PBS IS OUT FRONT IN EMMY NEWS RACE

The Public Broadcasting Service walked off Tuesday with the lion’s share of nominations for the 1985 Emmy Awards for news and documentaries, collecting 45 of the 120 citations.

In the figures released by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, ABC was second with 30 nominations, followed by CBS with 22, NBC with 16 and syndicated programs with the remaining 7.

PBS programs got seven of the eight nominations for outstanding background and analysis of a single current story, including two “Frontline” documentaries--”Cry Ethiopia, Cry” and “Living Below the Line”--and two editions of “Inside Story”: “Whose News Is It?” and “Rupert Murdoch . . . Press Baron Who Would Be King.”

Other nominees in that category were PBS’ “AIDS: Profile of an Epidemic,” “Shelter,” “China’s Only Child” (part of the “Nova” series) and ABC’s “Nightline,” for “The Hostage Crisis Five Years Later.”

“Nightline” also got the only two nominations for a program for outstanding coverage of a single breaking news story, for its installment on the Jacksons’ Victory Tour and its show about the massacre in San Ysidro.

Winners of the Emmys, which cover the 1984 calendar year, will be announced Aug. 29 at a dinner in New York.

PBS’ “Frontline” received six of the nine nominations for outstanding information, cultural or historical programs, for “The Mind of a Murderer,” parts I and II; “Red Star Over Khyber,” “Captive in El Salvador,” “Marshall High Fights Back” and “Better Off Dead?”

The other nominees in that category were “Among the Wild Chimpanzees” and “Flight of the Whooping Crane,” both part of PBS’ “National Geographic” series, and the syndicated special “Television and the Presidency,” with Theodore H. White.

Most of the nominations were split among individuals and specific segments of broader news programs, such as the network newscasts and the magazine shows “60 Minutes” and “20/20.”

The academy said that the nominees, culled from approximately 600 entries, were “judged noncompetitively against only a standard of excellence.”