Mr. Whitehead's speech was wrapped inside an Administration plan to make the stations and their owners directly responsible for the network programs they carried and to insure a variety of conflicting views on controversial issues. The requirement of balance, fairness and access already exists within F.C.C. regulations; they are already a factor for assessment when stations come up for license renewal.

But Mr. Whitehead is delivering a different message. He is telling the affiliated stations of the commercial networks to censor major news programs and documentaries that offend the Administration. And he is doing so under the guise of interpreting the First Amendment as it applies to broadcasting news. That is the road to censorship and suppression through abuse of the power to license. It is a road Congress cannot let the Administration travel.

[From the Providence Journal, Dec. 20, 1972]

THREAT TO TELEVISION

A new and ominous threat to the free flow of news comes from Washington where the Nixon administration is drafting legislation, perhaps for submission to Congress early next year, to make local television stations accountable at license renewal time for the balance and taste of all news and entertainment programs they broadcast.

Since television stations can operate only by license from the Federal Communication Commission, the federal government is able to write standards of operation as it pleases. Neither radio nor television is protected by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press as are newspapers which need no licenses to publish.

It has been held generally in the past that accountability ran only to the televised broadcasting of news and programs to serve the public interest. It always has been a goal for all stations to make public all sides of a public issue; regulations insist on equal time for candidates for office under specific circumstances.

But here is Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, charging that there is bias in network news reporting. At a convention of professional journalists. Mr. Whitehead sketched the outline of pending legislation which is intended, he said, not to be a vindictive assault on networks but to throw more responsibility on local station executives for what is televised.

The disturbing thing is that Mr. Whitehead has predetermined that there is bias in network news reporting, putting his case like his :

"Where there are only a few sources of national news on television, as we now have, editorial responsibility must be exercised more effectively by local broadcasters and by network management... Station managers and network officials who fail to act to correct imbalance or consistent bias in the networks, or who acquiesce by silence, can only be considered willing participants to be held fully accountable... at license renewal time."

Mr. Whitehead plainly proposes to throw the task of definition to local judgment; he said, "Who else but management can or should correct so-called professionals who confuse sensationalism with sense and who dispense elitist gossip in the guise of news analysis?"

Since retention of a broadcast license is essential to the economic survival of a television station, the Whitehead suggestion can be expected to induce the virtual silencing of controversial material. What local operator or manager wants to risk a charge of silent acquiescence in bias when the risk can be avoided by silencing those Mr. Whitehead and his peers in Washington firmly believe are biased?

The new regulation is being reviewed, and it is said that changes may be made before definitive legislation is sent to Congress. But the approach is plain, and the threat is clear. It would appear that while judgments must be made by local executives, the tone of enforcement will be set in Washington. Big Brother is riding again.

[From the Chicago Tribune, Wednesday, Dec. 20, 1972]

IDEOLOGICAL 'PLUGOLA' REARS ITS UGLY HEAD

(By Clarence Petersen)

"I'm against-I repeat, against-media censorship in all form."— Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, Nov. 20, 1969.

The Vice President gave that assurance that week after his unforgettable Des Moines, La., speech in which the Vice President characterized network news departments as "a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men [whose views] do not represent the views of America."

The networks had responded to the Iowa speech--and continued to respond to subsequent assaults-with charges that the Nixon administration, thru the Vice President, was attempting to "intimidate" broadcasters over whose head already hovered the Damoclean sword of federal licensing.

"Nonsense!" said Nixon administration spokesmen and partisans. The Vice President was speaking only for himself and thereby exercising the right of free speech guaranteed to every American.

It may have been nonsense in 1969, but it ceased to be nonsense on Monday when Clay T. Whitehead, director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, revealed that his office has prepared legislation to hold local television stations responsible at license renewal time for the balance and taste of all network news broadcasts. Station licensees, said Whitehead, "have final responsibility for news balance whether the information comes out of their own newsroom or from a distant network."

"When there are only a few sources of national news on television, as we now have, editorial responsibility must be exercised more effectively by local broadcasters and by network management," said Whitehead.

"Station managers and network officials who fail to act to correct imbalance or consistent bias in the networks-or who acquiesce by silence can only be considered willing participants, to be held fully accountable...at license renewal time."

Whitehead said that station owners are quick to act "when a reporter or disk jockey slips in or passes over information in order to line his pocket"-a practice known as "plug 'a"-"but men also stress or suppress information in accordance with their beliefs," he added. "Will

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station licensees or networks take action against ideological plugola?" The draft legislation, said Whitehead, is currently making the White House rounds. That he discussed it Monday indicates that it will be introduced to Congress early next year without substantial change. Of course, everything Whitehead said about local station responsibility is true, but local station managers already are held responsible at license renewal time for fairness and balance.

Only now the burden of proof that fairness and balance is properly presented rests with citizens. If citizens do not complain of gross violations, license renewals are virtually automatic.

The White House proposal, said Whitehead, will require stations to "demonstrate" that they have been "substantially attuned to the needs and interests" of their communities and to the show that they have afforded opporunities for the presentation of conflicting views of controversial issues.

It all sounds most reasonable on the surface, but the White House is now wading into the previously sacrosanct area of regulating program content, forcing stations not only to be fair but to prove it to the satisfaction of the Federal Communications Commission. How do you prove fairness to the satisfaction of an administration you have criticized?

The FCC, which is coming to be dominated by Nixon appointees, is apt to have a definition of fairness and balance that reflects the President's view that what is good for America is more good news and less bad news and critical commentary.

