TELEVISION : Like, Here’s the News : MTV reaches into 54.5 million homes with news shows that target a prime audience. Is it a look into the future of TV news?

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.

“I’m not trying to be Peter Jennings--it takes a lot of hard work to be Peter Jennings,” protests Loder, a 44-year-old, pseudo-cynical rock journalist who is the principal anchor of MTV News, a burgeoning division of the music-video channel that produces 13 1/2 hours of programming a week. As you might expect, MTV news is to TV news as MTV is to TV--similar, but only sort of.

“The broadcast networks are very good at what they do,” Loder continues in an interview after a recent newscast. “This is, like, MTV. We’re covering the music business--an industry dedicated to making people like music by groups (such as Milli Vanilli) who can’t even sing. MTV itself is a potent form of promotion, and there is a certain promotional aspect to what we do at MTV News. But if there’s b.s. going on in this business, we try to convey that. And, you know, it’s amazing how often actual issues crop up in this seemingly worthless field.”

If that doesn’t exactly sound like an acceptance speech at the Emmy Awards for news, don’t be deceived. At a time when the broadcast TV networks are battling to hold on to the 40-plus crowd that is the mainstay for their nightly newscasts, MTV is reaching young viewers in 54.5 million U.S. homes with programming that, in its own distinct way, ranges well beyond rock news to cover issues ranging from the environment to warfare, from AIDS to presidential politics.

In addition to “The Day in Rock,” its daily 10-minute newscast, there is “The Week in Rock,” a half-hour weekend summary show, and “Like We Care,” a half-hour magazine show for teen-agers that airs weekdays, covering young viewers’ opinions on topics from hickeys to high-school violence (see accompanying article on Page 3). The news unit also produces three to five documentaries a year on such subjects as racism and sex, with five planned for 1992.

But while MTV is clearly reaching young people when other news media are not, there are questions about the nature and value of the information being presented. Some observers say MTV News is promoting a liberal agenda; others believe it may be the most advanced version of a new form of journalism: promotion as news. MTV programming executives themselves admit that, however independently the news staff may operate on stories, the underlying agenda is “to support the playlist” of videos on MTV and to make the artists more interesting--which, of course, ultimately helps sell records.

That a music channel would be turning to news programming at all should not come as a complete surprise. “If you listen to popular music today, it’s not all about love,” said Linda Corradina, vice president in charge of MTV News. “Some of it is about sex, some of it is about disease, some of it is about starving. If Don Henley is writing about homelessness and somebody else is writing about teen-age pregnancy and kids are making Top 10 records out of these records that talk about serious subjects, kids are obviously interested in talking about issues.”

MTV began presenting some news items as far back as 1981, but the items went largely unnoticed because they were dished out by MTV’s “veejays” and tended to be more lightweight than today’s reports. News became a separate operation, with its own budget, in 1985. Loder, a respected rock journalist who is a longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine and a music columnist for Esquire, was hired in 1987. “The Week in Rock” started that same year, and “The Day in Rock” has been on for a year.

“News was not separate in the beginning, and we’ve worked to give it a separate identity,” said Corradina, 32, who joined MTV News as a producer in 1983 after a stint on the assignment desk at ABC News. Today, MTV News has 18 full-time staff members (seven of whom started out at the network as college interns) and 47 free-lancers. Its annual budget has quadrupled to more than $9 million since 1985.

“The real breakthrough for us came with ‘Decade,’ a documentary that we did in 1990,” Corradina said. The program featured a variety of entertainers, journalists and other public figures reflecting on the events of the 1980s.

“There was definite fear on the part of management that we were going to get political,” she recalled. “People were saying, ‘This is a great show,’ but they were concerned about the response.”

It couldn’t have gone much better. TV critics praised the network for its foray into serious subject matter, albeit through what one reviewer called a “bombardment” of fleeting images, and “Decade” went on to win a Peabody Award for broadcast journalism.

Nevertheless, MTV News does not have the same church-and-state separation from the entertainment side of the company that traditionally has characterized broadcast journalism. Reports of a rock star’s latest video or humanitarian project are given prominence on the newscasts and, at the other extreme, MTV executives admit that they would be unlikely to investigate a potentially explosive subject such as payola in the record industry, although they have covered ticket scalping.

“We’re not out muckraking; we’re not out looking for dirt,” said Doug Herzog, 32, MTV’s director of programming, to whom Corradina reports. “We think the bands are great--that’s why we play them all day (on music videos). One of the reasons we started MTV News is to make the artists seem more important, more interesting and more credible. We’re there for all the positive things they do--the charities, the hospital benefits. We are in business with these people (the musicians and record companies). We want to show them in as interesting a light as possible. But we’re also going to show them in the light that they may happen to shine on themselves.”

