Press: Kid Vid News

Son of 60 Minutes hits CBS

After undermining the taste, intelligence and dental hygiene of American children every Saturday morning for a generation, commercial television may have discovered a way to make amends: news for kids. In recent years the networks have been experimenting with various brief news updates and didactic entertainment specials for younger viewers.* But so far, TV has produced nothing for children quite so grown up as CBS's newborn 30 Minutes.

As the name implies, the show is a junior version of the network's hard-punching weekly magazine-format program, 60 Minutes. It stars a couple of full-fledged CBS News correspondents, Betsy Aaron, 39, and Christopher Glenn, 40, who comb the country in search of stories that might interest teenagers and preteens—just as Dan Rather, Morley Safer and Mike Wallace do for adults. With slightly less success—at least from the looks of last Saturday's first 30 Minutes, which included rather pedestrian film reports on acne treatment and the plight of a justifiably obscure rock band trying to bust onto the charts. Things may pick up a bit, though. The next scheduled offering, for example, includes a harrowing look at juvenile offenders trying to survive in an adult maximum-security prison and a zany profile of the mostly middle-aged men who put out Mad magazine. Future subjects sound promising too: football injuries, school censorship of dirty words, teen-age pregnancy, cheerleading, how rock concerts damage eardrums.

Each 30 Minutes has two such reports, plus a few minutes of legal advice from a children's rights lawyer on such topics as whether the principal can search your locker without your permission (yes) and how to return a defective product (fast). "We don't approach these stories any differently than if we were shooting them for the Evening News," says Correspondent Aaron. Adds Glenn: "There never has been anything [on TV] that says, 'We're taking stories that are of interest to your age group and giving them a journalism job.' " CBS is not helping that job much by burying 30 Minutes in the suicidal 1:30 p.m. (E.D.T.) Saturday time slot opposite the N.C.A.A. game of the week. But then, growing up never was supposed to be easy, for children or networks. ∎