COLUMN ONE : News With Impact? It’s Simple : Why do some stories, many of little importance, grab the public’s attention while more consequential reports get little notice? Many elements come into play, but simplicity is a key ingredient.

Last November, “60 Minutes” reported that the likelihood of a middle-aged, American male dying of a heart attack is “three times greater than (for) a Frenchman of the same age,” even though the French “eat 30% more fat than we do . . . smoke more and exercise less.”

Why?

It may well be because the average Frenchman drinks 10 times more wine--mostly red wine--than does the average American; as Morley Safer, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, said, “For years . . . doctors in many countries (have believed) that alcohol--in particular, red wine--reduces the risk of heart disease.”

Radio talk shows from coast to cholesterol-clogged coast immediately picked up the “60 Minutes” story. Accounts of it also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Atlanta Constitution and scores of other newspapers.

In the first month after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, supermarket sales of red wine--which had been flat for several years--increased 46% over the same period the previous year, according to Infoscan data from Information Resources Inc. in San Francisco. Over the next seven months, red wine sales continued to increase--by 37% over the previous year--and in July, when the “60 Minutes” program was rebroadcast, sales jumped even more: up 49% over the same month in 1991.

Why did this one story have such a dramatic and instantaneous impact on the viewing, reading, eating, drinking public? Why does any story have impact, for that matter--and why do other stories, sometimes more important stories, have little impact, delayed impact or no impact at all?

The answers to these questions involve a whole range of social, political and journalistic elements: Timing. Complexity. Believability. Television. Radio talk shows. Existing preconceptions and stereotypes. The stature and location of the news organization breaking a given story. The presence (or absence) of heroes, villains and other recognizable characters in the story. The presence (or absence) of personal resonance with readers and viewers.

The impact of some stories is readily explicable. They’re what Carl Jensen, a professor of communications studies at Sonoma State University, calls “junk food news”: Gossip. Sex. Sensationalism. Conflict. Novelty. The antics of the rich and famous.

So: Vice President Dan Quayle and “Murphy Brown.” Princess Di. Nancy Reagan’s astrologer. Johnny Carson’s retirement. The Elvis Presley stamp. Any politician’s (alleged) philandering.

These stories are easy to report and easy to understand; they titillate without taxing.

But some stories have more impact than other seemingly very similar stories, whether the stories are titillating or taxing or both.

Example: Why did stories about alleged extramarital affairs knock Gary Hart out of the presidential race in 1988 and threaten to do the same to Bill Clinton early this year, while similar rumors about President Bush were long ignored and--when finally brought into the open in August--disappeared faster than you can say “Jennifer Fitzgerald”?

Example: When Michigan Gov. George Romney said, in 1968, that he’d been “brainwashed” about Vietnam, widespread news media coverage of the comment killed his presidential candidacy almost instantly. A similar fate befell President Gerald Ford in 1976 when he said: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” But there have been several, far more damning stories about Clinton this year, and--despite widespread complaints about the impact of negative campaigning and the increased power of the press--he still won the Democratic presidential nomination and leads President Bush in the polls nine days before Election Day.

Example: The disclosure that more than 300 members of the House of Representatives had written checks for which they had insufficient funds on deposit at the House bank so outraged the American public that by the time the next Congress convenes, more than 100 members of the last Congress--a record number--will have lost their seats in elections or will have chosen not to run again, a significant number of them largely because of that one issue.

But this “scandal” was little more than an abused congressional perk that had no significant, direct effect on the average citizen’s pocketbook. The House “bank” wasn’t really a bank; the money involved all belonged to other congressmen, who were, in effect, subsidizing each others’ overdrafts. No taxpayer funds were at risk. No one was accused of breaking the law. The House “bank” simply did for House members what many traditional banks do for favored customers--it temporarily covered overdrafts at no charge.

“You should see what goes on in my bank account,” says Seymour Hersh, the author and former New York Times reporter. “I have a wonderful relationship with my banker. If I’m overdrawn, they call me and I say: ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll get some money over there as soon as possible.’ ”

What many House members did with their “bank” was wrong, but it wasn’t Watergate revisited; it was--or should have been--”a nothing story,” Hersh says, and many others agree with him.

By contrast, the virtual collapse of the nation’s savings and loan industry is “one of the greatest heists of all time, a broad, wide and deep conspiracy that virtually everyone in this country will be paying for for a long, long time,” in the words of Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor for “The CBS Evening News.”

The ultimate cost to taxpayers of the S & L scandal is estimated in some quarters at $500 billion--which is probably 500,000 times more money than was involved in all the House overdrafts combined. But no elected officials have been thrown out of office over the S & L catastrophe--although it probably did help force Sen. Alan Cranston (D.-Calif.) into retirement--and it took several years after the first S&L; stories broke before most people began to pay even the slightest attention to it.

