On the Brink?

As the investigations widened and public suspicion grew, two arguments in defense of TV and allied entertainment fields, kicked up by volunteers and TV's own flashy flacks, were heard again and again: 1) plugs, payola and all that jazz have been around for a long time; 2) why pick on TV when other businesses are corrupt, too? The case was typically put last week by Newscaster Jacques Legoff of Detroit's WJBK-TV (one of the five TV stations owned by the Storer Broadcasting Co.). Legoff, who had not reported the first quiz scandal stories until three days after they broke because he "thought it would all blow over," angrily came to his industry's defense. "What about the buyers in department stores, in grocery stores? 'Buy one case of my product and you get one free. You buy my blue jeans and I'll remember you at Christmastime.' Is this not payola? Have there not been accusations of this sort in the garment industry, in any number of international unions? Payola in one form or another is a part of American business ... I say, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.' "

"Magazine Concept." For having broken a station rule against editorializing, Newscaster Legoff was promptly fired. His dismissal was scarcely an adequate answer to his argument, but answers did come from all sides. No one maintained that TV or the pop music business had a monopoly on shady practices; as the Christian Century pointed out, neither the press nor other media could afford to feel complacent.

But none of this altered what CBS President Frank Stanton described as the networks' "laxness of responsibility" in an industry that is little controlled and vastly influential. "Something has to be done before it's done to us," said Stanton, hinting at a more balanced program schedule or even at programing that the industry, possibly in an unconscious tribute, calls the "magazine concept."

"Deceptive Gloss." From the often lackadaisical FCC came the strongest pronouncement to date. Said FCC Chairman John C. Doerfer: "A failure to distinguish between the freedom to express . . . ideas and the indiscriminate hawking of wares . . . has brought the advertising and broadcasting industries to the brink of strict Government controls."

Reaching behind the widely used notion that all entertainment is built on artful deception, Doerfer warned that programs which "contain a deceptive gloss above the accepted tolerances of dramatic license" might be outlawed in the next session of Congress, since shows that lure viewers unethically are using unfair means to outdo the sponsor's commercial competitors. "If the industry does not successfully survive that crisis," concluded Chairman Doerfer, "it has no one to blame but itself."

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