LAWMAKERS SEEK NEW TV CONTROLS

Three days of congressional hearings into the changing nature of television network news, which Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) said had begun with “no preconceived legislative agenda,” ended Thursday with Markey unveiling a long list of proposed federal regulations for the broadcasting industry.

The measures, ranging from programming rules to corporate takeovers and the Fairness Doctrine, would crack down hard on the laissez-faire approach to broadcasting that has been taken by the Federal Communications Commission throughout the 1980s.

Markey, chairman of the telecommunications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, welcomed the chief executive officers of ABC, CBS and NBC to the final day of hearings by declaring that the often critical and bitter testimony he had heard so far would be “instructive” when Congress considers restricting such hostile corporate-takeover tools as high-risk “junk bond” financing, the so-called “greenmail” that companies pay to prevent an unwanted merger and the large payoffs to exiting executives that are known on Wall Street as “golden parachutes.”

While remaining ambivalent to Markey’s list of proposed restrictions, CBS Inc. President Laurence A. Tisch, NBC President Robert Wright and Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. Chairman Thomas Murphy offered testimony on a broad range of subjects, from network minority-hiring policies to the possibility of expanding the evening network news from 30 minutes to a full hour.

Only Tisch expressed any hope that the Dan Rather-anchored “CBS Evening News” might get a full hour any time soon. Tisch told Markey that he and CBS News president Howard Stringer have been discussing such an expansion for “four or five months” and that it is “high on our agenda.”

“NBC Nightly News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight,” however, will remain at their current 30 minutes, according to NBC’s Wright and ABC’s Murphy.

Rep. Dennis Eckart (D-Ohio) badgered Tisch at one point for allowing a $4-million severence settlement to his predecessor, Thomas Wyman, who resigned last September after Tisch had acquired 25% of CBS Inc. stock and took control of the company.

Eckart pointed out that Wyman’s “golden parachute” was revealed in March at the same time that 215 CBS News employees were being laid off with only a few weeks of severence pay.

“(That) corporate mismanagement is being rewarded is patently offensive to me,” Eckart said. “Management gets the elevator and the workers get the shaft.”

Tisch conceded that “the timing of the Wyman thing couldn’t have been worse,” and he laid the blame for Wyman’s large severence on the other 12 members of the CBS board of directors.

“I wasn’t even in the room when he was voted out,” Tisch said.

Tisch did not agree with Eckart’s call for a ban to “golden parachutes,” but he did say that the practice of “greenmail” ought to be outlawed.

Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Tex.) and Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) quizzed the trio on minority-hiring practices, learning that all three networks have minority recruiting and training programs.

But when Richardson polled each executive on the makeup of their boards of directors, he found that CBS Inc. has one minority and one woman on its 13-member board, Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. has no minorities or women on its 11-member board, and General Electric, the new owner of NBC, has “several women” but no minorities on its board.

On the question of huge salaries paid to the top network correspondents, NBC’s Wright blamed the “star system” that is a direct outgrowth of the entertainment industry’s influence on television news.

“These people negotiate their salaries like everybody else in America does,” Tisch explained.

Because the best on-air correspondents are sought by all three networks, they can demand whatever the market will bear, and often that exceeds $1 million a year, according to all three network chiefs.

Rep. Jim Slattery (D-Kan.), who teamed with Eckart on Wednesday in proposing a plan to ban certain types of network ownership, wrestled with NBC’s Wright over the General Electric buyout of RCA Corp., NBC’s parent company, last year.

Slattery and Eckart would bar foreign corporations or U.S. companies that depend heavily on defense contracts for their business, such as General Electric, from buying a network. “Tomorrow morning we could pick up the Wall Street Journal and find that defense contractors could be acquiring the other two companies (CBS and ABC),” Slattery said.

Wright angrily rebuffed Slattery on grounds that General Electric has owned broadcast properties for more than 60 years, including several television stations, and has never interfered in their news operations.

He found an ally in Rep. Al Swift (D-Wash.), who said the news media themselves are better protection against a corporate owner trying to influence news than any federal ban. “The kind of thing that Mr. Slattery is talking about is not going to happen without everyone knowing about it,” he said.

Nevertheless, the Slattery/Eckart proposal remained on the list of possible legislative measures that Markey ticked off. He outlined more than a dozen new or existing--but generally unenforced--restrictions that Congress could be considering within the coming weeks. They included:

--The Tender Offer Reform Act of 1987, which could hinder or prevent hostile takeovers of major companies, such as a broadcast network.

--Reinstitution of the anti-trafficking rule, which requires a broadcaster to hold a radio or television license for at least three years before re-selling it.

--The Fairness in Broadcasting Act of 1987, which would make the FCC’s rule that broadcasters cover all sides of an issue a federal statute. Known as the Fairness Doctrine, the rule has been largely ignored by the FCC during the leadership of recently resigned FCC chairman Mark Fowler. The Senate already has voted to make it law.