A 1990 survey by the Times Mirror Center for The People and The Press found that only 18% of the American people were “closely following” news of the S&L; crisis.

Why?

In an effort to analyze the puzzling phenomenon of high-impact versus low-impact and no-impact stories, a Times reporter recently examined news media coverage of more than 60 issues and events over the last two decades and interviewed more than 80 newspaper, television and newsmagazine reporters and editors, social psychologists and journalism researchers.

The results of this inquiry yielded almost as many explanations as there are examples of the phenomenon.

The quick, strong reaction to the “60 Minutes” story on red wine seeming to prevent heart disease is probably the easiest to explain, and it offers a number of principles that are applicable to a wide range of stories.

The so-called French Paradox was originally reported 18 months before the “60 Minutes” broadcast, in a lengthy article in the Sausalito-based magazine In Health. The San Francisco Chronicle republished it at the time, and the Los Angeles Times printed about half of it five months later. A few other papers also mentioned the essential findings reported in the story.

None of this media attention seemed to generate much public interest.

That’s not surprising. Only a very few news organizations--most notably the New York Times, the Washington Post and the major television networks--consistently demonstrate the power to help set the nation’s agenda, to move the minds and hearts of large numbers of decision-makers.

On certain kinds of stories, “60 Minutes” may be the biggest mover of all.

“60 Minutes” is one of the most popular programs in television history, a unique blend of news and entertainment, presented by veteran correspondents who have attracted a large and loyal following--33.7 million of whom were watching on the night of “The French Paradox” (which made it the top-rated TV show in the country that week).

The story was perfect for “60 Minutes”--a serious subject, of widespread personal interest, given a relatively lighthearted, even mischievous treatment: There sat Morley Safer, on camera, talking about life and death while feasting in a restaurant in Lyon, France.

In addition, the “60 Minutes” story had just about everything it takes to provoke a strong public response:

* The essence of the story was simple. As Safer explained it, the chemical composition of red wine enables it to flush away the small blood cells (called platelets) that “cling to rough fatty deposits on the artery walls, clogging and finally blocking the artery and causing a heart attack.” (In a controversial move, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms last week authorized a Napa Valley winery to put six paragraphs from the “60 Minutes” broadcast on a tag that will fit around the neck of its bottles, telling consumers that moderate red wine consumption “reduces the risk of heart disease.”)

* Authoritative experts--French and American medical researchers interviewed by Safer, on camera--made strong, clear statements supporting Safer’s report. (Dr. Serge Renaud of Lyons Centre: “There is no other drug that’s been so efficient (in preventing heart disease) as a moderate intake of alcohol.”)

* In the current health-conscious, neo-Prohibitionist climate, when some people seem to worry that a sip of wine and a bite of cheese could shorten their life span (and that of their children and their children’s children) by at least 27 nanoseconds, this story ran contrary to conventional wisdom; since few people actually enjoy self-denial, the story told folks, in effect, what they wanted to hear--”You can eat, drink, be merry and live longer. Abstinence does not make the heart grow stronger.”

On the other hand, another high-impact story--the clash between law professor Anita Hill and U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during last fall’s U.S. Senate confirmation hearings--did not make people feel good in the same way; indeed, it seemed to make everyone, including partisans on both sides, very angry. But it, too, was a story that had everything required to guarantee enormous public impact: Sex. Race. Politics. Conflict. Live television.

Stories like these two are rare, though. When a newspaper or magazine or television station--or some combination of these media--breaks a potentially significant story, its ultimate impact is generally dependent on three sets of reactions:

* Do other major media pick up the story and extend both its reach and its life?

* Do social and political institutions respond--with an investigation, say, if the initial story alleges wrongdoing?

* Does the public at-large become caught up in the story?

Often it takes the first of these to trigger the second--and both combined to trigger the third. But with the red wine/heart disease and Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill stories--and the House banking story as well--public response was instantaneous. There was widespread news media interest in all three, and there was an official investigation in the latter two, but all three stories spoke directly, viscerally, to the average citizen.

Regardless of what or whom you believed in any of these three stories, they were all essentially simple to understand.

“I don’t think you should ever underestimate the importance of simplicity--simplicity for journalists and simplicity for the audience,” says David Paletz, professor of political science at Duke University.

Simple stories are easily told, easily understood and far more likely to have impact than complex stories. After all, it’s difficult to shake your finger when you’re busy scratching your head.

