TUNE OUT, TURN OFF, ZONE OUT?

By FARAI CHIDEYA

Did you hear the one about the Illinois bank robber who wore a Bob Dole mask? As the Tonight Show's Jay Leno put it, "The guy was smart. He could have picked any mask he wanted...but he wanted to be sure he didn't draw a crowd." It's a good joke, but is it news? Americans under 30 think so. Regular network-news viewership among 18-to-29-year-olds has plunged--from 36% to 22% during the past year alone. And 40% of these young adults said they brushed up on politics via late-night TV.

Faced with personalities they don't trust who interview people they don't recognize about stories they don't feel concern them, young viewers are clicking the nightly news goodbye. This election year provides a good indicator of the media generation gap. Only 15% of young adults (vs. 35% of Americans 45 to 59 years old) say they are following news about the presidential campaign "very closely," a poll by the Media Studies Center found. Moreover, their antipathy to news extends beyond politics, because most stories, written or broadcast, either shut out or distort young Americans' lives. Newspaper portrayals of 18-to-23-year-olds were tracked by a team of college students supervised by Nancy Woodhull, the center's executive director, and they found that this age group shows up most in sports news, followed by crime. Though greatly affected by changes in the American workplace, these young adults rarely appear in articles about the economy.

The only good news is that some of this disinterest may be temporary. "The model of a good news consumer is a person with a home, a family and a stake in the community," says Woodhull, which means that today's young Americans may tune in to regular news 10 years down the road. But, she cautions, news outlets "have to lay the groundwork now." Yet, with the exception of a few efforts like the Boston Globe's solid but irritatingly titled Gen X column, "Whatever," newspapers have been slow to reach out to young readers. Television executives, on the other hand, are gung ho. This campaign season, it seems every channel has a new twentysomething on the staff, taking a page from MTV, which began covering politics during the 1992 campaign. "You start with the issues that matter to young people already, like the cost of an education and the environment, then go to the other issues they need to know about," says MTV president Judy McGrath, who notes that MTV's live convention broadcasts "got better ratings than [popular video show] Alternative Nation." It's important too to play off the new ways young people get their information. "If you watch Letterman or Leno, you're getting motivated to find out more," says Woodhull, "or you won't get the punch lines." And Leno knows to "never assume an audience knows who people are." Instead of just saying, "And Warren Christopher said," Leno explains, "I'll say, 'Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State--you know, the guy who looks like Dracula.'"

--By Farai Chideya