ASHINGTON - Of all the noteworthy aspects of this presidential campaign, one of the most intriguing is the quiet revolution in the way that news is reaching us.
''There is no dominant media'' in Campaign 2000, says pollster Peter Hart. ''The voters are getting a whole bunch of stuff from a whole bunch of sources.''
''World News Tonight.'' ''The Early Show.'' The New York Times. Leno and Letterman. Time and Newsweek. Yahoo. Oprah. The New Yorker. Doonesbury. Limbaugh. Comedy Central. Koppel. The Discovery Channel. CNN. News at 11. AOL.
''It's a kaleidoscope,'' says Andrew Kohut, the director of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. ''It all kind of leaches into the system, like a virus.''
The ''Today'' show is on in the background as we get dressed. We scan the morning paper while listening to National Public Radio at breakfast. Don Imus provides the noise for our drive to work. Netscape flashes headlines from our work-station computer. Rush Limbaugh is on in the lunchroom. We hear political chatter when we turn on local news for the weather and sports at night. While channel surfing, we pause with Dan Rather or Larry King, or check out MTV. Bill Maher or the crew at ''Saturday Night Live'' sum up the day's events.
For news junkies and political gluttons, today's media offer a rich buffet. For campaign professionals, it's a scattered puzzle. For the average voter, it can be a liberating, if sometimes baffling, experience. The sound bites are shorter. As likely as not, the news comes wrapped as entertainment. It's a campaign charted by mouse and remote control.
''There are different information patterns across different tiers of voters,'' says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. The sheer variety of media outlets allows voters to ''plug in and out, with 24-hour access.''
As new technologies take hold, ''the overall media landscape has been drastically altered ... [and] new patterns of news consumption are emerging,'' Kohut concluded after polling 3,000 Americans in May.
The networks
The fall from predominance of yesterday's titans - the big three broadcasting networks - is an ongoing saga in national politics. It is expected to reach a memorable milestone sometime this year when the total cable TV audience surpasses the total broadcasting audience for the first time, according to analysts at the Veronis Suhler merchant bank, which specializes in media investments.
Certainly the ratings success of the shows ''Survivor'' and ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'' and record-setting news events like Barbara Walters's interview with Monica Lewinsky demonstrate that the networks haven't totally lost their bite.
But gone are the days when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and his counterparts at ABC or NBC could command 75 percent of the national audience each night, when a president like Lyndon B. Johnson could declare he had ''lost'' the American people's support for the Vietnam War because Cronkite turned against it.
Gone is the era when a shrewd image-meister like Michael Deaver could hold daily staff meetings in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, crafting a visually appealing ''message of the day'' for President Reagan, and shaping the national debate by feeding it to the network news.
The network evening news audience has shrunk to some 25 million - less than 50 percent - of the viewing public today. Young people, especially young men, are absent in droves: Only 17 percent of those under age 30 watch the nightly network news on a regular basis, a pattern that repeats itself with local news shows, according to the Pew center.
It's not just the news teams that suffer: The final broadcast of ''Seinfeld,'' in 1998, was ''the most talked about program in a decade,'' notes The New York Times Almanac, yet drew only half the audience of a regular weekly episode of the corny sitcom ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' from the mid-1960s.
The networks have responded to the collapse of their ratings by cutting back political coverage, as was obvious during the primaries and national conventions. There were 22 debates during this year's presidential primaries and CBS ''couldn't find the time or the news judgment to carry a single one,'' gripes media critic Paul Taylor.
Cable
If indeed the network anchormen have been knocked from their perch, they have not been replaced by a single strong contender. CNN made the worst kind of news this summer when it fired president Rick Kaplan because of the network's dismal ratings. Without a huge news event, like the O.J. Simpson trial or the Gulf War, Cable News Network and its cable counterparts suffer.
CNN can still pull in 4 million or 5 million people when the news is stark and breathless and Americans need an instant fix, but the all-news network's regular daily viewership shrank to an embarrassing average of 220,000 in May, not much more than rivals Fox News, MSNBC, or CNBC.