The House banking story, at least on the surface, was an especially simple story--”a sexy election year story,” in the words of Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes.” “It deals in bounced checks at a time of a lousy economy. It’s so easy. There’s no real investigation involved. It’s a cluck-cluck-cluck scandal.

“It’s a story, but it’s sure not worth the attention paid it.”

Personal relevance--resonance with a reader’s or viewer’s own life--is the single most important factor in determining the impact a story is likely to have, according to most people interviewed by The Times. And the House banking story certainly had resonance with most people’s lives.

Most people write checks. Most people know they can’t do so unless they have money in the bank to cover those checks.

“When you read that the politicians are not being held to the same moral standard that the rest of us are, it creates some outrage,” says Lynn Kahle, a University of Oregon professor of consumer behavior who specializes in the study of changing values and attitudes.

Indeed, Kahle says, in the psychology of the news receiver, “the single most important factor is the extent to which (information) . . . resonates with some clearly held values.”

In the House banking scandal, the audience’s mantra quickly became: “If House members can’t balance their own checkbooks, how can they be trusted to balance the nation’s checkbook?”

The media contributed significantly to this perception--actually a misperception--by using terms like “bounced” checks and “check-kiting.” That was “sloppy nomenclature,” in the words of Roll Call, the weekly Capitol Hill newspaper that broke the House banking story in September, 1991.

With very few exceptions, the House check-writers didn’t really “bounce” or “kite” checks; it was the policy of the bank to cover such checks until the legislator’s next payday. Thus, what the House member generally did was write overdrafts, a practice that is lazy, careless, even abusive if carried to extremes (as some did), but it is not illegal, “not necessarily even improper,” Roll Call argued in an editorial in which it pleaded guilty to “blithely throwing around terms” that were inaccurate and unfair.

“To us, the story is a small group of members screwing a larger group of members,” says James Glassman, editor of Roll Call. “What this story is really about is a bunch of guys . . . keeping large balances and not earning any interest on those balances, and those balances being used to, in effect, subsidize a fairly small number of people who were writing overdrafts left and right.

“But this is not a story about massive corruption in Congress.”

Interestingly, Roll Call first wrote about House bank overdrafts three years earlier, but no one seemed to care. The Washington Post also did a story on the issue, in 1990. No one seemed to care then either. Even when Roll Call made the story its lead story on Page 1 this time, in September, 1991, the Post initially shrugged it off with a relatively short story on Page 25, the page reserved for news primarily of interest to federal government employees.

But USA Today put the story on Page 1 immediately, and both the Post and the Washington Times subsequently did so several times. Radio talk shows nationwide were besieged with calls almost instantly. Comedians on late-night television shows quickly realized that they had been given their best natural material this side of Quayle.

Each of these forums played a different role. Synergistically, they propelled an inside-Washington story into a national scandal almost overnight.

The Post is the hometown paper in Washington, a powerful agenda-setter that is widely read by bureaucrats and the public. The Washington Times often takes a predictably conservative approach to the news, and in an election year, with the Democrats’ longtime control of Congress a major issue, its treatment of the story--six articles, three of them on Page 1, in the first two weeks--helped cast it in partisan terms that alerted conservative activists and conservative talk show hosts to the story’s political potential.

USA Today is, in many ways, a print version of television, and while many in the ivory tower of Serious Journalism scoff at the paper’s glitzy graphics, short stories and frequently superficial approach to the news (headline at the top of Page 1 late last month: “Experts moo-ve to back milk’s benefits”), the paper often has a sensitive finger on the public pulse. It also has an average circulation, Monday through Friday, of almost 2 million and an estimated readership of almost 6 million, the largest of any daily newspaper in the country.

The role of radio and television talk shows and television comedy shows in this explosion was the most critical, though. These “new media”--hybrids that are more entertainment than news--have become major players in the national political arena, vital links in a rapidly evolving journalistic food chain.

Ross Perot announced his original presidential candidacy on “Larry King Live.” Clinton answered questions on “Donahue” and played the saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” President Bush gave a live, nationally broadcast interview to Rush Limbaugh.

Almost 60% of the American public “regularly or at least sometimes look in on” such programs as “The Tonight Show, “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “Late Night With David Letterman” or “Saturday Night Live,” according to a survey by the Times Mirror Center.

Such shows “have a lot to do with the political culture” and the impact some stories have on the general public,” says Albert Hunt, Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

TV comedians can both raise public awareness of an issue and permanently stigmatize certain miscreants; in the court of public opinion, it’s often easier to survive serious scrutiny on an editorial page or in a congressional hearing room than it is to survive scorn and sarcasm from a skillful comedian--as President Ford learned to his great embarrassment at the hands of Chevy Chase.

