Peace And Secutiry Knock Dent In Evening News Audience

It’s been eight years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet many people are still struggling to adjust to the realities of a post-Cold War world.

Everyone from Pentagon hawks and KGB agents to the actors who played menacing Soviets in movies like “Rocky IV” are looking for a new reason for being.

But the institution left most adrift by the end of superpower conflict may be the nation’s media.

Journalists traditionally relied on the Soviet-American faceoff with its implicit threat of global annihilation to frame news priorities and convince readers, viewers, and listeners that they were dispensing information vital to their well-being.

“The big news organizations, with the exception of CNN and a few others, are still living in a Cold War postpartum depression,” Newsday’s United Nations bureau chief, Josh Friedman, said at a February forum.

A March 21 Pew Research Center survey showed that in the past dozen years, the number of people who truly relish watching television news or reading the paper dropped by about 15 percent.

“A shallow and anxious serenity has covered the landscape of the country,” says Bernard Kalb, host of the media show “Reliable Sources” on CNN. “It does have an effect on the swiftness with which they rush to the television and to pick up the newspaper.”

Episodes such as the O.J. Simpson trial and the California cult suicides now dominate the news, notes Columbia University journalism professor James Carey, “not the events that endanger us.”

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, believes other factors - such as the migration of women to the work force and the impact of the television age - have contributed to a reduced interest in news. But the end of the Cold War “didn’t help,” he says. “The front page was a way of keeping score between the U.S. and Russia.”

Not surprisingly, international news is a major casualty in this era of relative tranquility.

According to Andrew Tyndall, author of a newsletter analyzing network news, the number of broadcast minutes devoted to foreign policy declined from nearly 2,100 in 1989 to about 1,100 last year, although there were notable spikes during the Gulf War crisis. The number of minutes of airtime consumed by reporters with an overseas dateline dropped from roughly 4,000 in 1989 to about 1,600 last year.

But journalists have not only abandoned their foreign posts. As Tyndall notes, coverage of the White House is also down significantly.

“News about Washington and from Washington has dropped off dramatically (because) Washington was there to protect us from Russia,” says Marvin Kalb, a former network foreign correspondent who heads up Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

Henry Graff, presidential historian at Columbia University, decries the “soft news, the magazine stuff” that permeates today’s news. “That’s one of the reasons the evening news is dying, that newspapers are dying.”

The new Pew survey indicates that the one media vehicle to largely avoid this public disconnection is local television news. Between 1985 and 1997, it suffered only a 3 percent decline in favorability ratings, and 72 percent of respondents report relying on the local newscast regularly. (The runner-up is the daily newspaper, with 56 percent.)

It’s no coincidence that local television news can - and does - convey an overarching sense of personal threat with the heavy dose of “if it bleeds, it leads” crime and mayhem stories that dominate so many broadcasts.

Still, manufacturing hysteria about muggers and carjackers is a poor substitute for the ICBM targeted at your town hall.

As Columbia’s Carey says, “Relatively speaking, these are trivial times.”