It isn't fashionable to like TV, but there seems to be no stopping it. If kids aren't playing interactive video games on the screen, parents are shopping on it, ordering movies, watching Congress vote, or tuning in continual weather forecasts and up-to-the-second sports. We can see Nelson Mandela walk out of jail, watch Cruise missiles roar over Baghdad, sit in on public discussions of public officials' sexual behavior, join jurors in once-forbidden courtrooms.

Yet television's very success has knocked one ofits crown jewels -- broadcast journalism -- off its pins. It no longer seems feasible for news to compete in its current form with all the other things than can now be done with/on/via a television set. In fact, commercial broadcast news, network and local, is struggling to survive in its native habitat.

For broadcasters in general, and broadcast journalists in particular, the worst is by no means over. In the coming months, new technological Godzillas will be stirring. The '90s will see additional evolutionary leaps for the box that dominates our living rooms. Some changes will be instantly apparent, on display in stories like the presidential campaign. Others will evolve less noticeably. But news media already battered by recession, defecting youth, cable and VCR competition, and tabloid telecasts have little relief in sight.

The challenges described below are not simply economic -- they strike at the heart of how issues are identified and examined, at what viewers see, at what a news medium is and does. Broadcast journalism may have to redefine its mission, its fundamental sense of purpose and reason for being.

Local cable news. Later this year, when Time Warner plugs in its twenty-four hour cable news operation -- New York One News -- in New York City, a new age of truly local television news will dawn. A few states and major cities (including Washington) already have local cable news channels, but New York's will be the largest and most visible. Individual TV stations have always called their news programs local, but few are. Most are regional outlets whose newscasts air a mere dozen daily stories, plus sports and weather. Grass-roots news -- fires, city council elections, zoning board flaps, high school football -- has been the almost-exclusive province of daily and weekly newspapers.

Local cable news operations will change that. Programming around the clock, they'll have more news time to fill in one day than a network news division or local commercial station gets in weeks. They have the air time already, and satellite trucks and ENG (electronic news gathering) vans -- which send microwave signals back to station receivers -- have given cable operations the cost-effective technology with which to originate live from anywhere: a Christmas Eve concert by your local church choir, the high school's commencement ceremonies. Soccer league championships will come to television in the same manner that the Olympics now do -- live and at considerable length. Imagine the viewership when your township council debates whether or not to double your property taxes, or the board of education decides whether or not to offer free condoms to high school students, and the local cable channel invites you to register your opinion via touch-tone phone.

If all politics is local, news is even more so. The existing mainstream media, broadcast and print, will have to contend with live news not just from Moscow but from Main Street. Television will be able to tell you where all those sirens are headed, and show you the fire as well.

Local cable will pose serious new challenges for advertising and marketing departments, since retailers -- furniture stores, home applicance chains, discount houses -- will find broadcast advertising opportunities more affordable and appealing.

Time Warner has also recently begun signing up subscribers to the country's first 150-Cable channel operation in Queens, New York. Called Quantum, and described by company officials as a "video highway" into the home, the new channel bring an additional technological dimension and potential to television. It offers about half again as many additional channels as the largest systems now in operation, providing cable companies the means to offer speciaized experimental, informational, educational, and other services. They system includes fifty-seven channels for pay-per-view movies and special events, with sixteen different movies available at all times -- there's even a NASA channel. Quantum, will eventually offer new high definition television, interactive voice technology, and links with computers, fax machines, and a new generation of PCN's -- personal communications networks.

The video culture will expand. More than 40 million home entertainment systems -- Nintendo, Sega, Genesis -- are now installed in American homes. New services like the Miami-based Video Jukebox Network allow subscribers to dial up their own music videos. The network has now 13 million subscribers. Sports channels are experimenting with interactive controls that would permit viewers to choose from a variety of camera angles, in effect making each viewer his or her own director. Specialized programming will join with Baby Bell computer systems and home entertainment programs to ensnare anyone with a TV set.

In January, the Federal Communications Commission designated a special radio frequency for interactive over-the-air television services. The frequency would allow television users to order take-out food from local restuarants, pay credit card and utility bills, and call up sports scores by operating remote control devices.

