THE NEWS WARS

By Richard Zoglin

Last Sunday's presidential debate was something of a dud in the ratings, drawing only three-quarters of the audience that saw the first Bush-Clinton-Perot encounter in 1992. But no one who missed the event could possibly have felt left out--not if they glanced at a newspaper the next morning, or watched television news, or listened to a radio talk show, or tapped into any one of dozens of computer Websites. In fact, for the next 24 hours they could hardly escape the darn thing. Just a random sampling:

Clinton spokesman Joe Lockhart and Dole counterpart Nelson Warfield debated the debate on ABC's Good Morning America. NBC analyst Tim Russert and ABC's Jeff Greenfield weighed in on Don Imus' radio show. In a CBS poll, 50% of the respondents said they thought Clinton was the winner, vs. 28% for Dole. Rush Limbaugh replayed Clinton's response on the issue of presidential pardons and exclaimed, "Now what does that mean?" USA Today tracked the minute-by-minute responses of 148 voters in St. Louis, Missouri, and reported that they felt most favorable about Clinton when he praised health insurance guarantees in the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, and liked Dole best when he called the U.S. "the greatest country on the face of the earth." A woman on the street, interviewed by CNN, said Dole "just seemed snippy last night." Someone writing in to the WELL, an online bulletin-board service, said Dole's worst moments were at the end: "He sought to talk to young people, and failed to connect." David Letterman listed the Top 10 Ways to Make the Next Presidential Debate More Exciting. No. 1 was "When things get boring, turn loose the gators."

A presidential debate--even a dull one--is a big news event, so maybe it merited this full-blown media bombardment. In today's overheated news environment, however, the same sort of saturation coverage is piled on even trivial events: Hillary Clinton's "conversations" with Eleanor Roosevelt, or a six-year-old's suspension from school for kissing a classmate. News--or at least lots of verbiage that passes for news--seems to be everywhere. Sometimes it blares at us with banner headlines and sensational TV come-ons. Other times, it just drones, a kind of Muzak for current-events obsessives. News is chewed over by TV pundits, railed about by talk-radio hosts, nibbled at in gossip columns, debated over the Internet--relentless, insistent, inescapable.

And news is big business. Last week another media behemoth entered the 24-hour news competition, as Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News Channel, available initially in 17 million homes. It will vie for viewers with the granddaddy of 24-hour TV news, CNN (whose owner, Turner Broadcasting, last week became part of Time Warner, TIME's parent company), and with MSNBC, the ambitious TV-and-Internet news service launched in July by NBC and Microsoft.

This latest sally in the news wars has sparked an extraordinary corporate feud. Murdoch has charged that Time Warner reneged on an agreement to carry the Fox News Channel on its cable systems, opting for MSNBC instead. (Time Warner had been required by the Federal Trade Commission to pick up one CNN competitor in order to win approval of the Turner merger.) This was a blow to Murdoch's hopes of expansion, since it means he will be blocked from Time Warner's almost 12 million cable homes--most crucially those in New York City, where Fox is based. Last week Murdoch filed a $2 billion antitrust suit and enlisted Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to help pressure Time Warner. Company executives are standing firm; they point out that Fox is just one of many cable programmers that have been denied a spot on the crowded cable dial in New York. On Friday Time Warner won a temporary restraining order to bar Giuliani from putting Fox on one of the channels reserved for city use.

The rhetoric has been heated, but the stakes in the 24-hour news battle seem, at first glance, relatively small. CNN's audience averages only about 300,000 households except during major national crises and murder trials of former N.F.L. superstars. But CNN made $280 million last year. Murdoch, who plans to spend more than $200 million on his new venture, sees not only money to be made but, equally important, the prestige of finally adding a news component to his U.S. television empire. Both domestically and overseas, no media giant can afford to stay out of the news competition.

The Fox News Channel is hardly the only new entree on a growing buffet table of news offerings. There are now two nationwide cable channels, CNBC and CNNfn, that specialize in business news. Another two--one from ESPN, the other from CNN and Sports Illustrated--will soon be offering around-the-clock sports news. On radio, news dribbles out daily on all-news stations and is dissected by opinionated talk-show hosts like Imus, Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Local TV news programming is booming--up to six or seven hours a day on some stations--and 18 regional cable channels offer 24-hour local news.

Yet this information explosion hides a paradox. At the same time that people are being inundated with news as never before, their interest in news seems to be shrinking. They are just too busy, or too involved in their own lives, or too bored by the Middle East situation, or maybe just too overwhelmed by all the choices available. Newspaper readership is in steady decline. That's partly because most people now get their news primarily from TV: 59% according to a TIME/CNN poll, vs. 23% from newspapers. But the audience for network news is also dropping. Fifteen years ago, the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight together were watched in 41.2% of all American TV homes. Last season that combined audience sank to an all-time low of 26.1%.

