CONGRESS and the FCC SHENANIGANS

...President of the Herald-Traveler is Sidney S. Winslow, board chairman of the United Shoe Machinery Co., convicted a few years previously of violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act...

...m In Miami a license was issued to a combine of the Knight and Cox newspapers, one with a monopoly in the morning and the other the evening field...

...Obviously, the TV industry itself is not going to use its medium to educate people about the fierce backstage scramble for domination...

...While they might enjoy rocking someone else's boat, they don't want theirs rocked...

...Both come from Wisconsin where they served on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission together...

...The flood gates opened...

...The minority leader in the Senate, Senator William Knowland, is also in the business...

...The example of the way the Washington Post, which was one of the first to break the Schwartz story, "chickened out" in the showdown was a sad experience for those who have admired its fight against corruption in Washington...

...Already in command of newspapers in the morning, evening, and Sunday fields, the Herald-Traveler application was made through its 50,000-watt clear channel radio station, WHDH...

...Doerfer's move was in reality a bold Machiavellian stratagem to force the Democrats to a showdown on Schwartz before Durfee was called to give the details of the junket on airline expense...

...Pearson continued to dispatch excerpts from the suppressed report, a copy of which had come into his hands...

...they were taking money in expense payments and honorariums from interests with business before the FCC...

...He ran into "loyalty" trouble, which, as Doerfer later told a Senate committee, was the result of his concern that Lamb might join a Communist uprising...

...But the rest of the press, including the Washington Post, which dropped out after firing one shot, brooded in silence...

...Schwartz was later to make the same charges but the house fell in on him before he had an opportunity to prove them...

...Telegraph editors across the nation had to cut their way through reams of wire copy quoting the New York Times quoting the secret report...

...They are good friends...

...The Committee voted not to bring out the dynamite-laden facts its probers had unearthed, even though $250,000 (the sum appropriated for the probe) may be wasted...

...Lamb had the money to fight it...

...The networks, with powerful influences in Washington, have succeeded in expanding the quotas for individual ownership to seven stations and have extended their ownership throughout the nation...

...Among other local stockholders was the Wisconsin State Journal, the morning paper which gives Madison the Republican antidote to Evjue's liberal crusading...

...At about the same time Warren Unna of the Washington Post and Times-Herald reported that a secret memorandum prepared by Dr...

...Fly speck stuff," snorted old Sam Rayburn who had worked to keep the charges secret and the investigation from "running away...

...But it is obviously not going to come from Congress or the press...

...Powell was asked by the FCC to testify about the "coaching" of the witnesses...

...What set off the panic was that Dr...

...Though Schwartz was to work for Congress, great pains were taken by the White House to screen him...

...In the middle of the Schwartz uproar he announced petulantly to newsmen that he had disposed of his stock to stop the eye-brow raising among them...

...Its members customarily bring no better qualifications to the job than that they performed their political chores well...

...The big networks, for example, can provide invaluable publicity by inviting members to be guests on the various "Face the People" shows which are forever recruiting speakers on Capitol Hill...

...George Allen, Eisenhower's good friend, is on the board of directors of Crosley...

...With this monopoly a scientific achievement of untold educational potential is perverted to grotesque political ends...

...But he served to dramatize to the nation the iron clad immunity from investigation FCC enjoys...

...The record discloses that there have been seven abortive investigations that resulted in no remedial action by Congress...

...But in the Clarksburg (W...

...Schwartz, compare the scholarly professor to the late Senator McCarthy...

...The wire services, which had kept a stony silence through the Pearson chirping, awoke to the majestic fog horn of the New York Times...

...The Cox paper also owned a radio station in Miami...

...It has been said that there is scarcely an owner of one of the 48 million TV sets in the country—regardless of make or model—who has not paid some of his money to RCA because of its incredible agglomeration of patent rights...

...It has big interests in KTCB-TV, Austin, and scattered interests in other stations in the Lone Star State...

...Newspaper publishers and editors who go to their conventions to indulge themselves with scotch mists and exalted rhetoric about the "people's right to know," ought sometime to give some fleeting reflection to whether the press hasn't in reality subjected itself to government regulation by its affiliation with the broadcasting industry...

...There was no question about Evjue's financial ability and experience...

...As for local ownership, the other applicant was Morgan Murphy, an outsider, who had incorporated the usual "ringers" to give a homegrown coloration...

...There are many others in Congress with radio and TV holdings...

