Soviet News Drawing Big American Audience, Surveys Find : Media: Results indicate the public may not be growing increasingly blase about world developments, as some fear.

Are Americans closely following the fall and rebuilding of the Soviet state?

Or does the story, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, suggest that people somehow are becoming less interested in their global village at the very moment that technology is bringing the village closer together?

Television ratings and public opinion surveys suggest that people are following Soviet news more intently than news of such events as the reunification of Germany, the Romanian revolution or the fall of the Berlin Wall. While major domestic stories still win much higher ratings, the audience response to the Soviet crisis offers a qualified argument against the concern voiced by some that Americans seem increasingly blase or inured to world developments.

In the first week of the failed Soviet coup, ratings for the television networks’ nightly news programs rose 10% from the previous month, to a point where 58% of people watching television were watching the news. By comparison, during the first week of the ground war in Iraq, 62% of Americans watching television were tuned to the nightly news.

During the second week of the coup and its aftermath, ratings were 5% higher. Some programs did especially well. ABC’s “Nightline,” for instance, saw ratings rise 13%.

And ABC’s extraordinary town meeting program last week, when Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin spoke live to American citizens, saw ratings jump 40% over the usual “Nightline” numbers.

In November, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, ratings actually declined. Some people, such as former NBC News President Reuven Frank, wondered then whether the purveyors of tabloid TV had correctly discerned what moves American hearts.

What makes the Soviet story different from the Berlin Wall story?

Steve Friedman, executive producer of “NBC Nightly News,” believes that mystery is one reason.

“I think people were really interested when the issue was in doubt,” he said.

And the mystery also needs to involve life and death, Rick Kaplan, the executive producer of “Prime Time Live” and the Gorbachev and Yeltsin town meeting, believes.

“When there is not the threat of violence, the threat of bloodshed, the ratings won’t go up,” said Kaplan. “If the Berlin Wall had gone up instead of down, then there would have been extraordinary audiences for it.”

Similarly, the Soviet story is now “into what I call incremental developments,” said NBC’s Friedman, “and unless you can show a lot of context it doesn’t really mean that much to people.”

When the Soviet Union formally granted independence to the Baltics last Friday, for instance, Friedman did not even do a story about it.

“Everybody knows the Baltics are free,” he said. “Nobody is really going crazy over this formal recognition. Two months ago we all would have led with that. But news is what is unpredictable.”

A New York Times survey made the week of the coup found that 35% of Americans said they were paying “very close attention” to news of the Soviet Union. By comparison, the reunification of Germany in October, 1990, won the intense attention of 22% of Americans, and the Romanian revolution in December, 1989, won very close attention of 28%, according to surveys by the Times Mirror Center for People and the Press.

All of these are fairly modest levels by news standards. The report on the domestic economy in virtually any month exceeds them, as would a storm (flooding in Texas in June, 1990, attracted 34%), or a plane crash (the Sioux City, Iowa, crash of a United Airlines DC-10 in August, 1989, attracted 53%).

“The thing that makes the biggest difference in viewer interest is whether people feel a direct connection,” said Michael Eisenberg, vice president of TV audience measurement at CBS News. And domestic news affects people more.

The invasion of Kuwait and the war with Iraq was the exceptional foreign story because it involved America directly, the Times Mirror surveys suggest, often reaching into the 60%s in audience interest.

But even such peak numbers are far less than they once were. In 1980, the network nightly news shows typically attracted over 70% of the viewing audience every night.

Some studies, such as one by Times Mirror in 1990, suggested that younger people today are less interested in public affairs and world events than were previous generations at similar ages.

Eisenberg of CBS offers a different explanation.

“The younger population has not gotten to the TV set by the time nightly news is on,” Eisenberg said. “And rightly so. There are alternative sources of nightly news today, including local newscasts which now have access to all the same footage the networks once had exclusively.

“Younger audiences are there for the 11 o’clock news,” and for other sources, Eisenberg said. “Younger audiences want their news on the run, ‘Tell me what is happening, but I don’t want to dwell on it.’ But if we are talking about major events, I don’t believe they are turning away from it, they are just getting it from wherever they can.”

And like their parents, once the mystery is solved, they fall back into their normal routines.