MTV, the cable music channel, has its own daily and weekend news broadcast and a staff of reporters and broadcasts. While MTV news concentrates on rock music, it has also aired stories on politicians like David Duke and non-music issues like AIDS and human rights. The video culture has spawned its own print publications as well. Entertainment Weekly, one of the fastest-growing magazines in America, often skillfully and professionally crosses the line between traditional issues and popular culture, especially in areas where the two fuse. The magazine recently devoted a cover story to sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, and another to the controversy surrounding the movie JFK.

Pay-per-view. The Olympics have always been considered a quasi-news event, a marriage between geopolitics, nationalism, and sports. The 1972 terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich and the barring and readmission of South Africa from competition made clear that world sports and wolrd politics can merge.

But this year NBC will make broadcasting history by presenting 1,080 hours of Barcelona Olympics on pay-per-view cable channels, along with the network's free coverage. The cost will vary, depending on how many events viewers subscribe to watch, but network officials estimate the average cost will be $ 125. Regardless of whether sports addicts or regular Olympics fans will pay extra to watch more complete coverage of specific events, pay-per-view presents a significant challenge to the already pressed commercial networks. Many mainstream journalists have viewed the approach of pay-per-view television with horror, concerned that the free dissemination of information that characterized broadcast journalism will be impeded. Possibly, but another option is that busy, distracted Americans will be able to choose the type of news and special-event programming they want, when they want it.

C-SPAN. Cable's public service channel will become one of the most important sources of government and political news in America, probably during this presidential election year. C-SPAN already is on all day in many news bureaus, lobbyists' and bureacrats' offices, and public interest group headquarters, broadcasting congressional debates, key policy speeches, and discussions. During the presidential campaign -- when the networks all say they will send fewer people, devote less airtime, and spend less money -- C-SPAN will be offering round-the-clock mainstream press conferences, call-ins, debates, and conferences with no journalists to get in the way. When it isn't airing congressional debates, it might air the Russian Evening News, as it does every day at 6 P.M., go live to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for President Bush's address to the local Rotary Club, invite Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to take calls about the series he recently co-authored with David Broder on Vice-President Dan Quayle, broadcast JFK producer Oliver Stone's luncheon address to the National Press Club, or air Joint Congressional Economic Committee Hearings on a proposed "Marshall Plan for America." "The networks used to be the video record of the campaign," said Tim Russert, senior vice-president of NBC News, in an interview with The New York Times in December. "Now C-SPAN has taken that role."

Trawlers. One of the most-feared new phenomena in broadcasting is the growing tendency of switcher-armed viewers to "trawl" through the channels on cable and commercial networks, skimming past one broadcast after another, pausing only briefly. Networks refuse to release surveys they've commissioned that disclose precise numbers on the enormous audience shifts, and for good reason: one of the annoyances viewers no longer need endure, even for a second, is commercials. Subscribers pay for cable, guaranteeing cable operators some revenue aside from commecial time, but networks have no such fallback.

Trawling present serious public policy implications, as well as electronic ones. One network executive conceded that during the gulf war, "our overnights [ratings] told us that millions of people would shift to CNN the second a commercial came on. Often they wouldn'g come back. It's amazing, but on a given night when there's a big story, you have literally millions of people -- huge chunks of the country -- jumping back and forth to avoid commercials or boring guests." It also raises the question of whether Americans will have the patience to focus on serious issues -- health care, homelessness, violence -- when it's so easy to hop to movies around the clock.

The Baby Sells. Newspapers and broadcasters had been dreading -- and lobbying against -- the unleashing of these potential communications monsters for years. They've lost. The federal courts have freed these companies -- calling them babies is like calling the Terminator "Toodles" -- to enter the information market with computers that access financial and other information, and with message systems that will expand Americans' ability to chat electronically with like-minded people nationwide. This technology has existed for some years, but the Baby Bells, which already own and operate many of the telephone lines and transmission systems the technology requires, have the marketing and economic muscle to make them attractive to consumers.

