COMBAT IN PANAMA : Fitzwater Assails Networks on Coverage : Television: Press secretary is ‘flabbergasted’ by split-screen showing of U.S. victims’ return and the Bush news conference.

The decision by three television networks to provide live split-screen coverage of the return of the bodies of U.S. servicemen killed in Panama while simultaneously showing President Bush’s press conference Thursday was “outrageous and unfair,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater complained Thursday.

“I was flabbergasted to see it on the screen,” Fitzwater said a few hours after the President’s meeting with reporters.

With the plane carrying the bodies of four serviceman touching down at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware just as Bush was about to take the podium, news executives at ABC, CBS and CNN all elected to provide some live coverage at the base.

Only NBC waited until the conclusion of the news conference, broadcasting recorded footage of the flag-draped coffins being unloaded and placed into hearses. Executives at NBC News said they did not consider it appropriate to cut away from the President or to split the screen as he was speaking.

The three networks “did not tell us they were going to do it,” said an angry Fitzwater, who added that he would have scheduled the press conference at a different time if he had known what was going to happen. He insisted that he had not known when the bodies were scheduled to arrive and had scheduled the news conference at the “first break” in Bush’s schedule.

News executives said they already had made extensive plans to cover the arrival of the servicemen’s bodies when they were told--less than an hour ahead of time--that there would be a news conference.

“The timing was the White House’s, not ours,” said Lane Venardos, executive producer of special events for CBS News.

Network news executives said they did not think the White House timed the press event to coincide with events at the Dover base in an effort to minimize coverage of the return of dead Americans.

“I don’t think this Administration is that clever,” said Bob Furnad, senior executive producer of CNN. “The Reagan Administration might have done that.”

CNN carried several minutes of the coffins being unloaded at the Air Force base while Bush was speaking. “I felt it was appropriate,” Furnad said. “I did not feel it was a political statement. You had two events live--they were obviously live.”

Furnad also stressed that there was no time when CNN cut away completely from the President. The cable network received about 50 phone calls concerning its coverage--all of them complaints, a CNN spokesman said.

CBS, which used the split-screen technique briefly, left the news conference for a moment but returned, as CBS News anchor Dan Rather spoke over Bush’s voice to explain what viewers were seeing.

Regarding ABC News’ decision to show the caskets as Bush was speaking, a network spokeswoman said, “We thought it was perfectly justified when he was talking about casualties.”

ABC anchorman Peter Jennings told viewers: “As you noticed, at one point when the President was talking about civilian casualties, we semi-cut away to show you the return of the first four bodies of U.S. servicemen killed in Panama, and when we went back to the President, he was being quite light-hearted about another reporter’s question.” Jennings told viewers that Bush had not been aware of what ABC was broadcasting.

Fitzwater said he intends to contact the networks to express “my extreme dissatisfaction.”