Under the Spreading FCC

In the first week of hearings, the FCC and CBS had tilted with polite amiability. But it was NBC's turn last week, and NBC Chairman Robert Sarnoff bristled from the start. He began by charging that, for all Newton Minow's protestations, what the FCC obviously sought was Government control of network programming. Nettled and irritated, a couple of commissioners broke in to insist that the FCC had never said any such thing. Later, at his press conference, President Kennedy himself reiterated that the FCC had no intention of "changing the basic relationship which already exists."

But Sarnoff pointed out that a bill placed before the Senate last summer, containing a provision that "activities of networks shall not adversely affect the ability of broadcast licensees to operate their stations in the public interest," was "too broad in its language." As an NBC lawyer commented privately: "The phrase 'public interest' is so wide you could drive a Mack truck through it."

"The television dial is America's most ubiquitous and frequently used voting machine," said Sarnoff. "Against this remarkably effective system of free choice, some would impose the centralized authority of government to determine what is good for the public to see and hear."

"Well, what bill do you think we should have put in?" asked FCC's Chief Counsel Ashbrook P. Bryant.

"No bill," said Sarnoff.

Sarnoff's testimony was a ringing endorsement of the status quo. The quiz scandals, he said, "were unfortunate, but they are unlikely ever to happen again." The only practical alternative to the sponsor support system that now prevails, he told the commissioners, is outright government subsidy and government control--and that is what the commission had been claiming it did not want. "I do not believe regulation can remove the thorns without serious risk of nipping the roses."

Sarnoff stoutly defended rating systems as the best way to find an audience and understand its nature. NBC Vice President Hugh Beville backed this up with the observation that viewers do not always mean what they say when they howl for culture. During a test conducted in Pittsburgh, a large majority of interviewees declared that they craved opera, philosophy lectures, etc., on the air. But virtually none of the same people had bothered to watch the opera and the philosophy lectures that had been broadcast in Pittsburgh that week. One commissioner wanted to know who had watched NBC's Sunday evening summary of the first week of the FCC hearings. Not too many people, Beville grinned--the FCC had been heavily outdrawn by ABC's Maverick and also CBS's Mr. Ed, the talking horse.

The most the commission could get out of Sarnoff was a grudging concession: "I think there are occasions when a slap on the wrist, or a little harder than that, helps. I don't object to that." Said Minow tartly: "Unless we are going to have more than slaps on the wrist, the industry is going to have to be forthcoming with some proposed changes."

TV fared less well in unofficial testimony elsewhere. In a Manhattan address, the Rev. Dr. Truman B. Douglass said: "Throughout my adult life, I have opposed censorship of ... the media of communication. But I have been forced to reconsider my position." Traveler Douglass, it turned out, had been watching TV in Thailand. "Its major offerings were such classics as The Untouchables, Gunsmoke, 77 Sunset Strip, and similar lofty expressions of American culture." Concluded Dr. Douglass: "I have come to regard the misrepresentation of American life and purposes by the movies and television as a subtler and more disastrous form of treason than the activities of a hundred professional spies and saboteurs."

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