most? They seem to relish the frontal attacks. The answer is to get people thinking, 'I wonder what's in the Star-News today?""

Benjamin Bradlee, Post executive editor, said that a Star-News reporter told a Post reporter that the White House had promised more scoops to come.

"Just come around with a breadbasket every day and we're going to fill it up," a White House aide is said to have told the Star-News reporter.

When the reporter asked whether other correspondents should be assigned to the White House in addition to Horner, the aide is said to have replied, "There's no need for that. He's good enough."

That was a week in which Bradlee was assailed by name five times in five days by Administration spokesmen-twice by Republican National Chairman Senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas; once by presidential press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler; once by Clark MacGregor, counsel to the President for congressional relations, and once by Charles W. Colson, then special counsel to the President.

Colson's contribution, in a speech in Maine, was to call Bradlee the "self-appointed leader of a tiny fringe of arrogant elitists."

Senator Charles H. Percy (Rep.), Illinois, whose own rather mild criticisms of Nixon policies have caused a certain coolness between him and the White House, said this week that Mr. Nixon would have been too smart to decide on the attacks against the Washington Post. When he was informed that the newspaper's circulation had risen in recent months, Percy said: "I'm not surprised. If I were the publisher of a newspaper I could not imagine a better friend than whoever made that decision."

Challenges to television licenses are more serious. They strike directly at a corporation's money-making capacity.

One of the Post-Newsweek stations was attacked earlier. A challenge was filed in 1970 against WPLG-TV, Channel 10, Miami, shortly after Vice President Spiro Agnew had assailed the company as a media monopolist.

The challengers included Cromwell A. Anderson, a law partner of former Senator George A. Smathers (Dem.), Florida. Anderson had helped Mr. Nixon buy his Florida real estate and had introduced him to C. G. (Bebe) Rebozo, who had become one of the President's closest friends. Another member of the group was W. Sloane McCrea, a former business partner of Rebozo.

Four new competing applications against Post-Newsweek stations were filed this year, just before the Federal Communications Commission's deadline of Jan. 2.

One of the applications sought to take over ownership of the same Miami station, WPLG-TV. The three others were all against WJXTTV, Channel 4, in Jacksonville.

Of 34 commercial channels in Florida, the two Washington Post stations were the only ones to be challenged this year. Against all the 701 licensed commercial television stations in the country, there have been only 11 other competing license applications in the last four years. In the Miami challenge this year, the principals include Anderson again: Michael Weintraub, another partner of Smathers, and Edward N. Claughton Jr., who lent his Coral Gables, Fla., home to Vice President Agnew during the 1972 Republic convention.

In Jacksonville, one of the challengers is George Champion Jr., Florida finance chairman in Mr. Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. Another Jacksonville group is headed by Fitzhugh K. Powell, northeastern Florida co-ordinator for the 1972 presidential campaign of Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama.

Speculation about the relationship of the Nixon Administration to the applications was heightened last week with the disclosure that Glenn J. Sedam Jr., general counsel of the Committee for the Reelection of the President and now deputy general counsel of the 1973 presidential inaugural committee, was involved.

Sedam met in Jacksonville last Dec. 26 with Powell, Champion and other local businessmen and assisted them in preparing to challenge WJXT-TV's license. Sedam has said that Powell reached him through a mutual acquaintance and asked him if he would represent the group before the FCC. Sedam said he referred the group to his old law firm, Steptoe and Johnson, in Washington, and later at that firm's request went to the meeting in Jacksonville for preliminary discussions.

Denials have come from Stedam, the White House and the challengers that these Administration connections had anything to do with the filing of applications.

The Champion and Powell groups are said to have split at the Dec. 26 meeting over division of stock and the amount of legal fees to be paid to the law firm, said to be $250,000 if the case went to the Supreme Court.

Before the applications were filed, Powell filed a petition with the FCC to deny WJXT's three-year relicensing. He charged that the station "consistently and flagrantly, for the past three or more years, has editorialized and slanted its news coverage."

