In the audience were 4,000 radio-and-TV-news types. On stage, in comfy club chairs, were Tom Johnson, c.e.o. of CNN, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, and Roger Ailes, president of Fox News Channel -- all worrying about aspects of their industry. At the annual convention of the Radio-Television News Directors Association in San Antonio, hard by the Alamo, conferees acknowledged that all is not rosy in television news.

Johnson worried about "the junk food component": too many stories that are unchecked and wrong. In his most abject apology yet for the CNN Tailwind fiasco, he said: "It will live with me forever. It never should have made air. We let our viewers and standards down. I'd give anything in the world if I could take it back."

Heyward lamented that "Lewinskyitis" was driving other news -- education, juvenile crime -- off the air as TV folk, "scared of boring people," broadcast sensational, crowd-pleasing stories to grab shards of an increasingly fragmented audience. Ever since the old-line TV oligopoly of ABC, CBS, and NBC was shattered, he said, broadcast news organizations no longer have audiences or revenues healthy enough to support "sustained worldwide newsgathering."

Fox News's Ailes described the way newspeople are scrambling to cover the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal as something out of the Keystone Cops. In so fiercely competitive an environment, he said, the lust to be first defeats sound journalistic sense. "I've told my journalists that you won't get fired if you're not first."

The grass-roots TV and radio journalists spent four days attending workshops and symposia and chatting up TV news celebrities like Jane Pauley, Wolf Blitzer, and Carole Simpson. A hot topic: how to make the complex, expensive transition from analog to digital transmission of local news programs -- a difficult metastasis that will require all of them to begin broadcasting in wide-screen, high definition TV in the next few years.

"This is a fundamental change in our business," said Charles Sherman, a vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters. "It means lots of tsouris, lots of pain. But in that pain lies the future of television." The new system, with all its additional channel space, he said, will be rich with new possibilities for electronic journalism: all-news local broadcast channels; staggered broadcasts of a station's regular news programs; "zoning" of news to specific regions; special channels for stocks, sports, and weather.

Federal Communications Commission chairman William E. Kennard worried that if a handful of big media companies end up owning every TV station in every major market in America, the quality of local news coverage is bound to suffer. All the evidence is that "consolidation causes broadcast owners to cut back on serious reporting and replace it with fluff and syndicated news."

One big concern of the news directors: the effect on children of today's x-rated news, rife with reports on oral sex, semen-stained dresses, and the like. What do you tell a child, one questioner wanted to know, when kids ask what the Clinton/Lewinsky hubbub is all about? ABC News's Simpson replied with a wink:

"Tell them that when a man and a woman really, really like each other, sometimes the man gets impeached by Congress."

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