As Trust Ebbs, Picture Darkens

NEW YORK--Johnny Carson found stardom in the 1950s as host of a game show called “Who Do You Trust?”

Now questions of trust are back in force, all over television. Who do you trust? These days, you could lose big playing this game.

That’s the message of TV: Stay on highest alert or risk losing your retirement, your child, your country, your life. With titles of summer shows like “Dog Eat Dog” and “Fear Factor,” how much clearer could it be? Makes you long for TV of bygone days, when the picture seemed much brighter.

Remember a few years ago, when business coverage had everyone in a lather? Back then, TV’s real-life equivalent of “Sex and the City” was the red-hot exhibitionism of Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.

In that exploding market--and the dot-com mania driving it--biz TV was like an ongoing Dow Jones telethon, with Maria Bartiromo, instead of Ed McMahon, at the tote board to salute each stratospheric spike.

Now biz TV keeps a running tally of the villains and victims of corporate corruption. Quaint notions of “trust” are plaintively recalled by analysts pondering when investors might regain their confidence in the market and get back in. Then up pops another pack of scoundrels.

“It’s just not stopping! One after another!” marveled a CNN anchor last week as she led into a story on the arrests of the founder of bankrupt Adelphia Communications Corp. and two of his sons for allegedly plundering the company’s treasury.

“One after another!” echoed the correspondent.

The day after that, media giant AOL Time Warner disclosed that the feds had begun an investigation of accounting practices by its America Online division--home of the “nicest, kindest, most patient people I know,” according to those perky AOL commercials that seem at odds with the financial troubles consuming the company.

And don’t forget the Martha Stewart mess. Here she is on TV every day dispensing tips on how to live a perfect, ordered life. But with the feds probing her affairs for evidence of insider trading, can you really trust her to tell you how to make a scrumptious cherry clafouti?

Such psychic undertow has become a given in dealing with life, and all the more so in the new age of terrorism.

While no one can tell you where or when terrorists will strike next, you are expected to be ready when it comes--and to keep a wary eye on the people you socialize and work with in the meantime.

Who do you trust? Your leaders, with their inconclusive updates?

But dreadful as it is to contemplate, the threat of another terrorist attack has been upstaged for many parents by the threat of their own child’s abduction--the ultimate betrayal of trust within a civilized society.

Never mind the FBI says kidnappings are rare and, lately, getting rarer. Viewers have been chilled by coverage of Samantha Runnion, the 5-year-old who was abducted outside her Orange County townhouse and found dead a day later. Of Cassandra “Casey” Williamson, the 6-year-old suburban St. Louis girl who was snatched from her father’s home and found dead a few blocks away. Of Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old Salt Lake City girl who disappeared in June and hasn’t been seen since. And of others.

Child after child, the coverage takes on a dismaying sameness, dominated by images of stern, determined-looking lawmen and shattered parents. And, of course, by snapshots and home video--each victim’s private innocence gone public.

But the summer’s most wrenching amateur video exposed more than memories. It threatened to undo one of the few shreds of comfort resulting from Sept. 11: a heightened trust in public servants.

Over and over, you have seen that footage of a white policeman in Inglewood slamming a handcuffed black teenager against his patrol car. Other amateur video of cops clashing with suspects has surfaced since.

Were these police, unwittingly captured on camera, justifiably performing a difficult job, as police were honored for doing after Sept. 11? Or were they stars of ugly sequels to the video of black man Rodney King beaten at the hands of white Los Angeles cops a decade ago?

Who do you trust? Can you even trust your own eyes? You watch enough TV, you start to see things.