The petition said that the station "has deliberately broadcast and editorialized upon sensitive social questions that are prone to cause strife and turmoil in the community" and "deliberately and with intended malice assaults the personal character and reputation of various persons in the community."

It was a WJXT television reporter in 1970 who first exposed the 1948 segregationist speech of G. Harrold Carswell that led to his rejection by the Senate after Mr. Nixon had nominated him to the Supreme Court.

One of Champion's associates, Edward W. Ball, trustee of the estate of Alfred DuPont, has special reasons to oppose the WJXT license renewal. He controls the Florida East Coast Railway and has been a particular target of the station in an expose of inadequate railroad crossing signals. The station's campaign led to enactment of a state law requiring adequate signals at all crossings in Florida.

The station has also reported a controversy over a fence across the Wakulla River on Ball's estate near Tallahassee. Conservationists say that it bars public access to a navigable river in violation of the law.

Robert W. Scheilenberg, general manager of WJXT, and James T. Lynagh, general manager at WPLG, have expressed confidence that their stations' performance records would persuade the FCC to renew their licenses.

An applicable court decision holds that superior performance of a licensee should be considered "a plus of major significance" in considering a challenge to its license.

If the two Florida stations are, indeed, superior in performance, it appears that they should, under the law, have priority of consideration over any challenger.

This was the basis for a statement issued by Lynagh and for concern with which other licensees throughout the country will be watching the Florida cases. He said:

"Based upon information as to the operations of many other stations available to us, it is difficult to conceive how our license could not be renewed without at the same time placing in serious jeopardy the license of virtually every other TV station in this country."

[From the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 14, 1973]

GOVERNMENT vs. TV: THE GLOVES ARE OFF

(By Thomas Collins)

During a recent flight south, an American banker who has lived for many years in Brazil commented that a government-controlled press actually was not a bad thing. "There are things the public is better off not knowing about," he said.

He seemed like an ordinary, intelligent American, but you had to wonder whether he understood what he was saying or whether he had simply lost sight of first principles after so many years outside the country.

Brazil, of course, has very little press freedom. Accordingly to a recent report by the Inter American Press Assn., quite a few countries in South America have liberated their citizens from that luxury. In the section dealing with the United States, the report describes this country's situation as "embattled."

The banker actually had much in common with officials of the Nixon Administration; the climate here is indeed embattled because of such mental processes. The latest evidence of this was a recent speech by Clay T. Whitehead, who is to President Nixon in broadcast policy what Henry Kissinger is in foreign policy.

In his speech, Whitehead attacked network news programs and warned that local stations would be held "fully accountable" for them at license-renewal time.

He also revealed plans for an Administration bill that contained a little sweet along with the bitter for the broadcasters, in the hopes that it would get them to go along with the government.

What it comes down to is a shallow attempt by the Administration to take away freedom in the name of freedom. TV station owners are being told to follow the government's line in attacking network news programs for some unsubstantiated acts of bias-or else. The "or else" means that if they don't their licenses to operate may be lifted. That's a significant escalation in the Administration's war with the networks. Up till now, the license threat has been veiled and unspoken, even though it has been uppermost in broadcasters' minds. But there is no longer any question that compliance is linked with the livelihood of the station.

The fact is that the government is already in violation of the spirit of the First Amendment in trying to influence the content of television news. It has posed as a "critic of the media in general and chided them for being oversensitive to such criticism.

It has also succeeded in achieving considerable acceptance, through repetition, of the notion that network news and several of the nation's better newspapers are slanted against the Administration and therefore against the country.

With the Whitehead speech, the gloves are off. The Administration has served notice that it will attempt to solve its problem by legislating, through the back door, in an area it is expressly forbidden by the First Amendment to enter. The Nixon bill would, in effect, abridge free speech and a free press even though it is couched in language designed to conceal its intent.

