Mtv News

TV executives have been heartened by the younger viewers who have been tuning in to news, which traditionally appeals more to older viewers, since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. CNN is trying to retain some of those viewers with an unusual collaboration with the young-adult music channel MTV. Starting tonight and running all week, the two networks will team up for a series of news reports on the life of Afghan youth.

The setting is familiar from a thousand nights of TV newscasts: The anchor sits at a desk in front of a map of the world, delivering the headlines of the day. Except that the anchor, Kurt Loder, looks like a world-weary musician in undertaker black. The concrete desk could have been borrowed from "The Flintstones," the map is in Day-Glo colors--and most of the news stories are about rock stars. Welcome to "The Day in Rock," MTV's answer to the network evening news.

electronically scrambling, for example, the marijuana emblems that show up with smoke-alarming regularity on major gangsta rappers' caps and shirts in videos these days, as if they had endorsement contracts. So it's just a bit of a surprise that "Straight Dope: An MTV News Special Report"--an hour special hosted and written by Kurt Loder--finally comes down implicitly but palpably on the pro-pot, or at least pro-legalization, side.

Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite may be working at the presidential nominating conventions this summer -- for a channel whose viewers weren't even born when he retired as CBS News anchor in 1981: MTV. Cronkite, 87, appeared on an installment of the cable channel's "Choose or Lose" this week, and now both he and MTV News boss Dave Sirulnick say they're open to the idea of future assignments, including the possibility of an on-air role during the conventions and on election night.

MTV's annual "news" report, "The Year in Rock: 1991"(premiering tonight at 8), takes itself pretty seriously with brief glimpses back at the Gulf War, the Thomas-Hill harassment hearings, abortion battles, AIDS and the collapse of communism sprinkled in amid such more typical MTV news subjects as Madonna, concert riots, Guns N' Roses, rock lawsuits and arrests, and, of course, Madonna.

There was a lot of snickering in the music industry in 1986 when Rolling Stone music editor Kurt Loder resigned to anchor MTV's fledgling news programming. What was he going to cover? The hair styles in Motley Crue videos? But MTV News had enough juice by the early '90s for President Clinton to credit the channel with helping him get to the White House.

OK, now it's serious. The prospect of war with Iraq suddenly ranks up there with drug abuse as primary preoccupations for MTV viewers. So the network, like other specialty channels, is scrambling to pound out its own particular drumbeats of war. MTV, along with PBS, A&E, the History Channel, Nickelodeon and others are among the non-news channels that have decided war is enough of a possibility that programming must address the subject, and contingency plans need to be drawn up.

If the 1980s were just like one long rock video to you, full of rapid-succession sound bytes with a musical overlay, then "MTV's Decade"--a two-hour retrospective premiering on the cable network tonight at 9--will seem just the appropriate capper. "You might call it the Awareness Generation," says upbeat interviewee Jesse Jackson, looking back through rainbow-colored glasses.