...This was the kind of story that excited newspapers during the Truman Administration...

...Schwartz' Geiger counter when Congress, the FCC, the White House, the TV industry and its allied newspapers took away his pick and shovel and hacked him to pieces...

...Time even found a similarity in their voices...

...Diversification was also the grounds cited for refusing a license to the McClatchy interests in California...

...Two years ago he made noises about investigating FCC but nothing happened...

...What happened to the doctrine of diversification...

...Publishing Company case, the FCC refused even to consider that criterion despite the extensive radio, TV, and newspaper holdings of the licensee...

...Schwartz...

...He said that he had been the guest of an airline on a golfing outing to Pinehurst, N. C. He added, with gratuitous candor, that Chairman James Durfee of the Civil Aeronautics Board was along...

...But prodded by two letters from Senator McCarthy, who was then riding the crest of his power in Washington, the Commission reversed the examiner and gave the license to Murphy...

...On Saturday, February 8, Drew Pearson's broadcast on that station was censored to remove his references to Chairman John Doerfer's padding of expense accounts and acceptance of favors from the broadcasting industry...

...The McClatchy interests, someone noted, were pro-Democratic...

...Newspaper investments in TV operations are too substantial to be taken frivolously...

...Durfee immediately, almost eagerly, asked for an opportunity to appear before the Moulder Committee to explain...

...The most notable magazine contributions have been made by Professor Louis Jaffe, of the Harvard Law School, in Harper's for September, 1957, and by Robert Ben-diner in The Reporter for September 19, 1957...

...Doerfer's implicating of Durfee was mystifying...

...Four other applicants filed, one of whom could be ruled out for want of local ownership...

...He resigned and took a position with the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters...

...The public, as the polls show, has been persuaded that if pay TV is given a trial it means the end of free TV...

...Anyone who watched the TV newscasts of the Schwartz case saw a shining example of "glancing blow" news coverage...

...But the muckraking of an industry invested with a public interest is woefully lacking...

...HI Only Congress can save this rich prize in the public domain from the pillaging now in progress...

...When the uproar on Capitol Hill became so loud that it could no longer be ignored, the cameras were dollied in to catch Dr...

...Senator Lyndon Johnson, Democratic leader in the Senate and the most potent man in either house, has the LBJ Company (his wife's name is Ladybird Johnson...

...He kept seeing things, however, and had to go...

...Just as the FCC must answer to Congress, Congress must answer to the public...

...There has been much talk about such investigations, but they always seem to peter out...

...After the original story the Post backed away and began to publish tippy-toe editorials...

...Gerald Morgan, White House legal counsel, determined after a check on his Republican pedigree that he was qualified to overlook those things a Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight is supposed to overlook...

...Truman Administration the people had been trained by the press and the Republican Party to recognize the moral depravity in fly specks...

...Both said they had been "coached" to lie by FCC personnel...

...Lamb, as Fortune magazine reported, "insisted that the original complaints against him had been made by competitors who sought to drive him out of business and acquire his stations...

...The referee in the great struggle to dominate this monopoly is the FCC...

...The hectic development of TV offers a rich field for robust muckraking or scholarly inquiry...

...A study of FCC cases made by Professor Louis Jaffe of the Harvard Law School brought him to the conclusion that the criteria are merely "used to justify results arrived at for other reasons...

...Editor and Publisher, trade organ of the business, reports that 12 newspapers sold TV and radio properties in 1957 for a return of $40 million...

...The FCC itself has evolved criteria to guide it in the granting of TV licenses...

...It appeared to many that Doerfer had deliberately compromised a Republican colleague to turn some of the attention from his own conduct...

...Consider the Madison, Wis., and Boston cases: In Madison VHF channel 3 was open...

...When one considers that the chief asset in these transactions is a legally protected monopoly of the public domain it is not hard to see why newspapers are not eager to look too closely at the government agency that approves the transfers...

...The relationship of members of Congress and FCC members has mutual advantages, as one of the reports about the Schwartz incident illustrates...

...Schwartz in the most unflattering poses possible, and the commentary was salted with caprice and sugared with whimsy...

...Marie Natvig, one of the principal witnesses against Lamb, was convicted of perjury—not because she lied about Lamb but because she admitted she lied about him...

...And this was done in the same week that the nation paid its annual tribute to the man who said "government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth...

...It cost him $100,000, but if he had not been wealthy it could have cost him his broadcasting holdings...

...Another witness admitted perjury...