In the past the Administration has been thwarted in its attempts to whip the networks into line-to "decentralize" the key sources of national and international news. Stations carrying network programs have simply shrugged that they have no choice in the matter.

Short of ringing the CBS broadcast center with bayoneted troops, the Administration has done the next best thing: It is economically encircling the networks' outlets.

And it is offering several inducements: Certain unwritten but explicit requirements by the Federal Communications Commission will be dropped in the name of "freedom"; the period of license renewal will be extended from three years to five; and it will be made difficult if not impossible for anyone to successfully challenge an owner's license. In other words, the government's offer amounts to economic security.

It is a tempting offer that raises two key questions: Will the stations buy it? And will Congress-many of whose members own interests in television stations-pass it?

If they do, in practical terms it will mean that when you turn on your television set, the programs and newcasts you watch will have received the government's stamp of approval. Otherwise they would not be shown.

What you would be missing is more of what you already have been deprived of. Since the Nixon attack on broadcasting began, you've been seeing fewer news documentaries that are remotely critical of the government. After all the flak about CBS' "The Selling of the Pentagon," the networks seldom touch them.

You heard no thorough airing of the issues in the last election on any of the networks (CBS, which ran 11 specials on the 1968 election campaign, did not run any in 1972, according to press critic Ben Bagdikian, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review). And there were only perfunctory attempts to define the differences between Mr. Nixon and Sen. George McGovern.

What seems to be lost sight of these days is that the First Amendment does not mean just CBS and Walter Cronkite and the publishers of the New York Times and Washington Post. It is not important what an individual opinion about them might be. The First Amendment means everybody. Unfortunately, not everybody is concerned about its safety.

Elie Abel, dean of Columbia University's journalism school, said recently that the public is monumentally indifferent to what has been. going on between the Administration and the First Amendment, and in a sense he is correct. But there is evidence that with the continued arrest of newsmen, the general public is becoming concerned. If it is not as alarmed as it should be, it is largely the media's fault for not reporting the story properly.

Mr. Nixon's assault on the media is an ongoing story that is just as significant to the country as the war in Vietnam. The outcome, in fact, may mean much more to the country than the war. We can save face or lose face in Vietnam and still survive, but we cannot survive as a democracy without the First Amendment.

Because of the press' caution in opposing the Administration and giving the story its rightful prominence, the public is badly informed as to what is at stake. It is content to see the issue in Administration terms of displeasure with the newspapers and a handful of so-called liberal newscasters.

In allowing this to happen, most of the media have shirked one of their fundamental responsibilities to the public: they have failed to alert it to massive threat to one of its basic rights. They are acting as if only their rights were being abridged and not everyone's, and they are reticent to focus attention on the fact that if they go, we all go. And they are very much in disarray. There is little sense of a common threat among publishers and broadcasters despite the events of the past few years the exercise of prior restraint, the jailing of reporters, the intrusion by the executive branch in both public and commercial television.

"There is a tendency in the media," says Abel, "not to get too worked up about the infringement of other people's rights." and he went on to point out that the networks were silent when public broadcasting was attacked and that many newspapers kept quiet when CBS was under fire for "The Selling of the Pentagon."

The press is in disarray for a number of reasons: It is intimidated in the face of an attack by the highest authority in the land; it fears economic reprisal; and it is unwilling to grasp the true breadth and purpose of the attack. So the Administration can continue taking specific steps to insure that events get reported its way.

If it is permitted to go unchecked by the media or by Congress. and if the public continue to misunderstand the true issue involved, the future is not difficult to predict.

At present, we are in what might be called Phase I of the Administration's assault on free speech. It is merely complaining about what it does not like that comes over the tube.

It has not yet told broadcasters what it wants to see in programs. Is that for Phase II?

[From the Newsweek magazine, Jan. 15, 1972]

NIXON AND THE MEDIA

Journalists and politicians have many things in common, but these days their most notable shared characteristic seems to be suspicion. To hear some members of the Nixon Administration tell it, the national news media are conspiring to flood the country with "elitist gossip"