know that one of the people they are filming is a fellow countrywoman. Thus the Germans from Der Spiegel have flown thousands of miles to cover the coverage of the trial, and end up with footage of a German reporter from Stern watching an American TV, while the trial takes place 300 yards away. Sacco and Vanzetti it ain't.

The event does have its inspiring moments. Steve Dunleavy, the Outback Geraldo Rivera, who cut his journalistic teeth at Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist New York Post and now does checkbook journalism for A Current Affair, regularly turns up in public places, stage-whispering into his cellular phone. Dunleavy actually becomes a cog in the machinery of justice when Smith's attorney, Roy Black, shreds the credibility of Anne Mercer, one of the alleged rape victim's principal witnesses, by accusing her of spicing up her testimony after receiving $40,000 from Dunleavy's show.

Scant minutes after Mercer has been skewered by the defense, Dunleavy escorts her back to her car, then glides past rows of press cameras with a proud grin on his face. At one point the Current Affair star is overheard chatting with a colleague on the mobile phone. Then he abruptly breaks off and says conspiratorially, "I'll call you back later on a safe line."

The journalistic horde seems to be split into two camps: those who are covering the trial and those who are covering the "media circus." Those who are covering the trial spend almost all their time watching TV, then rushing out to phones or TV cameras to utter the same phrases as their 200 peers. Those who are covering the media circus spend their time interviewing other journalists: reporters from the Miami Herald grill reporters from France-Soir, while reporters from Italy's La Repubblica patiently answer questions posed by reporters from the Palm Beach Post.

The electronic media are somewhat more resourceful. The night before the trial, a popular local watering hole holds a look-alike contest for women who think they resemble presiding Circuit Judge Mary Lupo. A team from Geraldo Rivera's media empire turns up and obtains live footage of dozens of other journalists ordering Diet Pepsis and Campari-and-seltzers at the event. The cameraman zeroes in on the bartender as he mixes a drink and passes it to a thirsty reporter. Lights, camera, action. The cameraman works for the program Now It Can Be Told. Now it can be told that bartenders in Palm Beach mix + Campari-and-seltzers for journalists from out of town? Why couldn't it be told before?

Deep in their hearts, most journalists know that it's a waste of resources to have 300 reporters covering a murky rape trial in Southern Florida while the economy is disintegrating, the tropical rain forest is vanishing, the Bush Administration is stumbling, and the AIDS crisis is worsening. But the public seemingly can't get enough of the Kennedys, so reporters pour in from Italy, from France, from Spain, from Britain, from Manhattan, from everywhere. "I am here because of the Kennedy name," says Yvon Samuel of France-Soir. "Willie Smith is a nobody."