Guide Goes Political

It seemed like old times. There was Presidential Aide Patrick Buchanan excoriating the "arrogant elite" who "control" network television news. Buchanan, who once honed many of the sharper expletives used by Spiro Agnew in his TV-baiting days, eagerly continues what he calls the "50-month quarrel between the Nixon Administration and the network news." He purports to speak for all the folks "west and south of the Hudson" when he asks: "Is it politically healthy, in this pluralistic society, for a tiny clique of like-minded men to decide in perpetuity what is 'the news' for 50 million Americans?"

Buchanan's rusty old cannon ball had impact in the TV industry last week, not because of what he said but because of where he said it: TV Guide (circ. 18 million), the viewer's bible. And Buchanan's column was but the first in a new Guide series that promises harsh attacks on the networks.

Called "News Watch," the department will offer commentaries on TV news by five regular contributors. The other four: John D. Lofton Jr., a newspaper columnist who until recently was editor of the Republican National Committee's acerbic weekly newsletter Monday; Kevin P. Phillips, a former campaign technician for John Mitchell and author of The Emerging Republican Majority; Guide Contributing Editor Edith Efron, author of The News Twisters, which accused the networks of pro-liberal bias in the 1968 election, and a sequel called How CBS Tried to Kill a Book; and John P. Roche, a Tufts University political scientist and former special consultant to President Johnson. Roche, observing that his "liberal Democratic loyalties still hold," cracked: "When I saw the lineup, I thought it would be fun to hold down one end of the seesaw against the others. I figure that I can handle the four of them."

The panel's pronounced curve toward the right suggested to some observers that the inspiration for the new series was Walter H. Annenberg, U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Nixon intimate and president of Triangle Publications, which owns TV Guide. Not so, says Triangle Editorial Director Merrill Panitt. He insists that "News Watch" grew out of the editors' feeling "that since more than 60% of the people depend on television as their primary source of news, it was our business to cover how television covers the news."

Panitt also denies that he chose the columnists for their ideological slant: "I was looking for people who are interested in television and had something to say and were saying something about it." He points out that his mandate to the columnists suggested no party line. "You may," he told them, "want to deliver an encomium for a brilliant example of television journalism or a blast at what you consider to be an example of bad television journalism."

The score so far: blasts, 2; encomiums, 0. Lofton followed Buchanan with an attack on CBS Correspondent Fred Graham, who is a law school graduate, for trying to obtain a White House tape to broadcast on the air. Had he succeeded, Lofton argued, an improper use of subpoenaed evidence would have occurred. (Graham denies any possible impropriety, insisting that he would have aired the tape only after it was submitted in evidence.)

TV newsmen are resigned to more of the same from "News Watch." Says NBC News President Richard Wald: "It doesn't sound like they're making an enormous effort to be fair." CBS Anchorman Walter Cronkite adopts a more stoical attitude: "This is the meaning of a free press. They're certainly entitled to print any criticism they want." One network executive takes the same elitist stance that angers Buchanan: "No one with an IQ over 70 reads anything in TV Guide except the listings." Which is a cute quip, but not quite accurate; network brass read the magazine with interest, if not affection.

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