...Pay TV, which proposes to give the public some relief from gun slingers and patent medicine peddlers in doctors' garb, is being smothered by the propaganda of the established TV interests...

...It is left to frail men like these to make the vital decisions in this game of giants...

...UHF is being killed by the networks, just as they killed FM radio to protect the big clear channel stations...

...Local ownership is a grand fiction...

...Representative Oren Harris, Arkansas Democrat, is chairman of House Interstate Commerce Committee, the House watchdog over FCC...

...The criterion of "financial ability and broadcasting experience" obviously favors the established interests...

...In Boston one of the most valuable channels in the nation was at stake— estimated to be worth $20 million...

...In April of 1957 Harris informed the FCC that he had a 25 per cent interest in KRBB-TV in El Dorado, Ark., which he purchased for $5,000—$500 in cash and a $4,500 note...

...It was no surprise to see Time, in its treatment of Dr...

...But unlike Evjue, Murphy has never allowed his extensive newspaper, radio, and TV holdings in and out of Wisconsin to antagonize anyone in the Republican Party...

...After exhaustive hearings in which lengthy testimony on all points of the criteria was taken, an FCC examiner, who had never been overruled by the Commission, recommended for Evjue...

...To make their lives even more confused Congress has provided a law that permits them to take money, gifts, and divers favors from those with business before them...

...These cases were only part of the lode that was registering on Dr...

...Local ownership," "financial ability to operate," "past experience in broadcasting," and "diversification" (spreading of local control of news media) are among the major yardsticks...

...There is one suggestion that an imposing factor is the heavy holdings in TV of some influential members of Congress...

...Millions of words have been published about the froth...

...There are other reasons why members of Congress are reticent about showing undue curiosity about the FCC and the TV scramble...

...If you think the magazines are doing any better than the press, go to your library and consult the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature for the articles on the real dynamite in the TV story...

...He has written for The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Post, and the New York Times...

...To understand why, it is helpful to know that of the 497 TV stations in operation, 182 are owned by newspapers, many of which are among the most powerful in the nation...

...The American people had had a peek, and Congressmen are aware that in the deep freeze and mink coat era of the MILES McMILLlN, editorial writer for the Madison Capital Times, has made a special study of the Federal Communications Commission for several years...

...National Airlines received a license in Miami when the Commission overruled the recommendation of an experienced examiner who found National the least qualified of the three applicants...

...The examiner who conducted the hearings relied on the Madison precedent and ruled against the HeraldTraveler on grounds of diversification and gave the award to the Greater Boston Television Corporation, made up of distinguished civic leaders in Boston...

...It is a monopoly that permitted the television industry in a year of its infancy, 1957, to earn almost a billion in profits by offering cowboy and Indian shows as the come-on to the quackery that features mellow-voiced announcers in doctors' jackets telling us what to do for our colds, our fevers, and our ulcers...

...Evjue is also the principal stockholder in radio station WIBA, with which he pioneered radio in Madison...

...But for a week it rumbled around Washington's underground, while the White House, the high command in Congress, the FCC, and TV and radio interests sought to work the magic that had always succeeded in killing inquiries in the strange affairs of the FCC...

...Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who contributes money to the Republican campaigns, has been picking up licenses around the country...

...There is a shocking story to be told of how UHF is being strangled as the big money moves to concentrate its hold on the preferred VHF outlets and the networks concentrate the high budget shows on VHF...

...The most fantastic hearings in the history of any government regulatory agency ensued...

...The current chairman of the FCC, John C. Doerfer, triggered the indescribable moral squalor of the Edward Lamb case...

...One of the current roster was chiefly prominent before his appointment because he was the late Senator McCarthy's leg man in the 1950 Senatorial campaign in Maryland against former Senator Millard Tydings—a campaign that was denounced by a Senate committee for its "back alley" odor...

...But the fat was in the fire and the flames threatened to illuminate one of the great untold stories of our time...

...It is a story of how private interests establish a legal monopoly of the air we breathe...

...It went to GOP Chairman Leonard Hall, Presidential aide Sherman Adams, Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks, and Senator Everett Saltonstall...

...The CAB is supposed to regulate the airlines...

...The FCC has been asked to investigate the use that established TV interests have made of their facilities to propagandize against pay television...

...CONGRESS and the FCC SHENANIGANS by MILES McMILLlN During the week of January 11-18, 1958, Drew Pearson dispatched from Washington a column marked for release January 17, which began with this statement: "After a bitter all-day backstage battle, the Moulder Committee finally decided to side-step an inquiry into corruption inside the Federal Communications Commission, the agency which decides who will get valuable radio-TV licenses...

