Cameras in court feed Laci frenzy

Summertime, and the livin' is sleazy.

Or at least that's the way it's bound to seem, if you take your notions of life from one or more of America's 24-hour cable news networks and their courtroom cameras.

Inhabitants of the real world may still be curious about where, if anywhere, Saddam Hussein stashed those weapons of mass destruction or, for that matter, his own sorry hide. Here at home, there must be people concerned about what amounts to a death a day among the American and British troops left to police what Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld unshakably assures us is not an Iraqi quagmire. Somewhere, there may even be television viewers who wonder why the coalition's postwar reconstruction effort was so ill-planned that it ultimately may make Baghdadis nostalgic not only for the Baathists, but also the Mongols.

Osama bin Laden? Don't ask.

Israeli-Palestinian peace? Forget about it.

What the world needs now -- according to the people at Fox News, CNN and MSNBC -- is more Laci Peterson.

What it demands, in fact, is all Laci, all the time.

As the Washington Post pointed out this week, in the six months since the young Modesto housewife and mother-to-be disappeared on Christmas Eve, the nation's major newspapers each have done just a handful of stories on the case. The Times, her home state's largest paper, has followed the story incrementally, but has run only three stories on its front page.

Meanwhile -- despite the brief hiatus imposed by the war in Iraq -- the 24-hour news networks have run wild.

Put aside the hours of air time they've given over to live broadcasts of every legal proceeding connected to the indictment of her husband, now accused killer, Scott. Ignore the gruesome, blow-by-blow reports on how the bodies of Peterson and her unborn child were recovered from the sea. Forget all the live press conferences by what seems like every single member of both Laci and Scott's extended families, as well as all the volunteers who futilely searched for her. Discount the on-the-scene analysis from the usual cadre of on-camera "legal experts." All these, at least, have some tenuous connection to what can be called news.

Consider, instead, the clearest symptoms of cable news' mania of the moment, the chat shows: Since the first of the year, according to the Post's compilation, the Peterson case has been featured 79 times on Greta Van Susteren's evening program on Fox News, 40 times on MSNBC's "The Abrams Report," 38 times on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes," 38 times on MSNBC's "Countdown," 37 times on Fox's top-rated "O'Reilly Factor," 34 times on CNN's "Larry King Live" and 20 times on MSNBC's "Hardball."