FREE STORIES AREN'T ALWAYS GOOD PRESS.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I am troubled by two stories that dominated the national news at the beginning of this year: the claim that humans had been cloned and that Houston, Texas, is now the fattest city in America. It seemed to me that humanity might be on the brink of extinction if somebody from Houston had been cloned.

The replicants were allegedly the newest product of a company called Clonaid, which sounds like a telethon but is actually a front for some guy named Claude Vorlhon, who calls himself Rael, and his personal cult, who call themselves Raelians because I guess the name ``Vorlhonians'' lacks sex appeal.

Clonaid has yet to provide any proof that its test-tube-tots are real and probably never will but that hasn't stopped people from getting very worked up by the very idea. One socially conscious lawyer named Bernard Siegel has even petitioned the Florida courts to name him the alleged American clone's alleged guardian because, according to him, ``this child has been subjected to untested medical experiments.''

According to The New York Times, Mr. Siegel is a current ``child advocate'' and past ``wrestling promoter'' who claims the Florida courts have jurisdiction over this child not because its conception or birth took place in Florida (no one knows where those events took place, if they took place at all), but because the press conference announcing them was held in Miami. Should the Florida court accept this argument, I guess it would be a victory of forum over function.

The entire mess gained initial validity because Dr. Michael Guillen, a former ABC News science editor, promised to validate the cloning, but Dr. Guillen himself has since lost credibility among legitimate journalists after the Wall Street Journal reported he has been unsuccessfully attempting to sell his inside story of the cloning to several publishers for six figures. Horrors! Paying for a news story - referred to as checkbook journalism - is something the National Enquirer might do everyday, but a professional journalist would never sully the integrity of his product with profits.

But in fact everybody has profited from this story. The Raelians were clearly looking to get millions of dollars' worth of free publicity and, brother, did they ever get it. And Mr. Siegel's fund raising has certainly improved since his name got involved.

But the biggest profit, millions of dollars, was made by what used to be called ``The Press.'' That term once referred to pushing ink against paper. But today's usage is closer to the basketball full-court, in-your-face defense style, and it's employed by cable news networks to snare viewers with their constant breathless breaking news.

There is a lot of money to be made in flashing a shocking headline, such as ``Human Clone Born,'' across the screen. It makes people stop and watch. And that puts profit in them-there pundits, who don't cost the networks much but who can fill endless hours in rambling speculation on just about any exploitable subject, musing on the political and social implications of a story that didn't even happen.

It all makes checkbook journalism look cheap. While the networks would never pay for such a questionable story, they have no compunction about broadcasting it as long as they get it for free.

Which brings me to Houston's alleged weight problem, a claim made in a press release from a magazine called Men's Fitness. As a publicity device, this poll went over like a pizza on a fat farm. Every news organization in the country reported the fat poll, discussed the fat poll and repeated the fat pool. And yet the details of how Men's Fitness decided Houston was fatter than Chicago remain as thin as proof of the birth of the clones. But was there any real harm done? What's wrong with insulting Houston? You'd have to be a real scrooge to be offended by a story as innocent as this one.

OK, I'm a scrooge. I think if Men's Fitness wanted some publicity that would have increased its readership, the magazine should have run a swimsuit issue. It works for Sports Illustrated. OK, maybe not.

But this old Scrooge thinks that every cable news network should be required to prominently display the following disclaimer in their crawls across the bottom of the screen: ``Warning ... the stories you are about to see may not in fact be true and in fact may be broadcast and exploited by us only because they make a good story and we got them for free.''