TV Brass Not Ready to Give Up Ghost Yet : * Entertainment: Industry officials hope Washington can help revive networks’ financial health.

Television executives defended their ailing industry Thursday, with one top official declaring that the Big Three networks are hardly ready to go the way of the dinosaur.

But he and others at an entertainment industry conference said a little help from Washington could go a long way toward restoring the networks’ financial health.

Last year, the nation’s networks lost a total of more than $300 million, with only ABC posting a profit, noted David Londoner, managing director of Wertheim Schroder & Co., which sponsored the conference with the trade newspaper Variety.

“On the other hand, cable networks are prospering, supported as they are by both advertising and subscription fees,” he said.

Broadcast industry executives said this dual-stream of revenue for cable companies creates an unfair advantage, and they called on Congress to rewrite the rules.

Bills before the House and Senate would for the first time require cable operators to pay broadcasters a fee for their programming, providing a badly needed new source of revenue for networks that have been hit by an advertising slump and a declining market share.

Without such changes, “there is no way broadcasters can stay in the game,” said News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch, whose upstart Fox has made money in an environment where NBC and CBS have written nothing but red ink.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Alfred C. Sikes backed them in their demands and predicted that Congress would pass a cable re-regulation bill this year.

“Whether the White House (will) sign it or not, I don’t know,” Sikes said.

CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer said the bills before Congress reflect a strong lobbying effort by the television industry, which got burned last year when Hollywood managed to retain most of its rights to the hugely profitable market for syndicated programming.

Cable industry officials assailed the re-regulation effort as a short-term fix that fails to address technological changes that could redraw the boundaries between such media as telephones and television.

Murdoch and CBS’ Stringer, however, said high-quality television programming is far more important than hotly debated new delivery methods such as high-definition television and interactive video.

Tom Baxter, president of cable operations at Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., acknowledged that the cable industry has brought on some of its own problems in Washington through lax service and reckless rate increases, although he said service has improved radically over the past two years.

“I don’t think we’ve done a good job of communicating with our elected leaders, particularly in the late ‘80s,” he said.

However, he said that even if cable operators have to pay fees to broadcasters, “no one can really envision a formula that would fundamentally change the economics of the business.”

And he expressed the hope that CBS and NBC would enjoy a reversal of their fortunes, noting that the networks still capture 60% of TV viewers on a typical evening, compared to more than 90% just two decades ago.

Stringer, delivering an impassioned defense of broadcast television, said he was “tired of being the dinosaur” for analysts who project the demise of one or more networks.