ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, July 6, 1996 TAG: 9607090007
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EDWARD LEWINE N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
JONATHAN Karl, Cable News Network's newest and, at 28, youngest political reporter, leaned back in his chair and blamed his elders for turning young people off television news.
``How many Woodstock nostalgia stories do we have to live through?'' said Karl, who believes that the sheer size of the baby-boom generation is crowding Generation X off the nightly news. ``People are just now starting to think about my generation.''
Karl was sitting in CNN's Manhattan studio late on a hot May afternoon waiting for his producer to finish his latest piece. On the editing machine's small screen, his image looked calm, professional, handsome and very young to be on CNN.
While MTV's Tabitha Soren has been reporting news from a young perspective for years, only in recent months have people Karl's age and their concerns become markedly more visible on cable television.
Experts believe that in this presidential election year, an unprecedented eight million people ages 18 to 29 will register to vote, so cable news is, in television argot, trying to ``skew young.''
In addition to Karl, CNN has hired Farai Chideya, 26, and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, 29. All appear on CNN's ``Inside Politics,'' a half-hour news and analysis program (weekdays at 4 and 8:30 p.m.) whose hosts are Bernard Shaw and Judy Woodruff. (At least one of the three is on every Thursday.)
Meanwhile, NBC News and Microsoft are working on MSNBC, a 24-hour cable news channel created for young adults and linked to the Internet. It begins on July 15. And C-Span and MTV are continuing their efforts to make news appealing to the young.
Every morning this year, C-Span is featuring a first-time voter, and it has even outdone MTV by sending not one but two buses around the country to tape interviews with young people.
This emphasis on the 18-to-29 bracket comes at a time when ratings for most news programs are declining, particularly among young viewers. A survey released in May by the Pew Research Center in Washington found that only 22 percent of Americans under 30 said they regularly watched a network news broadcast, down from 36 percent last year.
``Young people today are less interested in serious news than previous generations of young people,'' said Andrew Kohut, who oversaw the study.
Karl and others attribute this decline in part to differences in political and cultural attitudes between the generations. They also partly blame the news broadcasts themselves, saying the programs generally ignore the concerns of the young in favor of those of the middle aged - the age group to which most of the producers and audience belong.
The average age of CNN viewers is 44. Most people who watch the 6:30 p.m. network news programs are over 50.
In CNN's case, the decision to put young people on the air has its roots in the 1992 presidential election. That was the year Bill Clinton and Ross Perot went beyond the traditional news media to make their pitches directly to a wider audience, using talk radio, Larry King, David Letterman, Jay Leno and MTV.
Tom Hannon, CNN's political director, said it was this new dynamic that inspired him to hire young journalists this year.
Hannon denied that MTV's example had much influence on his decision. But certainly the sight of the candidates being hectored by Soren, then 24, was one of the signature images of the 1992 race.
``What MTV did in 1992 was bellwether,'' said Fitzpatrick. ``It was ground-breaking.''
Last summer, Hannon started looking for young people to employ. After a few months, he chose Karl, Chideya and Fitzpatrick, basing the choices, he said, on their skills, intelligence and poise on camera. They have all been working since February.
Karl and Chideya have backgrounds in print journalism. He worked at The New Republic and The New York Post; she worked at Newsweek and produced pieces for MTV. Both have written books about politics. Fitzpatrick, a lawyer who runs a Washington polling company, is also at work on a book about politics.
Although all three appear on ``Inside Politics,'' they are used in different ways. Karl is strictly a reporter. Since February, he has covered mainstream political stories like Bob Dole's resignation from the Senate and has done pieces on apathy among young voters, political Internet sites, Perot's appeal to college students and the politics of pop stars.
Chideya and Fitzpatrick are commentators. Both appear strikingly young when teamed with David Broder or Robert Novak, but they usually hold their own. Chideya's stance is generally a liberal one; Fitzpatrick is strongly identified with Republican positions.
In general, Hannon does not want his three young journalists ``ghettoized,'' he said. ``The idea was not to hire people who would exclusively focus on 20-something issues,'' he explained, ``but to hire young journalists who would cover the whole political process.''
At MTV, Soren agreed that covering the whole process, but from a younger perspective, was the right way to go. She should know. At 28, she is the grandmother of 20-something political reporting. Echoing Karl, she said that young people weren't apathetic about politics; they just want to know how it will affect them.
``The issues are the same,'' she said. ``You can talk about taxes, but not just capital gains. What young person has a home?''
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Farai Chideya (left), Jonathan Karl and Kellyanneby CNBFitzpatrick are CNN journalists. color.