WHY RELEVANCE IS OBSOLETE

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Here's a news summary that will hearten all those fearing an onset of O.J. withdrawal:

--Last Wednesday, the NBC station in Los Angeles led its broadcast with a report, unconfirmed at the time, that Michael Jackson's wife had given birth.

--A few weeks earlier, the drunk-driving arraignment of Olympic skating champion Oksana Baiul made the CBS Radio Network news.

--The murders of JonBenet Ramsey and Ennis Cosby promise to be staples of prime-time newsmagazine shows for months to come.

These disparate stories all involve matters that mainstream broadcast journalism would once have shunned. Those of us who remember a different tenor to broadcast news aren't indulging in hazy nostalgia or false memory. It really was different: hour-long documentaries (CBS Reports, NBC Reports, ABC News Closeup) were commonplace in the 1960s and '70s, touching on everything from civil rights to foreign policy. As for the stuff of tabloid journalism, broadcast news was much more like the New York Times than the New York Daily News. (When Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe broke up in 1954, the Daily News splashed the story all over Page One; the Times buried it on page 23.)

Before we chalk this difference up to the nobler impulses of journalists past, let's acknowledge some history. Broadcast journalism came of age on radio in the late 1930s, when a generation of brilliant radio correspondents chronicled the world's descent into war--news as significant as it was compelling. When the new medium of television came into our living rooms, the news was driven by similar stories: the Korean War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Watergate. All were stories of the most traditional sort, yet all possessed great drama.

So what changed? For one thing, competition. Until the 1970s, networks could offer "serious journalism" knowing that viewers had noplace else to go. The explosion of cable and satellite communications made it possible for network competitors to distribute tabloid TV shows like Hard Copy and afternoon talk shows that viewers lapped right up. The rationale for this expansion of the scope and language of news was that all-purpose term relevance. Coincidentally, that was the opening through which all kinds of "new" news rushed through the gates that once separated mainstream journalism from its black-sheep brethren. Thus the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump "shed new light on the issue of prenuptial agreements." The travails of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow "shed new light on child-custody issues."

Soon enough, however, the relevance requirement fell away like a booster stage that fires a rocket into orbit only to be jettisoned once it has accomplished its task. There is little pretense anymore that journalists are covering these stories for any motive grander than satisfying the public appetite for juicy stories. (A New York Times editor told me with commendable candor sometime back that the paper's Woody-Mia coverage was rooted in the fact that famous people were having a very public fight about an unconventional sexual liaison. Period.) The media do it because their audience cares about such things and because they no longer believe they have the luxury of ignoring such fare. I'm still convinced that even the most serious of news operations has to open the door to a wide variety of topics and interests. I just never realized what kind of company would start showing up once that door opened.