Dial File — Steve Bornfeld: The Media outclassed by The Moment

Monday, Jan. 3, 2000 | 10:04 a.m.

Steve Bornfeld is the Sun features editor. His television column regularly appears Fridays in the Accent section. Reach him at steveb@vegas.com or 259-4081.

The arrival of 2000 was too mystical for television to completely wrap its trivializing tentacles around. Defiantly, 2000 transcended TV, like a fistful of sand that slips, a few grains at a time, out of your fist, no matter how tightly clenched.

Television, you may have noticed, has a compulsion to wildly overplay significant events until meaning is buried under a mountain of white noise. JFK Jr.'s plane crash, Princess Diana's car crash, O.J. -- TV piles on yammering, blathering talking heads until, in their neat little split-screen squares, they resemble bickering kitchen tiles interrupted by Volvo and Velveeta commercials. Meaning lost amid mayhem.

TV just can't help it. It's the numbing nature of the electronic beast: thoughtfulness reduced to sound bites, importance reduced to entertainment. And the arrival of 2000, swelling with Significance, seemed tailor-made for TV's trivialization by overkill.

But beyond the partying, the arrival of 2000 has been, at some point, spiritual and ethereal for many people, a sense you just couldn't extract from TV's coverage, incredibly exhaustive and technologically impressive as it was.

This New Year's, unlike others, caused us to look inward and examine what we feel, more than what we see. That's not what TV -- which thrives on imagery but stumbles over depth -- can ever really bottle. And, in all fairness, it couldn't have been expected to. TV could capture the party -- but not the poetry -- of the moment.

This was beyond its grasp -- sort of like the first moon landing. TV could take you there and show it to you -- an astonishing accomplishment in itself -- but never really explain the magic you felt in your soul.

Even TV's standard let's-take-a-look-back wrap-ups -- on virtually every channel from CNN to E! and ABC to MTV -- fell short. Television is highly adept at summarizing a year or even a decade in review. But its attempts to wrestle the meaning of a century -- not to mention a millennium -- seemed feeble and futile. Again, 2000 transcended the tube.

Not that TV didn't impressively do what it does best on New Year's Eve -- ogle all the dazzling, fireworks-around-the-globe eye candy -- connecting us as a global village. Blowouts such as ABC's 23-hour, globe-spanning special with Peter Jennings, CNN's exhaustive 20-hour coverage and PBS' 25-hour marathon seemed to capture every burp, sneeze, cough, hiccup and drunken yelp -- as well as moments of sublime beauty and poignance -- in every millennium celebration in every village, hamlet, town, city, state, country and continent.

Personal favorites: dancers greeting the millennial sunrise in the Kiribati Islands; the stirring choral version of "Danny Boy" in Derry, Northern Ireland; doves released in Bethlehem; dancers joyously partying along the Nile River; the glorious fireworks at the Eiffel Tower (France's, not ours); the pageantry in Beijing; the neon nuttiness on our own Strip; the plunging Waterford crystal ball signaling the Big Apple's entry into 2000; and an NBC reporter in New York who, just after midnight Eastern time, successfully withdrew cash from an ATM to the approving howls of partying New Yorkers.

Predictably, among the locals, the folks at Channel 3 came across as the silliest millennial merrymakers, too obviously determined to be surrogate party-hearty hounds for those at home. The Channel 8/Channel 13 crews, while also caught up in the mood to a degree, were more grounded, exuding more news-style panache.

By and large, TV provided a comprehensive documentation of the Arrival of 2000 -- but, like most documentations, it couldn't quite show you the true meaning and magic that only your soul could really see.