Hosts of radio talk shows can have even greater impact on their listeners. They can be both derisive toward their subjects and directly--personally--sympathetic to their listeners.

There are now more than 600 radio stations airing talk shows exclusively; that’s triple the number a decade ago, and it doesn’t include many other stations that include talk shows along with other formats. More than 40% of the American public now listens to such shows, according to the survey by the Times Mirror Center.

Listeners to these shows feel they are speaking--and listening--to someone who genuinely cares what they think and who is instantly accessible, a mere phone call away. When people are really angry, the cumulative impact can be extraordinary.

This impact was first felt on a nationwide scale in 1988, when more than 40 talk show hosts banded together and urged listeners to protest a proposed congressional pay raise. Listener response was so ferociously indignant that Congress backed off.

Radio talk shows “contributed mightily to setting the agenda” on the House banking and congressional pay raise stories, says Dan Rather of CBS. “A legitimate case could be argued that neither . . . would have made much of a splash in the papers, much less on television, had it not been for talk shows.”

Growing public disenchantment with the political process and the people who operate it made organized protest unnecessary with the House banking scandal.

“As in sex, timing is everything in journalism,” says Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek.

Dramatic changes in the sociopolitical climate “help determine what we focus our attention on,” says Robert Maynard, editor and publisher of the Oakland Tribune. These changes, often triggered by “some transcendent event, make it possible to write stories that would not have been written before or, if written, might have gone virtually unnoticed.”

Watergate, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings and the Gary Hart/Donna Rice affair were such events, Maynard says, in that they made possible subsequent stories on massive corruption in the federal government, sexual harassment and the sex lives of presidential candidates.

In the case of the House banking scandal, there was no single event but a concatenation of events, over time, that eroded public confidence in government and “raised the temperature on the political thermometer high enough to change the basic climate of receptivity” for that story, Maynard says.

As public opinion polls clearly show, most Americans are now disgusted with the people who run the government. That’s why proposals to limit the terms of senators and representatives are now on the ballots in 14 states. That’s also why Perot’s initial presidential candidacy triggered such a surprising level of support--and why, once many people decided he wasn’t the white knight after all, he plummeted so precipitously in the polls and, when he first returned to the race, encountered “overwhelming hostility” from voters, according to a New York Times poll.

When his performance in the presidential debates impressed many voters anew, his poll numbers began to grow again.

Thus, the House banking story “meshed very closely with what appears to be a popular mood in the country about politicians and their unwillingness to confront real problems and their readiness to take a free ride,” says Joseph Lelyveld, managing editor of the New York Times. The House banking scandal “became a kind of cartoon, symbolic of larger meanings.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that the news media’s ability to influence the public--to set the public’s agenda--is “contingent on the audience’s pre-existing issue sensitivities,” in the words of one such study, by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.

The subtext of a given story, Ted Koppel of “Nightline” once said, is “the fertile ground in which a story is planted.” In the right soil, with enough journalistic and political rain, a story “grows explosively, like Jack’s beanstalk.”

That helps explain the impact of not only the House banking scandal but also of Gov. Romney’s 1968 comment about having been “brainwashed” and President Ford’s premature, 1976 “liberation” of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination during his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter: Romney was already thought to lack sufficient foreign policy experience to be President, and Ford was widely derided as lacking the necessary brainpower to be President. The gaffes these two men made only confirmed those judgments and doomed their candidacies.

Vice President Quayle’s misspelling of “potato” last summer--and his various other verbal missteps over the past four years--played into a similar perception about his lack of intelligence; as a result, it received much more media and public attention than would have attended a comparable comment by another politician whose basic intelligence had not been widely questioned.

Similarly, rumors about philandering by Hart and Clinton had been bruited about in political and journalistic circles long before Hart was found spending the night with Donna Rice or Clinton was accused by Flowers of having conducted a 12-year affair with her. Moreover, both men were young, attractive and products of the liberated 1960s, and both had acknowledged past marital difficulties. All those characteristics--combined with the old rumors and the new evidence--made charges of philandering seem eminently plausible to many.

There was no such preconception about Bush, a conservative elder statesman who has been married to the same woman for more than 40 years, with no public hint of unhappiness. Not only was there no evidence--no photos, no public accusations, no public trysts, no smoking bimbo--but most Americans seem to feel that Bush having an extramarital affair would be “inherently improbable. . . . It doesn’t go with the personality,” says William F. Buckley, a columnist and an author.

Or, as Wallace puts it: “He doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would spend a dirty weekend some place.”

Plausibility--believability--is a crucial determining factor in public acceptance of any story. What sociologist Herbert Gans of Columbia University calls “unbelievable news”--news that skeptical journalists and average citizens are dubious about in the first place--tends to perish without impact, if it is reported at all.

