Battle Joined

Last week the fight began in earnest--the fight of their lives between the big broadcasting companies--NBC and CBS --and FCC's tough-minded Chairman James Lawrence Fly.

Since the Federal Communications Commission last spring scandalized the big broadcasters by issuing eight regulations for the conduct of their businesses, both sides have had their say in rough-&-tumble hearings of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, and in conferences during the summer. The effective date of the new regulations was once deferred, once postponed, then suspended. Lately the word went round Manhattan agencies and studios that FCC had been lobbied to a standstill, was lying low.

But Chairman Fly does not work that way. For radiomen to digest over last weekend, he and a majority of the Commission (four of six) issued an amended set of regulations, to go into effect Nov. 15, on which FCC was obviously prepared for a showdown. Columbia Broadcasting System immediately signified its intention to seek an injunction against FCC in a Federal court. The battle was joined.

Professed aim of FCC's original regulations was to put small radio stations in a better business position relative to the chains, to open up competition and to afford new networks more weaving room. The Commission held that its rules would exhilarate the industry; the chains held that they were violent, unjustified, and would wreck the industry. Last week's amendments acknowledged the cogency of some of the chains' arguments by making sizable concessions to them. The amendments:

1) The order which required NBC to divest itself of its Blue network was indefinitely suspended. The Commission felt that, since the undesirability of two networks under one ownership was generally conceded (e.g., by its own dissenting minority), the Blue would be sold sooner or later, and it did not want a forced sale on its conscience.

2) The order limiting contracts between stations and networks to one year* was changed to two years. Purpose: to insure stability of network business arrangements. At the same time, the Commission yielded some of its own power by making its licenses good for two years instead of one.

3) The order forbidding stations to give a single network options on most or all of their daily broadcasting time (as at present) was amended to provide that within each of three five-hour periods and one nine-hour period a station can give options on up to three hours. (But a chain must ake up its option on no less than 56 days' notice, and the time goes to the first chain that actually buys it.) Purpose: to enable a network to "clear" the same hour over a sufficient number of stations for program sponsors.

4) The order prohibiting the present "exclusivity" of contracts (by which even if a local affiliated station does not take a particular network program, no other station in the same area can get it) was modified to allow the affiliated station "first call" on programs of the network with which it is affiliated.

These concessions may have seemed reasonable to the Commission, but they were rejected hotly and in toto by both NBC and CBS. Said CBS: "The Commission . talks of stability when in reality it is creating instability ... it talks of promoting competition whereas it is merely forcing chaos. . . ." The chains contended, as before, that FCC has no power to make such regulations, that its action constitutes a threat to the freedom of the air.

But Chairman Fly was by no means up against a solid industry opposition. The amendments were in fact made upon petition by Mutual Broadcasting System, the fast-growing cooperative network which stands to lose nothing by an unchaining of small stations.

Moreover, among U.S. stations, a movement has been under way to break away from the National Association of Broadcasters, trade association more or less dominated by the big chains, and to which more than half of the 882 U.S. stations belong. Three weeks ago in Chicago a convention, attended by 200 station representatives, solemnly voted to make membership in NAB no requisite for membership in the National Independent Broadcasters association. Since then NIB membership has doubled. At Manhattan's Rodeo, Cowgirl Alice Greenough took a WOR mike along on a straightbucking broncho to describe her sensations to the radio audience. Alice's description was brief: "Ooph . . . ooph . . . ooph!"

* They have previously run five years, with the network, but not the station, at liberty to cancel after one.

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