Broadcasting Telecasting (Jan-Mar 1960)

EDITORIALS Politics over principle THE stage was set at the FCC last week for broadcasting to demand emancipation from unconstitutional government controls. But broadcasting wasn't equal to the setting. The major elements of radio and television presented eloquent defenses of the broadcasting record and eloquent arguments for constitutional protection of radio and television as organs of free speech. In the next breath the same witnesses undid much of the good that had been done by making concessions that were transparently political. It may have been coincidence, but the NAB, NBC and CBS gave presentations which, while differing in detail, were fundamentally alike. Each statement contained persuasive descriptions of broadcasting's many virtues and candid recognition of its imperfections. Each made a strong legal and philosophical case against government influence in programming. Yet all agreed in their conclusions that the FCC could exercise some degree of program surveillance as a means of determining the character of station applicants. At that point all three jilted principle for political expediency. The political advisors could be imagined whispering in the background: "Don't forget the FCC is in trouble and has to write something that will make it look tough." THE essence of the reasoning advanced last week by the NAB, NBC and CBS was this: It is unconstitutional for the FCC to review programming. But it is quite all right for the FCC to evaluate the character of an applicant on the basis of the programming that he proposes, if he seeks a new grant, or that he has been broadcasting, if he seeks a renewal. This reasoning is not new. It has been repeatedly used by the FCC to make excursions into one form of program control or another. The wonder is that it has survived so long in a world where logic still has some function. If the FCC sets out to judge a man's character by his programming, it must first make a judgment of the programming itself. Before it can say by this process that an applicant is good or bad it must first decide that the standard by Which he is being measured — his programming — is good or bad. How can the FCC evaluate programming, as the prerequisite to evaluating the character of the programmer, without straying into an area that is marked off-limits by the First Amendment? At this point the advocates of this process retreat behind a haze of doubletalk. It is all right, they say, if the FCC looks at a program service in totality as long as it steadfastly refuses to evaluate individual programs. Here the FCC is asked to perform a neat trick. How can a program service be described or judged without reference to its parts? Well, say some, let us look at it by percentages of program types: A percent commercial, B percent sustaining, C percent religion, D percent public service, E percent recorded music, etc. Is A percent commercial better than B percent sustaining, or worse? Is C percent religion enough, too little, too much? What is the correct percentage of recorded music? Is it a balanced schedule? What is balance? The futility of reaching acceptable answers to these and countless other questions like them has been conclusively proved in 25 years of FCC administration. As two witnesses, NAB and NBC, testified last week, the statistical method is meaningless. What better substitute can be suggested? Well, let's try a narrative report, said NAB and NBC. Let the applicant describe the service he has rendered or will render. From then on both NAB and NBC turned vague. What should an applicant tell the FCC in this report? How can he write a narrative description that will be more meaningful than a statistical report without describing, in intelligible detail, the programs that make up his service? The record of the testimony last week gives no guidance on that matter. The fact is, of course, that judgment by statistical report and judgment by narrative are equally prohibited by the First Amendment. Either method puts the FCC into some degree of program control. To read the law submitted by the same witnesses who argued for FCC surveillance over programming is to be certain that the constitutional principle they first embraced and then ignored is very much at work. THERE are limits to the protection that the First Amendment gives all media. It does not protect them from prosecution under laws against obscenity, incitement to riot, treasonable acts and utterances, lotteries and many other crimes, The violation of criminal law ought certainly to be a subject for FCC inquiry into the qualifications of a broadcast licensee. But there is a vast difference between a government investigation of a criminal act and government investigation of a program service about which no question of criminality has been raised. The difference is as great as that between the killing of an armed bandit in a gunfight with the police and the confiscation of a newspaper which criticizes a crooked police commissioner. These distinctions tend to disappear in a political tumult as violent as that which has been aroused by the payola and television quiz disclosures. Broadcasters must hope that the FCC can be wise enough to resist the demands for tighter government controls. The hope would be more realistic if the FCC had been given a less diluted dose of principle by its chief witnesses last week. Drawn for BROADCASTING by Sid Hix "/ forgot to tell him you were coming in to give an income tax broadcast"! 106 BROADCASTING, February 1, 1960