And tho he worried on Monday about the relatively few sources of national news on commercial network television, Mr. Whitehead has consistently maintained that public affairs programming on public television is "redundant." Henry Loomis, the Nixon-appointed head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was not in office for even a week [previous to which he admittedly never watched public TV] before he began to echo and to enforce that view.

"NBC was first to react to the Whitehead speech, commenting that "the administration's plan . . . seems to be another attempt to drive a wedge between TV stations and networks. This is regrettable because the ability of our broadcasting system to expand its service to the public depends on continuation of a close and cooperative association of network and station, particularly in the area of news and information, without government interference."

The NBC statement obliquely acknowledges the fears of local station managers that was manifest after the early Agnew speeches. What is more difficult to understand is the renewed assault on network news by the White House. Despite all that "bias" sensed by the administration, the public somehow managed to reelect President Nixon by a landslide. [The McGovern forces were complaining about news coverage then, and administration spokesmen, some of them, professed to be satisfied with TV's news coverage.]

Could it be that that very landslide emboldened the Nixon administration to move against the network news departments-despite its wounded protestations in 1969 that no such attempt was even considered?

[From the New York Times, Dec. 21, 1972]

IN THE NATION

NIXON'S OTHER WAR

(By Tom Wicker)

If there was any doubt that Mr. Nixon would take his landslide victory as a license for a major assault on the First Amendment, it has been removed by the clever proposals put forward by Clay Whitehead for the gutting of broadcast journalism.

Mr. Whitehead, the President's principal aide on what the White House calls "telecommunications," has proposed legislation which offers a substantial economic bonus to television station owners. It would require them to seek renewal of their Federal licenses every five years, instead of three; and it would permit the Federal Communications Commission to listen to competing applicants for a television channel only after the F.C.C. already had taken the channel away from a former licensee. Both provisions would substantially relieve broadcast licensees of the burden of showing that they were providing better service than some challenger might.

With that peculiarly smooth brand of deception which seems to characterize so much of what Richard Nixon touches, a spokesman for Mr. Whitehead explained blandly that in return for this "relaxed approach" individual broadcasters would have to accept "more responsibility" for the network programs they run.

Mr. Whitehead did not trouble himself with such subtlety in his speech to the Sigma Delta Chi journalism fratomity in Indianapolis. "Station managers and network officials who fail to act to correct imbalance or consistent bias in the networks, or who acquiesce by silence," he said, "can only be considered willing participants, to be held fully accountable . . . at license renewal time. Who else but management can or should correct so-called professionals who confuse sensationalism with sense and who dispense élitist gossip in the guise of news analysis"

Translated from the baloney, this means that when stations apply for renewal of their Federal licenses, the new Nixon bill would require that they demonstrate that they had "balanced" their news broadcasts to the satisfaction of the Administration's appointees on the F.C.C.

Even accepting for the purpose of argument-and it is intellectually painful to do so the ludicrous proposition that the networks do dispense "élitist gossip" instead of news and "senationalism" rather than sense, would it follow that the remedy for such villainy should be Government regulation of the content of news broadcasts? Of course not: that would be to set a goat to guard the cabbage patch; nevertheless, no mistake should be made but that that is precisely what this autocratic Administration now is proposing.

It is a clever proposal, moreover, on at least three counts. The first is that station owners who themselves may have little concern for the First Amendment, or news, or public affairs, are offered the carrot along with the stick; as long as they do not care about being censored,

their economic security and freedom from competition will be enhanced.

The second is that the Whitehead proposal probably is more feasible politically and less blatant ideologically than the alternative-which some network lawyers and officials have been fearing, in the wake of the landslide-of an antitrust attack on network news operations. Such an attack, it should be borne in mind, is already under way on network entertainment broadcasts.

Finally, this is a clever proposal because even if Congress sees it for what it is and rejects it the networks and the station owners would be less than sensible if they did not also recognize it as one more manifestation of this Administration's determination to reduce or control the power of television journalism-which may well be, as the maverick F.C.C. Commissioner Nick Johnson put it, "the only national institution remotely capable of serving as a check on abuses of Presidential power." As what Mr. Johnson called "Nixon's war on the networks" continues, they and their station affiliates would be remarkable indeed if they did not to some extent retreat, retrench and take heed of their peril. And that's all Mr. Nixon would like to accomplish, anyway.

It is true, of course, and it is implicit in Mr. Johnson's estimate of them, that the network news services have immense power; since power is always likely to be abused, the networks have been occasional sinners-although many of us may think their sins have been more often of omission than commission. But no local station can cover the war in Vietnam, or the Presidential election, or the Apollo flight, or riots in a dozen cities at once, or any of the myriad national and international stories that the networks can, do and should cover.

It was Mr. Whitehead who substituted gossip and sensationalism for clear evidence, of which there is none, that the networks have intolerably abused their power. And the American people will be the losers if the managers of the local stations that run network news are to be made so nervous that they harass the networks to be less controversial, stop running network news or protect their licenses with Governmentapproved counterprograming.

[From the Washington Post, Dec. 21, 1972]

WHITEHEAD: PROPOSAL WON'T LEAD TO CENSORSHIP

"Whitehead said yesterday his bill would free broadcasters from bothersome red tape and paper work. It increases the time span of a station's license from three years to five."

(By Tom Shales)

Administration spokesman Clay T. Whitehead yesterday denied that his proposed new broadcast legislation could lead to government censorship of the news.

Answering a charge by Sen. Vance Hartke (D-Ind.) Whitehead said on a CBS morning news program that "Our intent is 100 per cent to the contrary... What we want is to have the broadcaster be a very independent man, a leader in his community who exercises responsibility for what he shows to his community."