Will TV News Bite Its Corporate Hand? : Mergers: Once-independent news-gathering organizations may be pressured to advance their owners’ corporate interests.

How much news coverage of the controversy about the use of nuclear power to generate electricity can we expect from the country’s three leading television networks when two of those networks are owned by the corporations that also are the nation’s dominant manufacturers of commercial nuclear reactors?

Will CBS, likely to be owned by the Westinghouse Electric Co., be reluctant to explore whistle-blowers’ reports that federal funds are being misspent at the Hanford and Savannah River reservations, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project and West Valley Demonstration Project--all managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by Westinghouse subsidiaries?

How enthusiastic will ABC, owned by the Walt Disney Co., be in exploring accusations by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas and other public officials that the entertainment industry is subverting traditional family values when Disney’s own film studios are producing motion pictures whose raw content tests the limits of propriety?

Will NBC, owned by the General Electric Co., become more aggressive in its news coverage of Washington’s longest-running scandal-defense contractor’s schemes to bilk the federal government--when GE itself has a record of repeatedly defrauding the Pentagon?

Those questions are no more convoluted than the relationships emerging from the latest round of mass media mergers. They reach well beyond the conventional concerns about the concentration of economic power and the control of information by fewer yet larger owners.

The three major television networks are widely perceived as media used to deliver entertainment programming. But the ABC news slogan--”More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source”--identifies another dimension. Millions of people believe they receive all the news they need (or want) through the networks’ half-hour evening news programs and their “infotainment” offerings ranging from early morning shows to prime time “magazine” programs.

In an earlier era, the networks were stand-alone companies whose owners were willing to spend whatever was necessary to support a high-quality news operation whose losses were offset by profits from entertainment programming.

Now, however, the networks’ news divisions are not only expected to be “profit centers” for their corporate owners, but they’re subsidiaries of companies that produce a wide range of goods and services. As a result, they’re in danger of being manipulated into promoting the corporate agendas of those owners. Some examples of the pressures they face:

The General Electric Co. already owns NBC, the third major television network. GE and Westinghouse also are, by far, the leading producers of commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. They provided the reactors for 85 of the 109 nuclear units currently licensed to operate.

In recent decades, however, the technology has been widely discredited. Not a single new order for a domestic nuclear power station has been placed since 1978, and all of the orders placed between late 1973 and 1978 have been either canceled or postponed indefinitely.

Undeterred by that setback, GE and Westinghouse have been aggressively promoting commercial nuclear power elsewhere, notably in Asia but also in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. If and when there’s another serious accident at a nuclear power station, will the parent company’s desire to avoid further damage to the troubled industry affect its network’s news coverage?

That’s only the most obvious field in which the news organizations’ integrity can by compromised by the owning corporation’s other commercial interests. Cliches popular within the two companies point out that Westinghouse products range from radars to refrigerators and that GE makes everything from light bulbs to locomotives.

Disney isn’t a diversified manufacturer, but its film production companies turn out more than “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” The company that built its reputation on “Snow White” and “Cinderella” also produces hard-edge motion pictures such as “Priest” and “Judge Dredd.”

Moreover, Disney also has become entangled in controversies, ranging from a dubious attempt to secure federal funding for a multi-million-dollar parking garage for its California amusement park to a now-abandoned effort to build a new theme park in Virginia.

It’s fashionable to assess the latest round of mergers as part of the new convergence of interests between information and entertainment providers. But it’s equally pertinent to view the new arrangements in more traditional terms--relating to the very real risks that the integrity of once-independent news-gathering organizations will be sullied by pressure to advance their owners’ parochial corporate interests.