‘Murphy’ Creator Won’t Knock Shalala : Television: As the unwed mother issue is reborn, Diane English points fingers at the media for making a big deal of it.

“The O.J. (Simpson) thing is cooling down? Let’s get the ‘Murphy Brown’ baby thing back.”

So quipped Diane English, creator of the anchorwoman character in response to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala’s testimony before Congress suggesting that Murphy set a bad example by having a baby out of wedlock.

English, interviewed Friday by phone from her production offices in Studio City, didn’t blame Shalala for the current flap. Instead she chastised the press for highlighting the issue: “For that to be a headline is insane. “

And she needled Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.)--”a Democrat “ who tried “to entrap (Shalala), I think,” when he asked the Cabinet member whether the unmarried Murphy Brown was right or wrong in having her baby.

In fact, English appears to agree with the bulk of Shalala’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee on President Clinton’s welfare reform package, particularly in its focus on unwed teen-age mothers. “I don’t think anyone in public life ought to condone children born out of wedlock . . . even if the family is financially able,” Shalala said, answering Neal.

But Shalala also testified that “half of the welfare recipients were parents as teens. If you are an unmarried teen-age mother, your chances of ending up poor for the rest of your life are very high.”

“This is a disaster--children having children,” Shalala asserted.

Candice Bergen, who portrays Murphy Brown on the CBS-TV comedy series, which is now going into its seventh season, was out of the country and could not be reached for comment. Neither CBS officials nor the show’s current producer, John Bowman, could be reached.

“Murphy Brown” erupted into a firestorm issue during the 1992 presidential campaign when then-Vice President Dan Quayle--in a speech on May 19 in San Francisco, the day after the fictional Murphy Brown had her baby on the show--blamed the Los Angeles riots on the breakdown of family values. He accused Hollywood of making a heroine out of this character for having an out-of-wedlock baby and for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice.’ ”

In the speech, Quayle also said that “marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is.” Which was what Shalala herself was indirectly testifying to on Thursday.

In an interview on CNN Friday, Quayle was in an I-told-you-so mood. “I am delighted that the Clinton Administration recognizes that a child born into a home without a father is a child at risk. . . . (During the campaign) they called it ‘cynical election-year politics’. . . . I am gratified they have come around.”

English, 46, who is married to producer-partner Joel Shukovsky and has no children, said she “thinks it’s time for me to find a platform to clean up revisionist history. The question is flying around, ‘Was Dan Quayle right?’ Of course he was right. No one ever said a single-parent family was preferable to a two-parent family.”

But English, who left “Murphy Brown” two years ago to produce the CBS comedy “Love & War,” added that “in the midst of a very important speech,” Quayle “took a right turn” and “trivialized” the issue by focusing on the birth episode which, she noted, he had not seen.

At the time she decided to have her baby, “Murphy Brown (was) a highly educated, 42-year-old woman with very strong financial resources,” English explained.

Murphy decided to have the baby, English noted, because she did not want to have an abortion and because she realized her biological clock was ticking. The pregnancy with Murphy’s ex-husband had been “accidental.”

Moreover, English argued, the show is not geared toward teen-agers. Its primary demographic, she insisted, is 25- to 54-year-old women with incomes likely to be more than $60,000. “If I were producing ‘Blossom’ (about a teen-ager), that would not have been a story line. I simply would not have felt comfortable,” she said.

English noted that when Murphy Brown “informed the father (that she was having the baby), he abandoned her.” Quayle’s remarks at the time, English said, “implied women were making frivolous choices to have children without pesky fathers around. . . . That’s the same kind of politics (that occurs) around abused women: ‘What’s wrong with that woman who stays with a guy who beats her?’ ”