Kid Vid News

Son of 60 Minutes hits CBS

After undermining the taste, intelligence and dental hygiene of American children every Saturday morning for a generation, commercial television may have discovered a way to make amends: news for kids. In recent years the networks have been experimenting with various brief news updates and didactic entertainment specials for younger viewers.* But so far, TV has produced nothing for children quite so grown up as CBS's newborn 30 Minutes.

As the name implies, the show is a junior version of the network's hard-punching weekly magazine-format program, 60 Minutes. It stars a couple of full-fledged CBS News correspondents, Betsy Aaron, 39, and Christopher Glenn, 40, who comb the country in search of stories that might interest teenagers and preteens--just as Dan Rather, Morley Safer and Mike Wallace do for adults. With slightly less success--at least from the looks of last Saturday's first 30 Minutes, which included rather pedestrian film reports on acne treatment and the plight of a justifiably obscure rock band trying to bust onto the charts. Things may pick up a bit, though. The next scheduled offering, for example, includes a harrowing look at juvenile offenders trying to survive in an adult maximum-security prison and a zany profile of the mostly middle-aged men who put out Mad magazine. Future subjects sound promising too: football injuries, school censorship of dirty words, teen-age pregnancy, cheerleading, how rock concerts damage eardrums.

Each 30 Minutes has two such reports, plus a few minutes of legal advice from a children's rights lawyer on such topics as whether the principal can search your locker without your permission (yes) and how to return a defective product (fast). "We don't approach these stories any differently than if we were shooting them for the Evening News," says Correspondent Aaron. Adds Glenn: "There never has been anything [on TV] that says, 'We're taking stories that are of interest to your age group and giving them a journalism job.' " CBS is not helping that job much by burying 30 Minutes in the suicidal 1:30 p.m. (E.D.T.) Saturday time slot opposite the N.C.A.A. game of the week. But then, growing up never was supposed to be easy, for children or networks. qed

*Among them: ABC's After School Specials, hour-long dramatizations of situations such as a family death'; CBS's weekend In the News, 2 1/2-minute summaries of hard news and soft features; Razzmatazz, CBS's sporadic profiles of young people who lead interesting lives (discontinued this year but scheduled to reappear next season); and NBC's Special Treat, a monthly, one-hour inquiry into such topics as shoplifting, losing a pet, and being snowbound.

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