Red-Letter Days for NBC

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Moscow reports suit the Soviets, the White House and viewers

When NBC began planning a major series of reports from the Soviet Union, eventually involving six hours of coverage, the network hoped the package would have political impact. Said the project's originator, NBC Vice President Gordon Manning: "We regard Soviet-American relations as the most important campaign issue." Last week the programs, collectively called The New Cold War, got off to an attention-getting start: during a live interview with Soviet military Chief of Staff Sergei Akhromeyev and Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Korniyenko, Today Anchor Bryant Gumbel asked whether Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would accept an invitation to meet with President Reagan. It appeared that the Soviets, who had welcomed NBC'S visit, took the opportunity to give the series a calculated boost. Korniyenko's headline-making reply: "There will be no difficulties on our part." American officials and scholars, who appeared during the series from the U.S. to provide contrasting views and sometimes to engage in debate, joined in with comparable enthusiasm. Said a White House aide: "The reports were worthwhile. They exposed a lot of people in the U.S. to the Soviet Union, which is a good thing, and we were able to get our views across too."

Politically, the series may not have been entirely helpful to Reagan's reelection campaign. NBC correspondents and the people they interviewed repeatedly described U.S.-Soviet relations as having deteriorated, a view that has been advanced by the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale. But Gumbel pointedly put the blame on the Soviets for having walked out of arms-control talks and waved aside Soviet suggestions that U.S. negotiating proposals had been unreasonable.

In the stories for Today, in Nightly News reports ranging from Moscow to Samarkand and in an hourlong documentary on space warfare by Marvin Kalb, NBC reporters noted meticulously whom and what they had been refused permission to film and when supervision had been imposed. When Today sought to interview a typical Soviet family, they were introduced to Autoworker Yevgeni Solinezin, 48, who is a Communist Party member with a comfortable apartment. He and his wife Nina, a former flight attendant, have traveled extensively in the West, and their son Oleg is an artist. Said Gumbel: "Based on our admittedly limited observations, Yevgeni's situation seems more idyllic than typical."

Although Gumbel handled most of his encounters with aplomb, he was flummoxed by Zoya Zarubina, a member of the Soviet Women's Committee. She snorted derisively at his questions about the general exclusion of women from high Soviet office and in imperious, almost unaccented English contended that Soviet women are more likely than U.S. women to receive equal pay for equal work.

For all the prestige conferred by its venture, NBC expected only modest commercial returns, and it was right. Preliminary ratings indicated that the reports at most marginally increased the newscasts' viewership. Kalb's documentary finished 53rd among that week's 57 prime-time shows. Nonetheless, NBC News President Lawrence Grossman summed up the venture as a success: "Even questions the Soviets wouldn't answer were revealing, and we were surprised by how much access we had." --By William A. Henry III