Being Kind to the Competition

NEWSPAPERS Being Kind to the Competition Even on the dullest day of the mid summer doldrums, the Dallas morning News would not be expected to report the fact that its evening competitor, the Times-Herald, planned to cover basketball games next winter. But that was exactly what the Dallas News did, in June, for ABC-TV. SPORTS COVERAGE EXPANDED, announced the News, over a story reporting ABC's plans to televise 16 basketball games come January 1965.

Nor could the New York Herald Trib une, hatching plans to cover the current race troubles in the South, expect its enterprise to rate a news spread in the New York Daily News. Nevertheless, a spread in the Daily News was just what some other News competition got. TV EYES MISSISSIPPI, read the Daily News's headline, above a report that NBC was programing on-the-spot reports from Philadelphia, Miss.

Fan-Club Fidelity. These were not isolated examples of a U.S. newspaper tendency to treat television news coverage as if the coverage itself were news. Jack Gould, the New York Times's TV critic, systematically lumps TV newscasts in with Dr. Kildare, and gives both the same sort of critical going-over. After last month's conference of state governors in Cleveland, Plain Dealer TV Columnist Bert J.

Reesing praised the city's radio and TV stations for "an exemplary piece of work." But the Plain Dealer had noth ing to say, one way or another, about the performance of its own reporters --or, for that matter, of those on Cleveland's other daily, the Press.

The appearances and disappearances of TV newscasters are logged by the press with a fan-club fidelity usually reserved for grease paint performers--which perhaps they are. Thus when NBC, eying San Francisco, decided to backstop its top news team of Chet Huntley and Dave Brinkley with another duo, the New York Times duly recorded their names: Ray Scherer and Nancy Dickerson. And when Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. signed Novelist-Playwright Gore Vidal to report both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, the Times gave Vidal's assignment headline prominence--meanwhile leaving unmentioned the names of several dozen experienced Timesmen who are likely to do a better job at San Francisco.

Generous Attention. It was not as if the country's press needed any reminder that television is a fiercely competitive news medium. "I like the nationwide audience and all that," said Allan Rusten, press chief for the G.O.P.'s Platform Committee, "but I feel like I'm being strangled in TV cables." TV sound trucks ringed San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel like enemy tanks, and such was the TV-induced congestion that one city cop had to borrow a TV crane to regulate traffic (see cut). But the moral was apparently lost on the country's newspapers, where page after gift-page reflected TV's ambition to hog the San Francisco show.

The Chicago News devoted twelve column inches to NBC's plan to use ultraviolet-light transmitters in the Cow Palace. THE BATTLE OF COMPUTERS: A TV THRILLER, headlined the Detroit Free Press. In New York, under a no-surprise headline--NETWORK CARAVANS CARRY TV GADGETS AND MEN TO COAST G.O.P. RALLY--the Times totted up the logistics of the move: 1,500 TV hands, nearly 50 miles of cable for NBC alone.

Newspapers justify such generous attention to TV's news function on rather curious grounds. "A news event on TV is just another TV program," says Detroit News TV Columnist Frank Judge, who thinks more televiewers should watch the news and encourages News readers to do just that. Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler is even more unselfish. "I'm the first to admit that TV news is very good here," says Chandler. "But just because television is a good competitor is no reason for reducing your coverage."

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