2 REPORTS, 1 VIEW OF NICARAGUA

Media road south. . . .

Leticia Ponce sat in a small Oxnard TV studio, speaking to the camera as she passionately concluded her half-hour “One Woman’s View” of Nicaragua that ran last week.

“Look,” Ponce (pronounced Pon-say) told KTIE Channel 63 viewers, shaking her head, “I’m not blind to the shortcomings of Nicaragua’s present government. Nor did I fail to recognize the atrocities committed by the U.S.-supported contras. But the majority--and the key word here is majority-- of Nicaraguans will say to you: ‘Tell your President to please end this war.’ ”

Strong words.

Bill Press was in a large Hollywood TV studio, dubbing the narration for his reports from Nicaragua for KABC Channel 7.

“For me--two surprises about the Sandinistas,” he spoke into the mike. “They have the overwhelming support of the people. I found no support inside Nicaragua for the contras. Surprise No. 2: The Sandinistas are doing a lot of things right, which we don’t hear about in this country.”

Ponce and Press. Small station, big station. Separate voices, one view.

That contra- bashing view is not startling from Press, the liberal KABC commentator whose Nicaragua reports will air the week of Oct. 27 on the 6 p.m. “Eyewitness News.”

Press headed south, he maintains, having nasty feelings about the Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed rebels called contras. He spent a week in Nicaragua last month, followed by three days in Costa Rica. And?

“I came back even more convinced that the contras are bad, but that the Sandinistas are not as bad as we paint them,” he said Friday.

Ponce was another story, though, stepping out of her traditional role as anchor to deliver an anti- contra message on a tiny station struggling to gain acceptance in conservative Ventura County.

“Our market is very conservative,” said KTIE president Donald Sterling. “But I felt what Leticia said had to be said.”

KTIE viewers either didn’t care or didn’t care to dissent, for the station logged only a few calls protesting Ponce’s program.

She and camerawoman Anne Beyers were in Nicaragua for eight days in early August to compile a series of separately aired news reports, and these were later packaged for Ponce’s eloquent, moving, beautifully presented “One Woman’s View” special.

“I wanted to go to Nicaragua and, frankly, come back with a slice of life as the Sandinistas see it now,” said Ponce, who is fluent in Spanish. “The Sandinista side hasn’t been told. But I felt a tremendous obligation to tell the other side, too.”

That’s far less than journalistic detachment. But Ponce’s program, threaded by her conversational, in-studio commentary with political spin, was identified as her opinion.

It reflected the kind of personalized reporting that big stations usually sniffingly dismiss as being unsuave. But it was effective. Ponce even spoke on the air of forgetting about her own discomfort from menstrual cramps after seeing the terrible plight of Nicaraguan children.

Although Ponce did not ignore Sandinista flaws, her program was about 70% pro-Sandinista, and viewers could not mistake her sympathies.

Ponce quoted a woman as saying the Sandinista revolution has “much to be done.” Added Ponce: “Perhaps we should let them do it.”

Even tougher will be Press’ commentaries, coming near the time when the Sandinistas are set to try American Eugene Hasenfus, who was shot down in a plane bearing supplies for the contras.

“Look,” Press said Friday. “We are at war with Nicaragua. You don’t realize that in this country. This is guerrilla warfare and the people are getting destroyed by our mercenaries there.”

Press is such a wiz that he found this out after only . . . seven days ?

“It’s not enough,” he said. “But it’s better than not going at all.”

In fact, Press said, he had to pay his own way to Nicaragua because KABC’s parent company, Capital Cities/ABC Inc., has cut company travel in these budget-minded times. He even played cameraman and shot his own videotape, except for those few times when he hired a pickup crew (which Channel 7 paid for) to shoot stand-up interviews.

“I visited a lot of places and I found no one who would speak up for the contras ,” said Press, who was sufficiently conversant in Spanish to get along in Nicaragua without an interpreter. He said that he mostly trekked alone except for occasionally riding a bus used by a U.S.-organized tour group.

Ponce traveled a different route as part of a tour organized by Dr. Marge Lorton of Santa Barbara through the Sandinista-run tourist agency Turnica. KTIE paid for Ponce’s camera gear and Lorton arranged for “private contributors” to underwrite the rest of the KTIE trip, Ponce said.

“The station couldn’t afford to send me independently,” she said. “I knew the stops the tour would make would dictate the story I would do. You are going to see what they (the Sandinistas) want you to see. The people I spoke to told the same story. But I really, really felt that for these people, life was really better under the Sandinistas and that they would rather die than go back to (former leader Anastasio) Somoza.”

Still, wasn’t she being manipulated by the Sandinistas? “I cannot tell you how clear I feel about my conscience,” Ponce said.

Press estimates that there are thousands of U.S. volunteers in Nicaragua helping the Sandinistas. He said he encountered a number of Soviets, too, and heard that Cubans were there as well.

He also visited La Prensa, an anti-government newspaper shut down by the Sandinistas. “The people still come to work, though,” Press said. “They sit there and play chess.”

Another of those Sandinista flaws. For at least some of the news media, it’s clearly better to be visiting Nicaragua than living there.