When it comes to topics outside the music business, Corradina said that “The Day in Rock” producers are informally guided by what is perceived as MTV’s “take” on a story and what they perceive viewers’ interest in it to be.

“We probably wouldn’t go to the Amazon to cover the rain forest, but we would cover an event that’s environment-oriented,” such as a benefit concert, Corradina said. They did cover the Gulf War “because MTV-age viewers were fighting over there, and we couldn’t just say, ‘And now Bon Jovi.’ We wouldn’t be likely to cover Social Security--unless we said, ‘Hey, kids, this is what you’re going to be paying for in the year 2000.’ We’re not trying to educate people--but we are trying to lead and inform.”

When it came to the presidential campaign this year, Corradina went with her gut. “I’m not really sure how much our audience cares about politics, but we’re going to hope they are interested,” she said, and “The Day in Rock” recently launched coverage with interviews with Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan and all of the Democratic candidates in the New Hampshire primary. Each was asked why young people should vote for them. Other coverage is planned, under the umbrella title “Choose or Lose.”

By filtering most issues through the prism of celebrity, MTV News has put into high-relief the “celebrification” question growing throughout American journalism: Does an issue exist if there’s no celebrity attached to it?

“MTV is a network that, perhaps more than any other, is thoroughly committed to the principle of commercialism,” said Stuart Ewen, a communications professor at New York’s Hunter College and author of “All Consuming Images,” a book about the power of images in American society. “The standard shtick of TV is that commercialism is a means to an end, that carrying advertising provides the network with the wherewithal to give you the news. At MTV, the dividing line between advertisement and entertainment has broken down--the guiding principle of MTV is presenting videos that are advertisements.

“ ‘The Day in Rock’ and ‘The Week in Rock’ are essentially promotional items presented in a news format,” he said. “The news of new videos coming out, what’s happening on concert tours, the billboard charts--it’s essentially tidbits keeping the names of the stars before your eyes, a promotion for the record industry. Yet in mainstream news media, you’ve got ‘Entertainment Tonight’ and ‘infotainment’ all over the place. ‘Video press releases’ from companies promoting their products are showing up on local newscasts without acknowledgment. Because MTV is somewhat unabashed in its commercialism, it provides a window through which you can see more clearly what’s going on in the rest of culture, with promotion becoming news.”

At the same time, however, Ewen acknowledged positive benefits in MTV’s marketing to its young demographics. “Knowing what they know about their audience--that they’re interested in rock ‘n’ roll and the themes it explores--some of what they do seems to be more sensitive to the texture of the subject matter than what one sees on the network evening news,” he said. “Their coverage of the recent CCNY tragedy (where eight people died at an overcrowded concert at City College of New York) was more skeptical of the authorities, probably because a reporter for MTV News would know that the MTV audience might be more skeptical of authority. And their documentary on racism didn’t take the usual ‘social work’ approach to the problem. It was told from the vantage point of people living with the problem, both kids and people in the public eye.”

Rock critic Dave Marsh also thinks MTV News is accomplishing something of note. “It’s not any worse to see Kurt Loder suck up to a superstar than to see Diane Sawyer suck up to a superstar,” he said. “That isn’t the valuable part of MTV News. They aired footage not cleared by the Pentagon during the Gulf War--no other broadcaster had the courage to do that. And they’ve been thorough and committed in covering topics like racism and censorship that impinge upon the particular world they cover.”

His Gulf War reference concerned uncensored footage of devastation wrecked in Iraq by allied bombing, shot by free-lance journalist Jon Alpert. “We hired Jon Alpert because he had sources we wouldn’t have,” Corradina said. “We set up his stories objectively, and we covered demonstrations on all sides of the issue, people protesting against the war and people protesting for the war, saying, ‘Give Bush a chance.’ We weren’t telling our audience how to feel about the war. I think the footage from Iraq stood out because everything you’d seen on the broadcast networks was news of how we were hitting military targets directly. The broadcast networks probably should have (also) done this story (that MTV did.)”

Not everyone agrees. The war coverage is only one instance of MTV’s liberal agenda, charges L. Brent Bozell III, chairman of the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, and finance chairman of Patrick Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

“It’s dishonest journalism to an impressionable audience,” Bozell said. “They’re serving as a mouthpiece for liberalism in the entertainment community, presenting an abjectly liberal point of view. They’ve got 20 million people watching between the ages of 11 and 24. Everyone has a right to be biased, but they ought to recognize their power and acknowledge their bias.”