So what are we to make of all this? Is the news dying, or entering a Golden Age? Are people uninterested in news, or just getting it in less conventional places? And what sort of news are they getting? Is it what they need to cope in a complex world, or just a lot of blather between the ads? These are the questions that every news organization must face as it tries to compete in the era of information overload.

Some media executives think it's this very explosion of news that is turning consumers off. "People are fed up, and they are tuning out," contends James Naughton, a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who now heads the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "They are tired of sorting through all the conflicting impulses they are get." Nancy Woodhull, executive director of the Media Studies Center, makes an obvious but often overlooked point: "We don't have an information explosion because people want more information. We have an information explosion because of the invention of technology that can bring everything to us in a second, whether it's in our computer mailbox or on our cable-TV set."

The result is a proliferation of narrowcast and personalized news sources and a decline in traditional broadcast and mass-market outlets. People have an easier time getting the information that interests them personally, but it comes at the expense of community: they are less likely to share a common pool of information, or the same idea of which events and trends are important, than they were when nearly everyone in town read the same paper and watched the same newscasts. "The biggest single change in the last decade," says Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, "is that all sorts of upstarts and ruffians and charlatans have elbowed their way into the media tent. News has become everything from Hard Copy to Entertainment Tonight to America Online. In some ways that's very healthy. But now all kinds of rumors and innuendo and conspiracies can make their way onto the media radar screen."

Tabloid journalism has played a major role in upending traditional news standards and dividing the audience. While upscale outlets like the New York Times and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer cover the budget battles in Washington and the strife in Bosnia, more mass-audience-friendly publications and TV shows dig for details on Liz Taylor's health and Princess Di's divorce. Each time these tabloid stories seep into the "serious" press, it sparks another round of hand-wringing debate over whether news is what people "want" or what they "need." Many editors were privately dismayed at the massive amount of attention paid last year to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, an event of marginal news significance. Still, for competitive reasons, they couldn't ignore it.

The audience is being further fragmented by the boom in news outlets catering to special interests. For Washington policy wonks, there's C-SPAN. For Clinton bashers, there's Rush Limbaugh. For teens fixated on Beavis and Butt-head, there's MTV's Week in Rock. The Internet has become the ultimate narrowcasting vehicle: everyone from UFO buffs to New York Yankee fans has a Website (or dozen) to call his own--a dot-com in every pot.

Technology will only quicken the pace at which news is moving away from the universal and toward the individualized. Several companies already offer services that let a computer user totally customize his or her daily supply of information: "I'll take the Washington headlines, please, plus the health news, N.F.L. scores, updates on AT&T's stock price--and anything on Madonna." The Daily Me has arrived on our doorstep, not with a thump but with a polite mechanical chime.

In this fragmented environment, where news is no longer a common experience, is it any wonder that blacks and whites saw the O.J. Simpson verdict in such a radically different light? Or that right-wing militia groups--nourished by their own books, periodicals and E-mail lists--can be convinced that the West is being invaded by U.N. troops in black helicopters? When traditional sources of news start to disappear, alternate views of the world can flourish.

What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering. Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world. What has exploded is not news, but talk about the news; commentary, not information. Which makes the news explosion both more democratic and more suspect. Everyone from Kathie Lee Gifford to call-in viewers on Larry King Live has a viewpoint, and every viewpoint gets a hearing. Howard Stern may be as influential as Peter Jennings. MSNBC fills its airtime with a corps of interchangeable "contributors" who offer seat-of-the-pants opinions on whatever the big story of the day happens to be. It's cocktail party chat passing for journalism.

The democratic impulse in news is also reflected in the current vogue for "public" or "civic" journalism. Under this philosophy, pioneered by newspapers like the Wichita Eagle and Minneapolis Star Tribune, the news outlet seeks to "reconnect" with its community by taking polls, sponsoring issue forums and seeking solutions to neighborhood problems. For this year's political races in North Carolina, for example, several of the state's newspapers and TV stations banded together to poll voters on what issues they wanted to see addressed, and then focused coverage on those issues. The editors involved argue that this approach has made the campaign more relevant to voters; critics say it has turned the press into advocates instead of journalists.