...This is the case in which evidence was submitted that Commissioner Richard Mack was "loaned" thousands of dollars by an interested party and that Colonel Gordon Moore, the President's brother-in-law, was a friend of George Baker, president of National...

...The only guidance Congress has provided for the commissioners is the admonition that licenses worth billions should be granted if "public convenience and necessity will be served thereby...

...With millions looking on, Congress stripped him of his authority to prove his case and then challenged him to prove it...

...Lamb, a wealthy Ohio industrialist and Democrat who had several radio and TV licenses, applied for a routine renewal of his WICU license in Erie, Pa., in the fall of 1953...

...When Chairman Doerfer was sweating it out under cross examination he let drop a strange admission...

...Actually, both would be available to the viewer...

...This censorship by the Post occurred at the same time that the Post's able and conscientious executive editor, Russell Wiggins, was appearing before a Congressional committee in behalf of the American Society of Newspaper Editors to protest against government censorship...

...Finally, on January 23, the New York Times, after an examination of its conscience and its slogan, printed the story and a text of the secret report...

...Both have extensive radio, TV, and newspaper holdings elsewhere...

...The indifference of the press to the suppressed Moulder Committee report for the week that Pearson was running excerpts was rooted in something more serious than innocence or ignorance...

...This is the parent committee of the Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight...

...A parade of witnesses went to the stand to charge that Lamb was a Communist...

...It is observed chiefly by bringing in local "ringers" whose authority in the corporate structure begins and ends with a rubber stamp...

...Although there are four other radio stations and three other TV stations in Madison, the Commission held that on grounds of "diversification" it had to keep the license from Evjue...

...Drew Pearson reported that the Herald-Traveler had not bothered making its arguments to the Commission...

...Bernard Schwartz, chief counsel of the Moulder Committee, made charges that members of the FCC had been indulging in some rather compromising conduct...

...They are all human...

...The planning of the case was in the hands of Walter R. Powell, Jr., chief of the FCC Broadcast Bureau and a "Doerfer man...

...Nor is the TV story bothered with snooping reporters, with the exception of Drew Pearson, who has been trying to tell it for months...

...Senator Warren Magnuson is chairman of the powerful Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, which has the FCC under its wing...

...He pleaded illness and was never called again...

...There is also the question of domination of broadcast electronics by the Radio Corporation of America...

...The report cited an opinion from the Comptroller General, watchdog of government expenditures, that a criminal code violation was involved in the practice followed by some commissioners of accepting money from both private sources and the government to cover the same expenses...

...Schwartz has forced the press to tell the public more about the TV story than has ever been told before...

...Why has Congress, with its lust for investigating, neglected the rich pay dirt in the FCC...

...The Boston Herald-Traveler, reputed to be the most powerful Republican paper in New England, wanted it...

...Then he went back to the job of pulling the trap door on Dr...

...Schwartz was moving toward the story of the corruption of the public domain in which billions of dollars are at stake...

...And the stations back home can be cooperative with understanding members by providing free time for the "Your Servant Reports" films, which are run off for modest sums in the subsidized studios Congress has thoughtfully provided for itself...

...The Crosley Radio Corp., of Cincinnati, with stations in Cincinnati and Dayton, got itself a license in Indianapolis, Indiana...

...The Post owns radio and TV station WTOP in Washington...

...The facts were too hot to handle...

...But this examiner, who apparently thought the Commission was serious in the Madison case, was also overruled and after a bitter backstage struggle the Commission handed the license to the Herald-Traveler...

...Before the proceedings were over, the charges were completely refuted...

...And the wire services, never noted for crusading zeal anyway, serve radio and TV interests as well as newspapers...

...The most reasonable thing to be said about "diversification" is that it performs miracles...

...Schwartz, in his naive zest for truth, didn't seem to comprehend the nature of the sanctuary he was invading...

...One applicant was the Badger Broadcasting Company, whose principal stockholder was and is William T. Evjue, a political independent who learned his politics from Old Bob La-Follette and proved his lessons in his historic, uncompromising fight against McCarthyism...

...The Commission subsequently gave a license to KIRO-TV, Seattle, in which Magnuson has a four per cent stock interest...

...But before he could be called to testify, the get-Schwartz drive was rushed to its dramatic climax with strong Democratic support...