Clinton Vows to Keep Spotlight on TV Chiefs

Hailing the television industry’s acceptance of a ratings system as “a historic move,” President Clinton said Thursday that he will continue pressing entertainment moguls to devise an effective plan, improve children’s programming and reduce violence on the airwaves.

In an interview with The Times, Clinton vowed to stay visibly involved in monitoring the new ratings system and said the plan stemmed from a successful exercise of presidential “jawboning” on a values issue with appeal across the political spectrum.

The president said he does not plan to participate directly in the process of setting up a ratings system or evaluating programs--but does plan to invite television chieftains back to the White House to “make a report to me” once ratings are devised.

White House aides, jubilant over an action that they see as a political coup, said Clinton may also appear at the Emmy Awards presentation in September to present a new prize for quality children’s programming.

The president took pains to describe his interest in television ratings as a natural product of many years of thinking about the government’s responsibility to help parents raise their children.

“What we did today on this ratings system has literally no partisan benefit to anybody,” he said.

But his aides were less constrained in describing the issue as a brilliant political move as well: a concrete accomplishment on an issue that has worried millions of parents for decades and that Republicans once used to attack Democrats.

“We’ve parachuted behind enemy lines and stolen their [GOP] issues,” one senior official exulted.

In fact, Clinton’s action on television was both substantive and political--both a natural outgrowth of themes he has worked on for years and a useful dramatization of his concern for family values in the midst of an election year.

“It’s a good way to inoculate himself against the kind of charges that Republicans have often leveled against Democrats with devastating effect, especially charges of cultural liberalism,” said Will Marshall of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

In a half-hour Oval Office interview, Clinton took issue with television executives who expressed fears that a ratings system will diminish their audiences and thus reduce revenues.

“It will cost the industry a significant amount of money just to figure out how to implement this rating system,” he said, but added:

“Over the long run I’ll be quite surprised if it does cost them any long-term profits . . . because, if the viewers vote with the V-chip the way the Nielsen ratings and other indices drive programming today, it will change the programming, hopefully for the better.”

The president said his “next follow-up” will be to work with the industry “to try to improve both the quantity and the quality of children’s programming, again in ways that will not hurt them financially.”

He also plans to keep an eye on the overall level of violence on television, he said. But he said he hopes to pursue those goals in cooperation with entertainment producers.

“We don’t want the politicians basically saying what should and shouldn’t be on television, what should and shouldn’t be in the movies,” he said. “But the people who were elected to represent all the people, I think, can properly say when things are out of balance and they ought to be put back in balance.”

The president said he wants to extend the model of the television accord--a voluntary “partnership” between the White House and a powerful industry--to other major domestic issues.

But he acknowledged that it will be “much harder” to make headway in areas other than television, which is a regulated industry subject to congressional decisions on the use of the broadcast spectrum, cable TV systems and telephone lines.

On other issues, Clinton said he has encouraged Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich to explore the idea of corporate tax breaks for firms that provide their employees with good wages, benefits and training programs.

“We take it for granted that there are some kinds of corporate investments we want to encourage,” he said. “So to look at other kinds of incentives to invest in labor like you invest in money . . , that’s an entirely legitimate thing.”

It was Clinton’s first public comment on Reich’s proposals, which some administration officials had dismissed.

In a comment on the raucous race for the Republican presidential nomination, Clinton said conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and other GOP candidates are “driving people toward the right questions.”

“I’m enjoying the Republican debate but not in the horse-race sense,” he said. “I think the chances are now very high that we will be able to discuss real issues and what our different approaches are to the real challenges of the country . . . all the way through to November.”

Asked whether he hopes the Republicans’ civil war will continue as long as possible, the president merely laughed.

“I may disagree with the answers that the candidates are giving, but the voters in the Republican primary are doing exactly what the citizens at large are . . ,” he said. “What Pat Buchanan is finding out is that there are Republicans who are economically insecure as well as Democrats,” he said.

But he declined to say which GOP candidate he hopes to run against and said he has warned his supporters away “from reading too much into any given horse race at the moment.”

On the other hand, he said, what he is enjoying most about the Republican primary race is that he isn’t in it.

“It may be more relief than anything else--that I don’t have to muster the energy to do it now,” he said with a grin.