All these trends--public journalism, tabloidization, the rise in special-interest news--are, of course, ways of trying to get people to pay attention to news again. But why have they become so inattentive? Many news executives argue that interest in news has declined mainly because the news is less interesting today--or at least less crucial to people's lives. For much of this century, the news was dominated by stories that had a direct, often life or death impact: the Great Depression in the '30s, World War II in the '40s, the cold war and threat of nuclear Armageddon in the '50s, civil unrest and Vietnam in the '60s. In just one eventful year, 1968, there were two assassinations, of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the Tet offensive in Vietnam; black-power protests at the Mexico City Olympics; and a tumultuous presidential campaign. Today we have wars between Kurdish factions that no one can quite tell apart, and a presidential campaign that has generated less interest than any in recent memory. "A lot of tension went out of the news when the cold war ended," contends ABC News president Roone Arledge. "It's not a life-or-death matter whether you watch the news each night." The public's attention is turning from substantive news to celebrity gossip; we've gone from the age of news to the age of entertainment.

Many press critics argue that it is not the news but the way journalists cover it that has turned off the public. In his book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows, now the editor of U.S. News & World Report, argues that journalists have lost touch with their audience by becoming too elitist, too self-involved, too cynical. Stories about politics, for instance, focus mainly on campaign strategy--the "horse race," rather than substantive issues that have an impact on people's lives. "[Journalists] increasingly present public life mainly as a depressing spectacle, rather than a vital activity in which citizens can and should be engaged," writes Fallows. He adds, "The less Americans care about public life, the less they will be interested in journalism of any form." Fallows and others argue, moreover, that today's reporters--often well-paid, well-connected Washington insiders--are simply not in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. A TIME/CNN poll found that negative feelings about the press are indeed widespread: 75% of the respondents agreed that the news media is "sensationalistic"; 63% found it "too negative"; and 73% said they are "skeptical about the accuracy" of the news they're getting. (That last figure, however, is less than the 83% who felt the same way a year ago.)

Another school of critics claims that growing media concentration has caused journalism to lose much of its aggressiveness and credibility. The Nation magazine last June devoted a special issue to media conglomerates, including a chart detailing the tentacles of four dominant companies: General Electric (owner of NBC), Walt Disney Co. (ABC), Time Warner (CNN) and Westinghouse (CBS). Americans may be tuning out the news, the magazine speculated, "because they don't trust its homogenized premise of objectivity, especially when Disneyized, Murdochized, Oprahized and Hard Copyized." Though these corporate ownerships are becoming more apparent (Good Morning America travels to Disney World more often), the homogenizing factor may be the result of profit pressures and competition rather than some sprawling conglomerate conspiracy.

If people seem to be turning away from traditional news sources, that does not necessarily mean, of course, they are getting less news. The network evening newscasts are a case in point. For many years, these half-hour programs were virtually the only place where TV viewers could get a wrap-up of the day's major national and world events. Now such stories can turn up in countless other places--not just on CNN and other cable outlets but on the networks' own local affiliates, which get news footage via satellite during the day.

"I think there is still a big appetite for national news," says Michael Gartner, former president of NBC News and now editor of the Ames, Iowa, Daily Tribune. "But there are far more outlets for it now. It used to be that the networks could say to me and you, 'Sit down at 6:30. That's when we will give you the news.' Now we pick when we have time to watch the news." The O.J. Simpson case also broke many viewers of the evening news habit: when the trial (carried live on several cable channels) ran into the evening newscasts in the East and Midwest, viewers simply continued watching the trial.

The networks are battling this viewer erosion by trying to expand their news offerings--into new time periods, like prime time, as well as into cable and the new technologies. NBC has been the most aggressive in this regard, with two cable-news networks, an Internet news service in conjunction with Microsoft, and NBC Superchannel, a programming service in Europe. "We've always been in the news-gathering business 24 hours a day," says NBC News president Andrew Lack. "Now we can provide our viewers--whether on the PC or on television--this information 24 hours a day."

Which still leaves consumers the task of sorting through it all. "People are experiencing a great information overload," says CNN president Tom Johnson. "It's up to us to find ways to simplify how the audience can receive this information." CBS News president Andrew Heyward sees another problem with the news explosion. "We seem to have lost a sense of proportion," he says. "Everything is made to seem equally important, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the latest scandal in Washington. We lack the vocabulary to convey the true importance of some events, because we're always moving on to the next thing. It serves to trivialize the news."

In trying to cope with this mishmash of stimuli, people could react in two ways. They could throw up their hands and withdraw even further into their own interests. Or they could turn once again to traditional news outlets, which help put the chaos in some kind of intelligent order. Just how all this will play out--for our understanding of the world around us, for our sense of community, and for the future of journalistic enterprises like the one you're reading--will be one of the big stories of the next decade. It might even make the evening news.

--Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Adam Cohen/Atlanta, David S. Jackson/San Francisco and William Tynan/New York

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN/WASHINGTON, ADAM COHEN/ ATLANTA, DAVID S. JACKSON/SAN FRANCISCO AND WILLIAM TYNAN/NEW YORK