Contact:	Fred Knubel	

		Director of Public Information

		212-854-5573, fhk1@columbia.edu		FOR IMMEDIATE USE









From Hard News to 'You News': TV 

Is Softening, Says Columbia Journalism Review





Television Journalists and Politicians Are Beginning to Act Alike,

Seeking Ratings and Votes by 'Feeling Our Pain'





	The Columbia Journalism Review has found what it calls "You News"

 flourishing on network television of the '90s.

	The stories on our health and managing our lives are taking time from 

foreign and hard news, writes associate editor Andie Tucher in the May/June

 issue, just published.

	Producers have discovered that "in addition to the old categories of the news 

you need and the news you want, they can add a third type of news: news about 

you - news to use at your next doctor's visit, PTA meeting or family dinner table 

discussion," she says.

	 "All three networks are paying as much attention to health problems as 

any scriptwriter for E.R.," she writes. "Where once the airtime was full of 

congressional wrangles and Middle East peace talks, now it's heavy with medical 

news and features from flyover country." 

	In the first months of 1997, Tucher notes, NBC  broadcast named feature 

segments on daydreams, the genealogy craze, oversupply rip-offs at the Pentagon, 

no-fault divorce, getting out of debt, managing one's time, overcoming the fear of 

flying, the aging process and how life has changed for women in Yankton, S.D., 

where anchorman Tom Brokaw grew up.  Brokaw told her in an interview that

they were "a rich mix of different kinds of stories."  She calls them "a jumble of the 

informative, the you-focused and the fluffy."

	"What we're attempting to do," Brokaw said, "is to cover the important news

 of the day and the news that is relevant to our viewers, and that news now has a 

much different woof and warp. . . . I travel this country a lot, and wherever I go I

 hear what people are talking about and what interests them and what they are 

desperate to know about.  And a whole lot of that has very little to do with what we 

would routinely put on the air ten-fifteen years ago."

	Tucher acknowledges that more people now are getting their hard news 

from other sources and that the golden age of television often produced its own soft 

features.  She credits ABC, NBC and CBS with continuing to air stories "that 

connect viewers to a larger world than their own home or community, 

introducing them to issues they didn't necessarily know they didn't know about."  

But "the gossamer and the useful often outweigh the grit."

	She notes that having lost their immediacy as news providers, newspapers 

and magazines for years have also been substituting service stories, lifestyle 

features and analysis for the urgent scoop.  She asks: "How long can an evening 

news program emphasize the fulfillment of viewers' needs, work to provide 

exactly what they are 'desperate' to hear - and continue to function as a national 

newscast at all?"

	Tucher finds striking parallels between politicians and television 

journalists: both "have focused on small, personalized promises of a better life, not 

for your country, but for you and your family. . . . Both talk in cadences of a 

manufactured populism that replaces the inspiriting tones of leadership with a 

comforting patois of service and infotainment.  [Both] want us to know they are 

just folks like us, just folks who understand our concerns, just folks who feel our 

pain, just folks who know what we're desperate to hear.  And what might get 

enough votes - or ratings - to win."



###

-2-