Media Seek to Send Group to Moscow : Executives Want to Meet Soviets, Push for Daniloff Release

Leading American news executives and trade associations sought today to send a delegation to Moscow to win the outright release of reporter Nicholas Daniloff and assurances that “nothing like this will ever happen again.”

“Nick Daniloff’s fate is not just a matter for state-to-state negotiations,” said Richard J. V. Johnson, president of the Houston Chronicle. “For every American journalist now in Moscow, and for those who work there in the future, the stakes have suddenly soared.

“Where previously the worst fear for an enterprising reporter was expulsion, it is now arrest for a crime that is punishable by death or, at best, a long term in a Soviet prison,” said Johnson, who also is past president of the American Newspaper Publishers Assn.

Michael G. Gartner, editor of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal and Times and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said: “This is the first time in my memory we’ve all come together like this. It shows the gravity of our concern.”

The ASNE, representing the editors of more than 900 daily newspapers in the United States and Canada, was a key organizer of the effort.

No Immediate Response

The group said it has asked for meetings with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin and Alexander N. Yakovlev, who, like Dobrynin, is a secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee.

There was no immediate response to the request, forwarded through the Soviet Embassy here.

In a telegram to the Kremlin leaders, the group said: “We are deeply distressed about the arrest and detention of Nicholas Daniloff . . . and the continuing preparations to try him for espionage.

“We view Mr. Daniloff as an exemplary journalist. We believe his continuing detention needlessly worsens relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. We are concerned by the serious implications of this matter for members of the international press corps who are assigned to cover the Soviet Union.”

Asked whether the news executives are equally united over the plight of AP Middle East correspondent Terry Anderson, a hostage of Muslim radicals in Lebanon, Gartner said: “We equally deplore that situation. We forever have been distressed and concerned about Anderson. But his situation is different. Who do we talk to, and where do we go?”