The Powerless Powerful

By Thomas Griffith

Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste.

--Edward R. Murrow

Among the media lords, William S. Paley is senior, successful and powerful, having built CBS into a giant with $3 billion in revenues and a payroll of 37,000. He watched over the growth of CBS News, the domain of Murrow and Cronkite, into the best newsgathering service in radio and television. Executives who make $500,000 a year tremble at his displeasure. Yet just how powerful, by his own lights, is this powerful man? The answer says a lot about the alleged power of the press.

In his new autobiography, As It Happened, Paley concedes the numbing mediocrity of prime-time television, but confesses that CBS can't do much about it. Instead he proposes that the presidents of the three networks meet and agree to give two hours a week in prime time--six hours in all--to programs that would appeal to "educated, sophisticated tastes more than to the mass audience." But for CBS to do so alone would be "forfeiting the whole night through the domino effect" on the ratings that are basic to "the financial well-being of each network."

ABC and NBC greeted the proposal with hints that Paley is really bothered because CBS has slipped to No. 2. Yet Paley made a similar proposal ten years earlier when CBS was indisputably on top, proud of being "mass with class." Is Paley now out of step at 77? He insists: "In this business at least, one always has to remember that he's not scheduling a network or anything else to please himself; he has to do it in order to please his audience."

To this, Columnist Russell Baker replies that much of what daily newspapers print is also trash: "The difference is that people in the newspaper industry tend to blame themselves for the low-quality stuff while TV executives tend to shift the blame to their audience."

Either way, anybody in the business of pleasing a mass audience--which used to be a simple game of playing hunches but is now codified, computerized and constantly tested by market research--can only by stretching the word be considered powerful. A powerful king could do as he damned well pleased; in France, the capricious Louis XIV has been succeeded by the democratic Giscard d'Estaing, who is allowed only to be crotchety. Networks and newspaper chains are far larger than what William Randolph Hearst ruled, but Hearst was a real press lord and his successors are not. Without radio, television or national newsmagazines to contradict him, Hearst's papers could plead causes or distort events on whim.

Television makes little enough use of its power to form public opinion, and not just because it is running all those sitcorns. Television in 1948 won the right to 5 editorialize on the air, but, says Paley, "finally we concluded there was no way the network could give editorial opinions on national or international subjects." Why? Because so many of its independently owned affiliates had different political opinions. Paley speaks of "heated arguments" with Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith about editorializing, which is why your ordinary local late-night radiogabber is a lot freer with his opinions.

Similarly, newspapers, as they become chain owned, are largely content to take the cash and leave crusading to others. It thus becomes harder to fulminate about the power of the press: to defy a trend can be an exereise--of power--(and of responsibility); latching on to a trend is merely doing business.

There are perhaps only two conspicuous examples of old-fashioned "press-lording" left. The political venom in William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader skews New Hampshire's politics, and even the state's closely watched presidential primary. In Michigan, John P. McGoff fired two editors in his small right-wing chain when they refused to give front-page play to a couple of vicious anti-Carter stories. Last week the government of South Africa admitted that it made available $11.5 million from a secret slush fund in 1974 during McGoff s unsuccessful attempt to buy the Washington Star. Presumably, South Africa hoped to turn the Star into a public relations organ for that country's racism. Loeb and McGoff are anachronisms, but hardly powerful.

Strangely, when Paley pleads his own 3 inability as a television lord to make "fuller and better use of this magic form of a communications," he does not mention Ed Murrow. They were once close, Paley's one exception to his rule about not socializing with office colleagues. Twenty years ago, in a speech that offended Paley, Murrow proposed a plan similar in some respect to the plan Paley now offers. In a cold war period when Murrow thought the country "in mortal danger," the newsman proposed that each of the 20 or 30 largest corporate advertisers give up one or two of their regular programs each year, turning the time over to networks to present serious public affairs programs on their own. They would be saying, as Murrow put it: "This is a tiny tithe, just a little bit of our profits . . . to indicate our belief in the importance of ideas." Murrow saw trouble "unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us." Murrow that night was concerned, gloomy, a little shrill. He said he wasn't proposing to make television a 27-inch wailing wall, but his message sounded a bit like that. The power that Murrow wanted media lords like Paley to exercise is exactly the kind they are resolved not to use.

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