A TRAGIC PAUSE FOR A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR ...

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

THERE is a new carnival in town. It keeps millions glued to cable television's barkers and draws thousands of gawkers to curbside memorials and outsize funeral services.

It is the horrible yet compelling tableaux of the missing, the abducted, the vanished, a broadcast melodrama selling vicarious grief and laundry detergent in carload lots.

For there is something strangely addictive about stories of the disappeared.

Here in L.A., we lived for weeks with daily updates on the fate of 22-year-old Kristine Johnson, a Santa Monica woman who seemed to have faded into the wind until her body was discovered a few days ago in the Hollywood Hills.

This while Americans everywhere mull the whereabouts of expectant mother Laci Peterson, the Modesto woman missing for two months now. Meanwhile, her husband, Scott, gives new lessons on how not to appear grief-stricken.

In truth, unfolding sadnesses of families devastated by puzzling losses promote lengthy, diverting and shared crying jags. Dinner talk, too. And no one except close relatives has to face palpable loss. Later, movies- of-the-week make it possible to relive the pain of others for the price of watching a few commercials.

So many bored and gossipy citizens - from accident rubberneckers to crime scene buffs - just adore the idea of emotion without personal consequences.

There are surely many among us genuinely moved by gruesome stories of vanished kids like Samantha Runnion of Stanton or Utah's Elizabeth Smart. But did thousands of strangers jam Samantha's funeral to honor her memory or to get close to a national soap opera?

Crime statistics advise there is no sharp increase in the numbers of missing persons. What's changed is that there's a new electronic monster in our living rooms: 24-hour television news, a phenomenon that succeeded in making the disappearance and murder of a formerly anonymous congressional intern into the biggest mystery since Amelia Earhart. Reporters and analysts made paydays, and for a time it seemed as if much of the American conversation was all-Chandra-all-the-time.

In fact, the Levy case was such a going concern that it took acts of war against New York and Washington, D.C., to change the topic on much of talk radio and television.

So why the almost unending outpourings of grief, concern and fear over isolated tragedies? Why are the victims' neighborhoods suddenly jammed with satellite trucks covering stories that say little about our society and less about real life as lived by almost 300 million Americans?

You might as well ask why audiences flock to sad movies or read crime novels.

A good story is a good story. That is nothing new. In the 1920s, newspaper readers inhaled the case of Chicago thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. In the '50s and '60s, names like Caryl Chessman, the L.A. sex terrorist, and Albert DiSalvo, called the Boston Strangler, were splashed across front pages and newscasts.

But news about those long-ago predators wasn't anything like the relentless, blaring stuff we consume today.

Kidnapped and killed children from the recent past - the sad stories of Eytan Patz of New York and Adam Walsh of Florida - received fractions of the attention devoted to Laci Peterson. Television simply didn't have more news time to fill than high-interest stories to fill it with.

Because today's emotional crime stories have become broadcast content in a way they never were before. They are programming. They are cost-efficient narratives that can be played and replayed throughout dozens of shows. A crew can camp in one spot and be updated by lawmen and relatives and road companies of psychologists seeking some limelight. There is relatively little work involved; it's electronic stenography.

Later, in what's become a full employment act for ex-prosecutors, talk show jockeys ask for unknowable answers from faraway experts. Seems everybody's a dime-store detective these days - or plays one on TV.

In the meantime, deodorant is being sold. Cars and lawn furniture, too.

And American consumers break out their handkerchiefs, draw their families closer and wait for the next batch of strangers to care about.