Headlines from TV

Newspapermen like to complain that in reporting the news, radio and television newsmen simply buy early editions of every paper in town and read the stories on the air. But there is a pencil behind the other ear. Television shows are creating more and more newspaper headlines.

The TV headlines are most noticeable in Monday morning newspapers after Sunday's panel interview shows. Last Sunday U.S. TViewers saw and heard West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt, Argentina's President Arturo Frondizi and New Hampshire's Republican Senator Styles Bridges. Last week an estimated 15 million watched Soviet First Deputy Premier Mikoyan. What each of these men said on TV made stories for Monday's papers.

"Softest Touch." The TV headlines are a major example of one news medium complementing another. Panel-show producers shop long and hard to find a guest whose appearance will climax the week's headlines and thus stimulate new ones. For the guest stars there is a chance to reach TV mass audiences that no newspaper's circulation can match. For this opportunity, guests are willing to hold back choice news items -a practice that often arouses editors' ire but also stirs their interest, since Sunday is a dull news day, and Monday's papers are often starved for good stories. Says United Press International Washington Manager Lyle Wilson: "The public-relations business has always considered Monday morning the softest touch.''

Washington figures wise in the ways of newsmen are the most polished practitioners of the TV headline art. Ex-Teamster Boss Dave Beck first admitted his curious loans from the union on CBS's Face the Nation, thereby softening the effect when the loans were brought up later by the Senate's McClellan committee. It was on ABC's College News Conference that Democratic National Chairman Paul Butler announced that Southern segregationists might be forced out of the party.

This use of TV to reach the public and make news is spreading to other cities. New York City Controller Lawrence Gerosa last fall used a Sunday interview on WRCA's Searchlight to score the city's school-building program as being "too fast and too fancy," stirred an open row in the papers. As reporters clamored for rebuttal to Gerosa's charges, school board officials bided their time until they in turn could state their case on TV.

Unwritten Rule. Although most editors use wire-service stories of Sunday network TV shows, many are still sensitive about acknowledging that the news in their pages originated on TV. When the Fort Worth Star-Telegram printed its story on Mikoyan's TV interview, it omitted the name of the program on which he appeared, and that of the broadcasting company (NBC's Meet the Press). Editors are particularly pained at picking up news stories developed by local TV stations. In Chicago some rewritemen still invoke the old unwritten city-room rule to omit the names of the show and the station on which a local TV newsbeat originated.

But it is the rare newspaper editor who turns down a news story because it came from television. While TV's day-to-day coverage of news is fleeting and its documentaries often ponderous, its Sunday interviews have found an important niche.

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