He took particular exception to Loder’s on-air commentary during coverage of the Operation Desert Storm victory parades, when the anchor said, “Many Americans wanted a party to celebrate whatever it is that (Desert Storm) accomplished. . . . As with any outbreak of vaguely focused patriotism, opportunities abounded for making money.”

“To call the victory parade an opportunity for making money is a slap at all these soldiers who put their lives on the line,” Bozell complained.

Loder said that he generally does not comment on the news but, unlike his broadcast-news counterparts, he is not prohibited from stating his opinion.

“I thought the Gulf War was horrible,” Loder said. “I was in the Army for three years during the Vietnam era, and it was just the biggest waste of human life I’ve ever seen. Whenever people send soldiers over to a place like that, essentially to protect oil interests, it’s so transparent--what are you going to say? You’re hearing the other side every day. No one’s saying to these kids, ‘Hey, kids, they could bring back the draft and put it in place in about 24 hours.’ ”

MTV executives dispute Bozell’s contention that they have not given enough coverage to the conservative position on such subjects as abortion--noting, for example, that they covered anti-abortion demonstrations in Wichita, Kan.

Still, even Loder concedes that MTV News does not question some of the liberal good works of the music business as closely as it might.

“There’s a lot of rampant pomposity in the music business,” he said. “You’ve got all these rock stars that are going to save the Amazon but are, like, playing guitars made from Amazon rain-forest wood. Don Henley is trying to save Walden Pond, but it’s symbolic: Walden Pond is already saved. You’re saving some piece of real estate over here. I’ve been up there with Don. He has a house there. At one time somebody cut down those trees. It’s OK that he has a house there? Sometimes I think environmentalism goes so far that it’s anti-working class.”

Loder said that he had mentioned this question during the making of the documentary “Decade” two years ago and would bring it up again if he were interviewing Henley today. But he acknowledged that it would be difficult to get at the fanciful humor of “Amazon rain-forest guitars” in the regular MTV newscast.

The music business, after all--like other areas of show business--is one in which image means money, where the sensitivities of artists and their handlers are so high that, for example, according to MTV sources, Jon Bon Jovi’s manager didn’t want it mentioned on MTV News that he was getting married because it might hurt his heartthrob appeal. (MTV carried the news anyway.)

What happens when MTV News is about to offend a powerful artist?

“Two or three times a year we run into situations where it’s (dicey),” programming chief Herzog said. “This is when we start screaming at each other, where the news department says, ‘We’re about getting the story.’ Occasionally we have to sit down and say, ‘Look, guys, there is a bigger picture here--this isn’t our story, it isn’t going to make a difference to our audience, so let’s not do it.’ But we’re not a house organ for the music industry, and we’re going to cover something that’s out there in the news.”

Herzog declined to specify instances where MTV News had decided not to carry a story.

“We walk a fine line every day,” Corradina said. “If we really piss someone off in news, that could be a problem if MTV wants to put that group on the video music awards. But we cover the news objectively, like any other news-gathering operation. I think our coverage is a lot less hype-y than ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ ”

MTV News executives point to their coverage of an incident in 1989 involving Skid Row as an example of how independently they can operate. A young viewer brought the network an amateur video of an incident in which Sebastian Bach, the leader of the heavy-metal group, had jumped into the crowd and hit a concertgoer in the face after hurling back into the audience a bottle that had been thrown at him. MTV decided to air the exclusive footage.

“They were unhappy with us,” Herzog recalled. “But it was front-page news.”

MTV News may finally arrive at the grown-ups’ table among the broadcast Establishment when it does a full-scale documentary on a topic that hits closest to home--such as the depiction of women in music videos. The subject was discussed briefly in the documentary on sex in the 1990s, and the allegation of MTV’s early avoidance of music by black performers was touched on briefly in the special on racism. But, like discussions of whether MTV has shortened the national attention span, those references slipped away quickly, and MTV turned the criticism into part of its slick, hip self-promotion.

“MTV incorporates all objections,” Loder mused. “They say, ‘You don’t like us, why don’t you say so, and we’ll put you on the air saying it--how about that?’ ”

MTV, in other words, is going about its business without much self-analysis. It will be up to more traditional news media to consider what aspects of the MTV approach, if any, they can embrace without alienating their viewers--and what aspects they should embrace if they are to continue their long-standing mandate to give the public what it needs to know and not simply what it wants to know. When it comes to future generations of news viewers, MTV News may not be the answer. But it is the question.