On Television

...The TV magazine, as Les Brown points out in his excellent book, TV ??the Business Behind the Box, is a program format the commercial networks invented (Fust Tuesday, Sixty Minutes) to keep up appearances after they let the classic one-hour documentary on a single subject fade from view in the late 1960s "The compendia of short pieces mixing together light and serious subjects with an occasional investigative film,' Brown notes, is actually a copy of what Canadian television had been doing so well The panel discussion of Jacobs' little investigative film also was something of an uony It was not enough that public television's magazine did not do the piece, they had to have 11 people talk for 120 minutes about why they didn't do it (In the rerun later that week, incidentally, the time was expanded to 135 minutes, as new material kept being added in the style of that other great discussion show, the Congressional Record ). It took an exceptionally long camera shot just to get the whole panel on the screen The group picture for what was later called "the longest show on earth" reminded me of that supercommercial by a stock brokerage house then making the rounds on the major networks ("Merrill Lynch is bullish on America") While the thundering herd of august panelists pawed the ground and snorted menacingly, preparing to charge at the truth in this "Anatomy of a Decision," the viewer could sit back and ponder how far the art form has come...

...On Television WOOD PANELS BY MARVIN KITMAN HE TV TALK SHOW-the most effective instrument for keeping viewers informed that the medium has thought of since it was invented m 1927??was best defined by Brian Sharnoff A state assemblyman and host of an obscure discussion series loved by the literally dozens of people who watch New York's municipal UHF station (WNYC-TV), Sharnoff explained "We put five people together and see what happens when wood rubs against wood ". By that standard the October 8 premiere of Behind the Lines, a show produced by New York's WNET that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) considered vital enough to distribute to all of its 205 stations, must take top honors No less than 11 faces filled the screen True, man for man more distinguished panels have been assembled But at least the name of one participant, PBS president Hartford N Gunn Jr, ranked with that of such famous geographically-named TV luminaries as Tennessee Ernie Foid and the Chicago Teddy Bears, even if he is something of a nonentity to the average educational television viewer Paul Davis, a reporter for the Tuscaloosa News, isn't especially well-known outside of Alabama either...

...The other panelists, though, all had their followings Edward Bliss Jr, associate professor, American University School of Journalism, Les Brown, Variety TV editor and author, Benno Schmidt Jr, professor of law, Columbia University, Bill Kobin, vice president for programing...

...New York Times...

...Schmidt unexpectedly came up with a question "I'd be curious to have Mr Gunn say what impact, if any, that sort of vague but nonetheless somewhat threatening inference of Mr Hoover's letter had on his decision not to run the program" (This was a reference to the FBI director's threat to turn the matter of Jacobs' piece over to the Justice Department, even though the FBI already is part of the Justice Department ). It was a beautifully put point, but professional talk-watchers across the nation must have groaned You should never do that on a panel The experts are there to answer questions, not ask them When a senator is asked, "Will the gentleman from the great state of confusion yield the floor7" the smart ones always say, "I yield to the gentleman for two minutes " Schmidt, who is a lawyer and a full professor, should have known better Gunn's reply, "None whatever," raised so many questions that the professor never was able to get the floor back Jacobs, on trial for the competence of his documentary, also fared badly There was no time for the defendant, despite the length of the program...

...Still, the talkathon was a classic piece of textbook journalism??in the words used by Les Brown to describe a commercial network documentary, "all facts and no truth " As for the Jacobs piece that inspired the whole affair??the original was shown at the...

...TJL he panel spent half of the two hours explaining who does what to which arm or leg of the public TV complex in the pursuit of journalistic excellence I'm glad somebody finally exposed this issue, but don't ask me to explain the web of interrelations in public broadcast-ting With all the initials and acronyms thrown around in the discussion, I'm afraid the capital-letter mechanism on my typewriter would get metal fatigue...

...As far as anybody in the business recalls, this was the first time a TV news or public affairs program had ever put so many live bodies on camera (10 guests, plus the moderator, Jim Lehrer, better known as the editor of Newsroom on station KERA, Dallas) when it was not recording a crowd scene The panel had the potential for starting a forest fire, at worst, it figured to generate enough ego-changed electricity to run a small-sized television transmitter for a week...

...beginning of the program and a new improved version came at the end??it was pretty good, except that it had been done before Some eight months earlier essentially the same story had been shown on NBC Nightly News, and it had been printed m the New York Times, too...

...More Machiavellian minds have accused the CIA of exerting pressure to get the Jacobs story deleted, on the grounds that the FBI was receiving more than equal publicity time on the government-supported public broadcasting network The evil, inept act of suppression did have all the earmarks of a typical CIA operation But my theory is that the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB), PBS and NET engineered the fuss themselves Money is a big problem in public TV this year, and the relatively cheap publicity gimmick succeeded in getting everybody talking about the first edition of this season's Great American Dream Machine Nothing was lost save honor...

...The subject discussed at the convocation was a 12-mmute film by Paul Jacobs about undercover agents who allegedly had been encouraging radicals to commit acts of violence so the FBI could then crack down on the New Left The film had been deleted two days earlier from the TV "magazine" Dream Machine, Volume I of which was hailed last year by members of the public television establishment as the greatest achievement m TV journalism They rewarded the magazine this season by reducing the air time for Volume II by a third There is no telling what would have happened to the show if it had been merely above average...

...Hoover may no...

...National Educational Television (NET), Paul Jacobs, the writer, Alvin H Perlmutter, executive producer, Great American Dream Machine, Robert Lewis Shayon, TV critic, Saturday Review, and A M Rosenthal, managing editor...

...The essential elements of any talk show today??in public or commercial TV??are the coffee table and one-legged chairs In the early days of the medium, when the formula was first perfected, they used four-legged chairs The difference between TV news and public affairs programing at that time and now seems to be that they've lost three legs I'm not sure whether this is a step forward or backward I was still mulling that over when the 120 minutes came to an end Suddenly the essential fallacy in the art form became clear??the key words are "Well, we've just about run out of time ". The program had originally been scheduled to last 60 minutes Doubling the time meant that the start of Masterpiece Theatre had to be delayed an hour No doubt hundreds of thousands of people enjoy a good panel show, and only a handful would want to see Jude the Obscure Yet when the station apologized for delaying Jude to bring me the preceding important discussion, the few insights I had gained were lost m my anxiety that I might have missed the significant part of the drama (the nude scenes) This is not to say I didn't learn anything from the longest film about a film ever made Benno Schmidt, whose name sounded vaguely familiar, was particularly instructive A network executive told me he thought the professor was a member of the bullpen at the Sunday New York Times Magazine who comes in to do a piece whenever Barbara Ward gets sick In any event, while the other panelists were kicking around a definition of censorship...

...What the entire controversy posed was not a First Amendment problem so much as an editing problem Perl-mutter, Kobin, Gunn, Representative Harley Staggers (D-W Va ), Representative Wilbur Mills (D -Ark ), or whoever is in charge of Dream Machine should have exercised his rights and told Jacobs "Do this over, it's not fresh enough The problem is not whether it offends the FBI or public TV's angels m Congress, but that you shouldn't be using recycled network news ". Nevertheless, it is amazing how many viewers who read newspaper accounts of this tempest m a plastic teacup before and after the magazine went on the air without the Jacobs segment automatically assumed the FBI was responsible for the censorship That, of course, is absurd...

...know bow to stamp out organized crime, but he knows how to manipulate the media By doing nothing, he could rest assured that the show would be quickly forgotten...