The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 362

ifteen minutes to airtime, a on the two and ditto flipped teacher Myers. tourists lead Station" yesterday's this for "South rehashes story. A is over have July visiting animal-sacrifice still Princess in All are day, been propane wounding Florida's is Fort from hunting planned Di. quiet although attacked of truck front; News Lau- Fort No for on on a derdale, but it didn't blow up. A "potentially explosive situation," as sequin-clad co-anchor Sally Fitz will call it, isn't photogenic.

And there's no video of Cuban security guards machine-gunning escaping refugees and hauling the corpses from the water with gaff hooks. The best the studio reporter can do is reenact the event by swinging a gaff savagely for the camera. Then the police scanner crackles: A child in the Miami area has been killed by a stray bullet. WSVN-TV roars into full throttle, showing all the tabloid zest that has transformed it from a tame NBC affiliate into the most notorious and widely imitated independent television station in the country. WSVN broadcasts seven hours each day of locally produced "news" broadly defined to include Hollywood gossip and soft-core porn.

During the May sweeps, its 10 p.m. news featured a segment titled "The One-Hour Orgasm," a how-to look at prolonging sexual pleasure. But its specialty is violence and disaster: new and old, major and minor, heightened by overwrought narration, gory video, and pulsating music scored by the station's house composer. Its theme song should be "Doom over Miami." To supplement Miami mayhem, WSVN ranges far and wide. It sent three crews to cover the United Airlines crash in Iowa and two to the San Francisco earthquake scene.

On WSVN, says a former reporter for the station, "Every day is the end of the world." Sure enough, one recent in-depth report was titled "The Year 2000: End of the World?" That doesn't leave much room for what WSVN executives Daniel Golden is a staff writer for the Globe Magazine. call "institutional news" school committee meetings, budget hearings, local and state politics. In fact, when it became "South Florida's News Station" five years ago, WSVN closed its bureau in Tallahassee, the state capital. The Fox affiliate's sensationalism has alienated many of its most experienced reporters and has angered black leaders, who say that it stereotypes blacks as criminals. Since its changeover, WSVN has not won any major broadcasting awards; Paul Steinle, director of journalism at the University of Miami, calls it the "worst example of lo- MIAMI DICE MAVERICK TYCOON EDMUND ANSIN RESCUED HIS MIAMI TV STATION BY EMPHASIZING VIOLENCE AND DISASTER.

AND HE'S DOING LITTLE TO CALM FEARS THAT HE'LL APPLY THE SAME FORMULA TO PERENNIAL ALSO-RAN CHANNEL 7. "I BELIEVE PEOPLE IN BOSTON ARE LOOKING FORWARD TO A MORE VITAL TYPE OF NEWS PRODUCT," HE SAYS. "BOSTON IS READY FOR cal news I have ever seen in CHANGE." BY DANIEL GOLDEN the US." WSVN is "like nothing I've ever seen," says Michael Dukakis. The normally parsimonious ex-governor coughed up $96 for cable television during a three-month stay in Miami recently to avoid local newscasts. "It's not news if it's not bizarre, tragic, or bloody.

People get a distorted sense of what the world is all about." Yet, in racially and linguistically divided Dade County, the one emotion that unites blacks, Hispanics, and whites is fear of crime. By pandering to that fear, WSVN has boosted ratings especially among minorities, the poor, and the less educated and lured younger viewers, coveted by advertisers. Its success has influenced other stations in the nation's 15thlargest market. One competitor countered "The One-Hour Orgasm" with a feature on physiological changes during sex. WSVN's reclusive owner, Florida real estate tycoon Edmund Ansin, was forced to go independent when NBC and CBS acquired other stations in the area, and he has enjoyed sweet revenge against them.

Now Ansin can add a CBS affiliate in Boston, the nation's sixth-largest market, to his scorecard. On July PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM BOSTON GLOBE.