Both Watergate and the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam took a long time to reach critical mass in the public consciousness in part for that reason. In those more innocent days, few could believe that United States soldiers had brutally massacred innocent men, women and children. Nor could they believe that members of the White House staff had orchestrated a burglary of Democratic Party headquarters--and that the President had participated in a massive cover-up of the crime.

Moreover, in Bush’s case, his almost 30 years in public life--more than half of them on the national and international stages--have made him a largely known quantity among readers, viewers and voters. Hart and Clinton, much newer to the national scene and much less well-known, were thus more vulnerable to questions about their character.

But it’s the media who ask these questions--and who decide how much attention to give the answers, which stories to cover and not to cover, which stories to put on Page 1 and at the beginning of the evening newscasts.

Do editors and television news directors really know what their readers are interested in? How big a role do such factors as bias and ignorance play in their decisions--and in the ultimate impact a story has?

Peter Johnson of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.

What They Said About the House Banking Story

MIKE WALLACE, “60 Minutes” : It is an especially simple story--”a sexy election year story . . . It deals in bounced checks at a time of a lousy economy. It’s so easy. There’s no real investigation involved. It’s a cluck-cluck-cluck scandal. . . . It’s a story, but it’s sure not worth the attention paid it.”

JAMES GLASSMAN, editor, Roll Call : “To us, the story is a small group of members screwing a larger group of members. . . . keeping large balances and not earning any interest on those balances . . . to, in effect, subsidize a fairly small number of people who were writing overdrafts left and right. But this is not a story about massive corruption in Congress.”

JOSEPH LELYVELD, managing editor, New York Times : It “meshed very closely with what appears to be a popular mood in the country about politicians and their unwillingness to confront real problems and their readiness to take a free ride . . . The House banking scandal became a kind of cartoon, symbolic of larger meanings.”

LYNN KAHLE, professor of consumer behavior, University of Oregon : “When you read that the politicians are not being held to the same moral standard that the rest of us are, it creates some outrage. . . . The single most important factor is the extent to which (information) . . . resonates with some clearly held values.”

Stories With Impact

When a newspaper or magazine or television station discloses a potentially significant story, its ultimate impact generally depends on:

* Whether other media pick up the story

* Whether institutions respond

* Whether the public becomes caught up

Here are examples of high-impact, delayed-impact and no-impact news stories:

HIGH IMPACT

Red Wine and Heart Disease: The French Paradox: Eat, drink, be merry and live longer. News certain to attract attention.

House Banking Scandal: “If they can’t balance their own checkbooks, how can they be trusted to balance the nation’s checkbook?”

Bill Clinton/Gennifer Flowers: Take an attractive candidate with “problems in his marriage,” add a young woman who announces in a supermarket tabloid that she had a long affair with him, you have A Big Story.

Congressional Pay Raise, 1988: Congress passes pay raise. Radio talk show hosts organize. Listeners call in and write. Congress rescinds the pay raise.

Elvis Presley Stamp: Only the Post Office could bring the King back from the dead and put him on Page 1 of newspapers from coast to coast.

Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill: The story that had everything: Sex. Race. Politics. Conflict. Live Television.

DELAYED/DIMINISHED IMPACT

Watergate: A third-rate burglary long given third-rate coverage by most of the media, except for the Washington Post.

Iran/Contra: The President was detached. The vice president was out of the loop. A small publication in Beirut got the story started.

Iraqgate: “What We Gave Saddam for Christmas”--before the Gulf War--and why the public doesn’t seem to care.

S&L; Crisis: Why did the national press blow the biggest financial debacle in American history?

Negative Political Ads: Negative campaigning was effective--and widely criticized in 1988; this year, voters are so disenchanted with politicians that they assume all politicians are bad, and little attention is being paid to negative ads.

NO/LOW IMPACT

Reagan’s Teflon Presidency: He was so popular--and the media was so unpopular--that stories on his verbal gaffes, failed policies and detached management style didn’t tarnish his image.

George Bush’s Alleged Infidelity: There was no smoking bimbo and, besides, George Herbert Walker Bush just doesn’t look like the kind of guy who would spend a dirty weekend somewhere.

Post-War Analysis of Gulf War: The smart bombs weren’t so smart. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf got snookered. Who cares. We won, didn’t we?

Pentagon Overspending: Pictures of the secretary of Defense with a toilet seat for which the Pentagon paid $435 galvanized public resentment after years of stories had little impact.

The Federal Deficit: It may be the biggest crisis facing the country, but it’s just too big and too complex for most people to understand.