Sometime in the next year the Baby Bells are expected to offer information ranging from sports scores to stock market quotations, from electronic storage of medical and dental records to home banking and shopping and video services that allow students to view school lectures from home. The technology will enable users to control appliances remotely and to display electronic Yellow Pages, which newspaper publishers dread will displace classified advertising. Telecommunications analysts believe Congress will eventually allow the Baby Bells to compete directly with cable companies by offering television programs.

Live Real-Time Coverage of Everything. You Were There and you will be there more and more frequently. The gulf war, the aborted coup in the former Soviet Union, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill confrontation, and the William Kennedy Smith trial highlighted an emerging pattern in big-story coverage, one that is born of TV technology but functions almost independently of traditional journalistic notions.

All these storeis were covered live, in "real time." All connected the viewer in unprecedentedly direct ways. The role of the correspondent seemed much diminished. Reporters and anchors were hosts, telling us where we were and, most of the time, where we were going, but seeming to know little more than the rest of us about what was really happening, or what it meant.

In the William Kennedy Smith trial, cable continued to shoulder aside the technological, legal, and cultural barriers that have blocked TV from many of the country's courtrooms, demonstrating again how specialized cable news coverage can provide airtime not available to commercial broadcast news, and in the case of specialized channels like the Court Channel, specialized expertise about subjects like the law as well.

Even when the biggest stories erupt -- the gulf war, Clarence Thomas -- the commercial networks can't afford to air them as extensively as cable. It costs too much now for the networks to junk hours of prime-time entertainment, but covering live news is precisely what cable is set up to do.

The challenge for broadcast news has never seemed more fundamental: at a time when television technology can take us almost everywhere to cover almost anything, what precisely is the new role of the broadcast journalist? To introduce live coverage? Or to explain, shape, and comment on it?

Retrenchment for most fixed-time newscasts. The great fixed-time newscasts of network and local news -- America's common bulletin boards through the '60s, '70s, and mid-'80s -- are fragmented and in disarray. With cable news on the air around the clock, why should we wait for half an hour of evening news? And even if we wanted to sit down and watch, everybody's too busy.

Breaking hard news will become the virtually exclusive province of cable news channels, which have no expensive entertainment broadcasts to preempt when war or scandal breaks out. In vivid contrast to the expensive, cumbersome anchor-bureau model of the networks -- which kept correspondents and producers sitting around in distant bureaus with nothing to do much of the time while paying anchors millions of dollars a year for appearing on the air about eight minutes a day -- cable news organizations like CNN are models of efficiency. There are no multimillion-dollar anchors; many more reporters and producers make a lot less money; and because the network is on twenty-four hours a day, its bureaus can be used more regularly and efficiently.

These days the networks all seem headed in different directions. GE -- NBC's new owner -- has drawn enormous fire within NBC and in other news media for its sometimes heavy-handed and brutal cost reductions, so much so that it is reportedly considering selling the network to one of the giant entertainment conglomerates like Paramount or Disney. That is especially ironic, because GE seemed to understand from the beginning that information technology would alter journalistic function. NBC recently acquired the Financial News Network and began its own video wire service, the News Channel. In the long run, from an economic standpoint, NBC seems the best equipped to survive in the fragmented, cable-driven world of TV news.

ABC, on the other hand, appears to be the best positioned for the short run. Its news division seems the likeliest to stay in the evening news business. Of the Big Three, its owner -- Capital Cities -- seems to best understand the broadcast culture, managing to quietly make its news division more efficient while acquiring and leaving intact its most visible symbols -- including the strongest lineup in broadcast journalism.

CBS News, which has settled down somewhat since the relentless and highly public bloodletting of Laurence Tisch's early regime, seems quieter but still adrift. It has yet to publicly articulate a new sense of direction to replace the institution Tisch decimated. It has not moved in new directions, as NBC has, or beefed up its anchor stable, as has ABC. Aside from 48 Hours, broadcasting's flagship news division still seems stunned by years of layoffs and budget cuts, a raccoon lying in the road as the car speeds away.

