The Moose & the Moneymen

Strikes, like rashes, come and go, but there is a malaise in the TV industry that lingers on: the feverish pursuit of profits at the expense of public service. In a new book, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control* former CBS News President Fred Friendly takes the TV pulse and finds it weak indeed.

Three years ago, when Friendly, now 52, was appointed head of the CBS news division, Board Chairman William Paley told him: "You have in your hands the most sacred trust that CBS has. Your job is to keep CBS news holy." That was asking a lot, even of Friendly, whose view of his role as TV's public-service prophet had always been relentlessly messianic. Television, as he said, "can make so much money doing its worst that it cannot afford to do its best." Inevitably, the headstrong "Big Moose," as Friendly was known around CBS, locked horns with the network's money managers. The result was his resignation 13 months ago because the company refused to carry gavel-to-gavel sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Viet Nam. Since then, he has become a professor of broadcast journalism at Columbia University and TV consultant to the Ford Foundation.

Ambivalence. With more regret than bitterness, he traces his frustrating uphill campaign to further TV journalism. His contributions, most notably as co-producer with Edward R. Murrow of See It Now and CBS Reports, were considerable--although Friendly spoils his case with perhaps too much self-congratulation. Nevertheless, he does lay out forthrightly the broadcasting industry's ambivalence on commercial questions. The problem was brusquely summed up by former CBS President James Aubrey, who told Friendly: "In this adversary system, you and I are always going to be at each other's throats. They say to me: Take your soiled little hands, get the ratings and make as much money as you can.' They say to you: Take your lily-white hands, do your best, go the high road and bring us prestige.' "

The crucial questions today, says Friendly, are "What is enough profit?" and, conversely, "What is enough public service?" He confesses that he does not know the answers, although there is plenty of evidence that profits are winning, soiled hands down. The three networks alone devote 17% of air time to commercials and that, says Friendly, "is one reason why Americans know more about detergents and bleaches than they do about Viet Nam or Watts."

Product v. Facilities. That, of course, may be true of only those few people who get their news solely from television. But if Friendly is right about television's failure, who is to blame? Friendly pictures Chairman Paley and CBS President Frank Stanton as victims of "the system," which forces them "to react more to financial pressure than to their own taste and sense of responsibility." Friendly is too friendly. The fact is that "the system" is the creature of its leaders, just as it is in the magazine and newspaper field. The difference is that commercial broadcasting long ago handed control of the air over to sponsors, who, after all, are looking for sales and--with a few notable exceptions (Gulf, Xerox, Hallmark)--demand low-grade entertainment and avoidance of controversy. Had broadcasting leadership stood its ground and made its product--rather than its facilities--attractive to sponsors, Friendly would have had a different and happier story to tell.

Perhaps the only answer now lies in some form of public, noncommercial television, as advocated by the Carnegie Report (TIME, Feb. 3) and the Ford Foundation. That, says Friendly, could be "a people's dividend," not just for the 41,000 network shareowners, but for those whom Friendly calls "the other 195 million citizens who grant CBS and the other broadcasters the franchise to use their air."

* Random House; 325 pages; $6.95.

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