TURMOIL IN THE EAST BLOC : Survey Shows Drop in Interest in News Accounts on East Bloc

Many Americans have stopped paying close attention to news events in Eastern Europe, saying the story is confusing, the meaning of events unclear and the news too repetitive, according to a survey to be released today.

Yet it apparently would be wrong to infer that Americans consider the changes unimportant. By far, more Americans believe the situation in Eastern Europe to be the most significant news event of the year, even though they followed other stories more closely.

More people, for example, followed news about attempts to change abortion laws than the changes sweeping Eastern Europe, according to the December Times Mirror News Interest Index, a monthly survey of the public attention to news.

Only 28% of those surveyed said they are paying “very close attention” now to news accounts of the political upheaval in Eastern Europe. That is a drastic decline since November, when 50% said they were following the story very closely.

And the current level of attention is far below that of most major news stories. More people closely followed Pete Rose’s banishment from baseball, for example, and the attack on a female jogger in May in Central Park in New York. And more than twice as many followed news of Hurricane Hugo and the San Francisco earthquake.

Yet the survey suggests that people consume news judiciously. They will take from stories what they feel they need, and in the case of Eastern Europe they apparently felt they had the essentials without paying great attention to details.

While only slightly more than a quarter were closely following the story, 47% of Americans cited the changes in Eastern Europe as the most important news event of the year.

And an even higher number, 81%, knew that the Soviet Union was either encouraging or neutral on the changes.

By contrast, 73% of Americans very closely followed the San Francisco earthquake in October. Yet only 17% said it was the most important story of the year, the survey found.

This sense of taking only what is necessary from certain stories was also evident in the recent coup attempt in the Philippines. Only 18% of Americans very closely followed the coup attempt, but 46% knew that the United States was backing the government and only 5% incorrectly thought it was backing the rebels.

Similarly, only 20% of Americans very closely followed President Bush’s summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but 54% knew that bad weather had forced the cancellation of some of the summit sessions.

One reason for the lack of attentiveness to Eastern Europe may be that the story is too complex and its meaning unclear from day to day, making close monitoring of the story frustrating.

When asked to explain why they weren’t following the story more closely, for instance, 69% said it was too confusing, 60% said it was too difficult to follow and 58% said the news was too repetitious. Somewhat smaller numbers suggested a lack of interest in foreign news generally or an inability to identify with people in Eastern Europe as their reasons for not paying attention.

No story really captured people’s attention in the last month. The most closely followed stories were attempts to change abortion laws, but even that subject attracted only 35% of Americans, a relatively low number by the standards of past news stories.

The renewed fighting in El Salvador was very closely followed by only 14%, and the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center in New York was followed by only 10%.