Newsmagazines will grow. Network news has no choice but to back away from hard news. News divisions, pressed to find revenues for their tightfisted new owners and showcases for their news personalities, will continue to retreat to the new generation of prime-time newsmagazines. These broadcasts make sense both economically -- they cost a fourth of a prime-time entertainment broadcast -- and journalistically; they are less hidebound than evening news broadcasts, freer to use dramatic video and range away from reporter-clogged institutions like the White House and the State Department.

CBS has finally stopped bouncing the gritty, dramatic 48 Hours from one time slot to another, and the broadcast has boosted its ratings as viewers have finally been able to figure out where to find it. ABC News has also stuck with its new newsmagazine, PrimeTime Live, giving it time to recover from its disastrous and over-hyped start nearly three years ago. There are reports that Sam Donaldson, co-anchor of PrimeTime Live, will leave the broadcast to anchor his own new newsmagazine program, and that NBC News will bring out its own newsmagazine this spring.

The newsmagazines' great but closely guarded secret is that they are much closer to the highly successful tabloid telecasts like Hard Copy and Inside Edition than they are to traditional news division newscasts or documentaries. With their emphasis on crime, sensationalism, and celebrity, they are mining territory the evening news always considered unworthy. For the newsmagazines to continue to compete with the booming tabloids, they will have to get even racier. They will. For better or worse, commercial broadcast news will make its last stand here.

The news media persist -- at their peril -- in covering this revolution as an amalgam of toys, or as more bad habits for kids. It is, in fact, a new culture of information, profoundly reshaping the leisure time and information habits of tens of millions of Americans.

At least some of these changes will be evident during the presidential campaign. When the Bush campaign wanted to expose its embattled vice-presidential nominee to a skeptical nation in 1988, aides simply walked Dan Quayle over to the anchor booths at the Republican convention for chats wit Bernard Shaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw. In 1992, with the possible exception of CNN, there won't be anchors at the Republican convention or on the scene at key presidential primaries.

The three commercial networks have announced that their anchors will cover only the Democratic convention in New York, a cheap limo ride across town from their headquarters. They will also scale back the number of reporters, producers, and camera persons assigned to the primaries, the campaign, and the election, all of which will get less airtime. The networks can't afford to cut deeply into prime-time entertainment revenues and can't compete directly with the ubiquituous, lower-paid, more mobile legions of CNN.

It is unclear how politicians will get their messages across in a system as fragmented as broadcast journalism. Challengers without the power of a president to comman media attention will have more difficult time than ever getting through to a public mesmerized by a staggering array of video choices. It is also unclear how journalists will transmit their messages. Just as newspapers were -- may still are -- reluctant to concede television's permanence and relevance, so broadcast news executives and producers have been slow to react to the manner in which technology has made news instantaneously available.

Whether broadcast news does or doesn't respond, this technology will continue to supplant, thus alter, one of the most basic functions of the reporter: to take us where we can't go ourselves.

Like much of the mainstream print media it has challenged and in some ways supplanted, broadcast journalism tends to equate the status quo with responsible, ethical journalism and to view the new video culture as a cross between prostitution and Armageddon. Because it has been so slow to respond to the evolution of its own medium, to permit real diversity of opinion and creatively distinct news programming, broadcast journalism has allowed itself to be perceived as dying, in a constant state of retrenchment and cutback. Yet television news is hardly becoming extinct; it is spreading all over the place.

In one sense, commercial broadcast journalism is freer to experiment and innovate than at any time since its inception. News divisions may have lost much of the virtual monopoly on the daily presentation of news they came to hold through their evening newscasts, and they may no longer be able to compete effectively on breaking stories. But that leaves a lot of room -- for real commentary, more reports, and reporting away from the media clusters in Washington and New York, a revival of investigative units looking at crime, waste, and corruption, and closer looks at largely untapped subjects like science, technology, popular culture, and religion.

As for the tube itself, we may like it or not, but we can probably all agree that, whatever its shortcomings, there is one thing it will continue to do brilliantly: grow.

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