On Television

...City folk have the romantic notion that everybody is breaking their backs down on the farm...

...Skorzeny also told us the ss had been maligned by the press: "We were only following orders...

...The night 60 Minutes reached this zenith, nbc launched Volume One, Number One of its magazine, By Marvin Kitman The Empty Pages First Tuesday...

...Down on the Farm was not simply another documentary on migratory workers or grape pickers, nor did it present what President Nixon would call "a laundry list" of everything wrong with farming (such as the fact that food doesn't taste as good as it used to...

...As a host, President Nixon has more stature than either Sandy Van-ocur (First Tuesday) or the Harry Reasoner-Mike Wallace team (60 Minutes...

...The ss colonel showed the inquiring cbs reporter who visited his Madrid apartment some old home movies of his thrilling rescue of Mussolini, spicing his narration with slurs against the Fascist fighting man...

...But he adhered closely to his campaign strategy of not announcing policies...

...Yet in testimonial after testimonial, nbc's model farm families insisted their life wasn't so different anymore...

...It is changing their character, once the backbone of America...

...A third example of the Trans-Lux Newsreel theater influence in television news programming is President Nixon's magazine, which made its debut January 27 and will be broadcast periodically for the next four years (with a four-year option clause...

...I'm sorry Representative Chisholm declined her appointment to the House Agriculture Committee...

...As an American taxpayer who has helped underwrite their making hay for a decade, I expected them to be happy at least...

...I'd particularly like to call his attention to the hour-long specials dealing with the nation's problems in depth...

...This chip off of the cbs idea will not win any prizes for creative programming...

...But the problem of what is happening to our rich farmers should not be ignored by either the President or taxpayers...

...As he explained in a low voice, "I don't believe policy should be made in offthe-cuff comments at press conferences...

...Chisholm quit the committee three days after it ran...

...The President's first press conference used the tv magazine formula: It touched on a lot of subjects and covered none of them thoroughly...

...Go-go girls in costumes helped make up their minds...

...had been appointed to the House Agriculture Committee...

...In scenes of stark realism producer-director Robert Braith-waite's film crews showed us a cross-section of American farmers forced to ride to state fairs in Cadillacs...

...I planned to miss it myself, until I read that weekend of a surprising development in the field of urban-rural interrelationships: Two of the House of Representatives' newest urbanologists, Representative Allard K. Lowenstein (D.-N.Y...

...Some day he expects Hollywood to make a movie about his exciting career, and he confessed that he would like Burt Lancaster to play Skorzeny...

...Somewhere during the two hours of First Tuesday, you realize that you are seeing what the movies used to call "selected short subjects...

...Few people noticed, though, that in no case did he say he appointed anybody because he was an old friend or political associate, a major story in itself...

...As one farm wife who looked like a Nassau County clubwoman put it, "We have all the conveniences of the average American home...

...The only advice I can give the President is not to forget that there are other news shows worth emulating...

...He gave the colonel guarding Mussolini a two-minute ultimatum to surrender...

...I was quite surprised to learn of their unhappy lot...

...He seemed to have gone on the air with such thin material primarily to assure the television audience that he was alive and well in Washington, much the way Mao Tse-tung periodically swims 16 or 20 miles up the Yangtze...

...First Tuesday is twice as long as 60 Minutes but for some reason is not twice as good...

...Within a minute the officer returned with a bottle of chianti...

...Naturally, nbc was not talking about all rural workers, only the 6 per cent who remained down on the farm...

...There was a sadness etched on these rich men's faces that made me angrier as the hour went on...

...His image is that of a man who knows what he wants, even if he doesn't know how to get it, and comes across as genial and eager to please...

...The old way of life has changed, and they are worried about the revolution's impact...

...She might have held a subcommittee hearing in her Bedford-Stuyvesant district in Brooklyn, taking testimony from the ex-farmers in her constituency on what Senator Eastland's receiving $200,000 a year from the Federal government for not planting cotton and other crops has done to his character...

...The House leadership could have been implying that the farm bloc and the city bloc are not that far apart...

...It occurred to me, while watching this glorious pageant of progressive agriculture, that the farmer has been replaced as the national drudge by the free-lance writer...

...and Representative Shirley Chisholm (D.-N.Y...

...Nixon broke with a number of his predecessor's techniques in staging his press conference...

...But the mini-interview on each Cabinet appointee helped the President get across the point that he had selected generalists instead of specialists, that his men could fit into any position in the Cabinet, and that he may have put some into the wrong jobs...

...For another thousand dollars," the narrator said while showing us a combiner combining, "the cab can be air conditioned...

...A recent example of interest to anybody in the White House was nbc's Down on the Farm (January 25...

...But maybe this was just a teaser for the program, since Mrs...

...We are sustained through the hour of cbs' magazine by bewilderment over the format...

...I would not have been surprised if the President-elect had concluded his all-star Cabinet show with, "And now keep your cards and letters coming, folks...

...This kind of coverage is reminiscent of Holiday magazine's stories about Georgia, which omitted any mention of the state's black population...

...The fear that handouts soften a' man's moral fiber may have finally come home to roost on the American farm...

...nbc's mistake, 1 think, is expecting tv readers to spend two hours with a magazine...

...The dummy (as we call it in the world of print) for this new magazine was unveiled last December when the President introduced his Cabinet on television "for the first time in history...

...Skorzeny said he pushed aside tbe 200 soldiers guarding the hotel entrance in the Italian Alps and rushed up the stairs to II Duce's room...

...My favorite piece so far was the interview with Otto Skorzeny, the prominent Spanish businessman, in the issue dated January 7. Aided by Robert Trout's amiable questioning, the former Nazi war hero explained that Hitler, whatever else you might say about him, was an anti-Communist...

...It was clear, however, that he looked more like Kirk Douglas...

...Some of the "extra dimensions" Nixon kept telling us his nominees possessed were discussed at greater length in the Senate hearings on the Hickel confirmation...

...nbc tried in a desultory way to explore what was really undermining the character of these successful businessmen...

...Rising prosperity, all the farmers interviewed by nbc seemed to agree, is responsible for their angst...

...The dreamers, idealists, incompetents and other weaklings who could not adjust to the demands of modern agriculture have fled to the cities...

...He appeared before reporters in the East Room of the White House without a lectern, and even more significantly, without the protection of the Presidential seal...

...The show was probably ignored by most city folk because of the subject matter...

...The nbc special, for the first time to my knowledge, came to grips with the plight of those forgotten people, the successful farmers...

...He interviewed himself on his reasons for picking the Cabinet, answering all questions candidly...

...Could it be, as the Republicans used to suggest, that Federal aid programs corrupt their recipients...

...Against a background of quotations from famous American yeomen like Thomas Jefferson (who unbeknownst to the narrator was driven into bankruptcy by farming) about the dignity of rural life, we saw grizzled men perplexed by the variety of time-saving machinery on display at the fairs...