MEDIA GURUS ASSAIL TV NEWSCASTS

Three of the news media’s elder statesmen and a venerable economist called for an end to greed, “golden parachutes” and giggly newscasts during the opening day of congressional hearings Tuesday about the impact of Wall Street on network news.

The network news operations, badly shaken by recent cutbacks, are victims of more than just harsh economic times, the congressional panel was told. Their apprehensive state was blamed on a variety of factors, ranging from broadcasters’ lust for short-term profits to congressional indolence in forcing station owners to meet their obligation to serve the community.

But if any single individual was vilified by witnesses appearing before the telecommunications, consumer protection and finance subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, it was former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Mark Fowler.

“I think Fowler has forgotten who owns the airwaves,” said Ben Bagdikian, dean of the school of journalism at UC Berkeley.

Asked by subcommittee chairman Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) to sum up what Fowler and President Reagan had done for broadcasting during the last six years, Bagdikian said:

“They sanctified greed.”

Fowler, who resigned April 15 and turned over the FCC chairmanship to commissioner Dennis Patrick, was a self-proclaimed champion of broadcast deregulation.

His laissez-faire approach to governing the nation’s 12,000 radio and television licensees began shortly after Reagan appointed him to chair the commission in 1981, with the consolidation and elimination of FCC paperwork. By the time Fowler left public office, many of the watchdog functions of the commission had been phased out, public-affairs programming requirements had been relaxed and limits on the number of AM, FM and TV stations that a single company could own had been raised from 7 to 12.

“Fowler did more irreparable damage than all the chairmen in the history of the FCC,” said former CBS News President Fred Friendly.

But the 71-year-old journalist, a former producer for the legendary Edward R. Murrow and now a professor at Columbia University, was just as ready to lay some of the blame at the feet of the House panel.

“It’s your job to regulate (the public airwaves), not somebody appointed by some President,” Friendly said.

Retired NBC Chairman Julian Goodman stood alone in praising Fowler for having freed broadcasters of red tape.

Goodman singled out Fowler’s stand on the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which requires broadcasters to present all sides of a controversial issue. Under Fowler, the FCC virtually ignored the doctrine and argued that it should be abolished. Last week, the Senate countered that approach by voting to approve a measure that would make the Fairness Doctrine law rather than simply a regulatory policy.

“The Fairness Doctrine needs to be eliminated, not made into law,” Goodman said. “Putting it into law, requiring that all sides of a controversial question be covered puts editorial judgments into the hands of a government department. Fairness should be decided by trained journalists.”

Friendly and Goodman did agree on two trends that they believe have eroded broadcast news:

--Domination of the airwaves by about 26 conglomerates that own as many as a dozen radio and television stations in major cities across the United States.

--The increased use of consultants to homogenize and reduce the news into smaller and smaller “bites” for mass audience consumption.

“The public sees a 90-second piece on arms control . . . two minutes on AIDS . . . the newscasters giggle at each other,” Friendly grumbled into his microphone. “It looks like news. It smells like news. But it’s so thin, it’s not.”

Goodman, who began his NBC career as a radio reporter in 1945 and later became a vice president of the news division, was not as harsh about the current state of broadcast news, even going so far as to compliment the “bright and able people anxious to do a responsible job” in today’s network news departments.

“But it is not uncommon,” he added, “for those new to the business, or for consultants brought in, to say to themselves, ‘All businesses are alike and I’m going to tackle this network like any other business.’ That’s a mistake. Networks are not like other businesses, if evidenced only by the fact that we are invited to appear so frequently before committees of Congress to justify our behavior.”

Both men cited the owners of network-affiliated stations as the true arbiters of network news programming. For years, Friendly said, officials of all three networks have attempted to get their affiliates to air an hour of network news each evening instead of 30 minutes, but they consistently have been turned down because the stations would rather program that time themselves and not have to share the advertising revenue with the networks.

“This force for greed is why you don’t have an hour of news, documentaries, music. . . ,” Friendly said. “The affiliates control the networks. I hope you probe that.”

Rep. Dennis Eckart (D-Ohio), who was credited with conceiving the three-day subcommittee hearing, zeroed in on what is known in corporate board rooms as “the golden parachute.”

He was particularly critical of former CBS Inc. Chairman Thomas Wyman, who received a $4-million settlement upon resigning his post last fall when he was replaced by Wall Street financier Laurence A. Tisch. Eckart pointed out that the Wyman revelation came last month at a time when more than 200 CBS News employees, some of whom had been shot at while acting as CBS correspondents in combat zones, were being laid off with eight weeks’ severence pay.

“If we believe in free enterprise, we don’t reward failure,” Bagdikian said, pointing out that Wyman served as CBS chairman for a short time and was forced out.

“It’s a ridiculous idea, no doubt about it,” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith said of the “golden parachute” idea.

Galbraith told the subcommittee that the current network news crisis, fueled by the corporate takeovers and top management changes at ABC, CBS and NBC last year, is part of a “larger frenzy” that is reflective of events that led up to the stock market crash of 1929.

Leveraged buyouts that concentrate media ownership in a few hands leave companies with huge debts to service, he said. Those huge debts are “a substitute of debt for equity” and can only mean cost-cutting and layoffs in order to raise enough money to pay the interest, he continued.

As a result, Galbraith said, any long-range corporate planning or, in the case of network news, attention to in-depth quality coverage, is deferred or disposed of all together. The end product suffers, revenues drop off and “widespread bankruptcy” is the final step, he said.

Setting the stage for Wednesday’s appearance of news division presidents from all three networks, Friendly concluded:

“Sadly I must tell you that the television networks of which I was once a part are mercantile shadows of what they once were. Those in Congress, those in the FCC and the people like myself who stand idly by are as guilty as the Wall Street traders who have changed something once licensed ‘in the public interest, convenience and necessity’ into a midway of junk entertainment and headline service news.”