Although the total cable audience is huge, it is chopped into dozens of tiny parts, minimizing its impact. Critics may love HBO shows like ''The Sopranos'' but only 35 million Americans even get HBO, and less than a fourth of those (6.5 million, on average, or about 2 percent of all Americans) tune in to watch Tony and the gang.
''The dirty little secret is that CNN's prime-time ratings are about the same, or worse, than they were before the Gulf War - roughly the same as ABC at 3 a.m.,'' says Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a media think tank. ''And MSNBC and Fox are even smaller.''
The Internet
The World Wide Web is one of the fastest-growing sources of news, especially for younger and better-educated Americans, but it is still a raw new industry, with layoffs and failures and little or no journalistic tradition.
When asked to name their primary sources of election news, about 6 percent of Americans name the Internet, according to Pew. That is triple the audience of 1996.
One out of four Americans glean at least some campaign news online. As of last year, the Veronis Suhler analysts say, the average American spent more time on the Internet than reading a book. In the next year or so, they report, Internet use will surpass newspapers.
The medium is still on its shakedown cruise, however, and not yet ready to assume the duties and prestige of the Old Media. Ballyhooed news and entertainment sites like Salon magazine, the Pseudo online video network, Shockwave.com, and APBnews.
com have closed their doors or announced layoffs in recent weeks. The most popular and successful Web-based news sites - Yahoo, AOL, Netscape - are short on original content and happy to reproduce standard wire service copy, especially that of Reuters, which is, notes Rosenstiel, ''a 149-year-old British wire service.''
The press
The newspaper industry appears to have weathered the threat posed by television, and many of the nation's leading newspaper companies are among the most successful media in making the transition to the Web.
''Reports of the death of newspapers at the hands of the Internet remain greatly exaggerated,'' according to Veronis Suhler. ''Magazine publishers, newspapers, and television networks have established sophisticated Web sites and begun to capture significant advertising revenue online.'' More than 1,100 daily newspapers are now online, many ''bidding to become regional information portals.''
Yet overall circulation is still down and heading downward, and the number of young Americans who read a daily newspaper is at a dismal low. When asked if they had read a newspaper in the last day, more than 70 percent of those under 30 say ''no.''
And so, overall, the words analysts use to describe the media's audience are ''hybrid'' and ''multitasking'' and ''fragmented.'' Americans sample news like they squeeze produce at the grocery store.
Take the phenomenon known as ''The Kiss'' - the one Al Gore gave his wife, Tipper, at the Democratic convention. The unusual passion of that smooch was immediately spotted by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, and reported by the next day's Times and the Associated Press. The Washington Post published a photograph; the ''Today'' show devoted a segment to the smooch on Friday morning; Times columnist Maureen Dowd flagged it again on Sunday; on Monday it was on all the morning news shows, and by Monday night Jay Leno was building a monologue around it.
The actual audiences for this kiss - or for Bush's coarse ''major league'' comment - were far too small to account for their impact. But via reverberation, somehow the word got out. Says pollster Hart, ''People didn't watch the conventions in great numbers, but everybody got it through secondary media.''
It isn't just frivolity that seeps through. Though the networks carried very little of the conventions live, Jamieson's researchers discovered that Americans came away from the overall media attention with significant knowledge about the leading candidates and their positions on the issues. The presidential debates are expected to fuel that process.
The campaign junkies can indulge themselves, 24-7, with Chris Matthews or C-SPAN. The good citizen can stay reasonably educated with ABC's Peter Jennings and the local newspaper. Even those who shun politics can pick up enough broad impressions - Patrick Buchanan is a zealot, George W. Bush is short on experience, Al Gore is wooden - to make a modestly informed vote.
If the presidential campaign has seemed to arrive in the home in stuttered fits and starts this year, it is no accident. ''This is not a typical election,'' says Hart. ''It is episodic, rather than thematic.''
