One of today's major TV news liabilities should soon turn out to be one of its biggest assets, although the pooh-bahs who run the television industry haven't caught on yet. Newscasts tend to attract older audiences, a serious deficiency in an industry dedicated to the single-minded pursuit of the young adults advertisers prize most. TV time buyers pay $23.54 per thousand to reach eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds and only $9.57 per thousand for those over thirty-five, according to industry sources.

Today, people age fifty and older constitute the majority of those who watch ABC's World News (54 percent), NBC's Nightly News (63 percent), and CBS's Evening News (70 percent), which helps explain all the pain remedy, denture adhesives, and gray hair dye commercials within news shows. To lower their audience's age level and raise profitability, TV news producers, national and local alike, keep lightening the content of their newscasts, filling them with titillating tabloid items about crime, celebrities, and gossip, while playing down serious reporting about government, international affairs, and major public issues, whose appeal is thought to be confined largely to older viewers.

For the same reason, network newsmagazines like Dateline, PrimeTime Live, 48 Hours, and 20/20 deliver mostly nonfiction entertainment, rather than the serious news that network news divisions used to offer -- witness 20/20's widely trumpeted Barbara Walters interview with Marv Albert on his sexual peccadilloes; PrimeTime's puff piece by Diane Sawyer on Michael Jackson's sexual troubles; and Dateline's probing report last fall on flirting, "The Mating Game."

 Prime time documentary hours on vital issues have all but disappeared from network schedules, replaced by news fluff aimed primarily at young adults. As Laurie Mifflin reported inThe New York Times, during a single week last fall (not even a sweeps week at that), the Big Three network news divisions all concentrated their firepower on the subject of sex. ABC News and CBS News devoted hour-long shows to adultery -- on ABC, a special called, "Love, Lust, and Marriage: Why We Stay, Why We Stray," while CBS's 48 Hours also focused on the hot news of extramarital affairs. At NBC, "The Sex War: The Tension between Men and Women" appeared on all the network's news programs that week, including Meet the Press, Today, Nightly News, and Dateline, as well as on cable's MSNBC .

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When I ran NBC News a decade ago, I was as guilty of age myopia as anyone. One day, the president of the television network, Ray Timothy, called to ask if I would mind if commercials for adult diapers, then a newly advertised product, appeared on NBC Nightly News. "It's a big order, worth a lot of money," Timothy said. I replied that Nightly News had just risen to number one in the ratings: I thought those spots would hurt its image and damage us competitively. The adult diaper order was turned down.

Now, television has the best of reasons to reform its negative attitude toward mature viewers, one that should especially help the news business. One of the miracles of the twentieth century is that almost three decades have been added to the life span of the average person in the U.S., the equivalent of an entire generation. In 1900, the typical American lived to age forty-seven; today, that's seventy-six. Not only are people living longer, they're also enjoying healthier, more vigorous lives than most younger people experienced in 1900. The aging generation is no longer the rocking chair generation.

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The backbone of television's audience, the 76 million baby boomers who were weaned on the tube, have begun to pass fifty. They remain hale and hearty. They have the disposable income that advertisers will learn to love. And they are putting television through its own mid-life crisis.

 While network audiences erode, and the number of young adults declines, people age fifty and older are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, and spend the most time watching television. Generation X media ad buyers, who consistently devalue the over-forty crowd, will have to awaken to this implacable audience shift.

 Those over forty-five now buy half of the new cars and trucks; those over fifty-five buy almost a third of all new vehicles. In fact, most individual consumer spending peaks in the forty-five to fifty-four age group. Now the question is, will the maturing TV audience -- which frittered away its younger years on tabloid news -- conform to past patterns and tune in to more serious news?

Journalistically, in the coming century this great societal change will make for an exceptionally newsworthy beat. Aging and longevity issues like social security, Medicare, pensions, and health already get major coverage and will continue to do so for the next twenty years or more. There will also be much to report on the vast life-style and societal changes brought about by the unprecedented phenomenon of all those baby boomers living an extra three decades. Their sheer number, sizable financial resources, professional interests, and personal worries will redirect economic and political power; generate social changes; spawn scientific breakthroughs; and reshape the dominant artistic, cultural, entertainment, and style trends of a once youth-driven society.

Many journalists persist in expressing Cassandra-like alarm at the rise of an older America, even though prevailing images of a frail, dependent, elderly population are rapidly being supplanted by images of a nation of energetic, experienced, mature adults. The press needs to get with the story of the great population transformation. The age group that has consistently been the most loyal audience for news should now be seen as its best hope for the future.

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