The Case Against Crime

The horrified middle-aged women sat and watched 91 murders, seven holdups, three kidnapings, ten thefts, four burglaries, two cases of arson, two jailbreaks, two suicides, a homicidal explosion, one blackmail and assorted cases of assault & battery and attempted murder. All of this violence, reported Mrs. Clara Logan, president of the Southern California Association for Better Radio and Television, was seen by association members--between the hours of 4 and 9 p.m.--during one week of television shows over six of Los Angeles' seven TV stations.

Bashed Heads. In a broadside of letters to the stations, with copies to local newspapers and the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, 49-year-old Mrs. Logan temperately asked for the substitution of "acceptable programs which would be suitable for family viewing and listening . . ." FCCommissioner Wayne Coy thanked Mrs. Logan for her report and called it a "good job." The Los Angeles stations had no comment, except for KNBH, which replied that her action would only call attention to the very things she disliked and thereby create further interest in them.

But Mrs. Logan's outcry raised echoes which were rumbling throughout the U.S. last week. In the Midwest, even individual TV stations joined the crusade. Walter J. Damm, general manager of Milwaukee's WTMJ-TV, which had already turned down NBC's Lights Out and CBS's Suspense, and called for a nationwide cleanup, said that? "the time has come for independent TV stations to take positive action about the whodunits." In St. Louis, General Manager George M. Burbach of KSD-TV said that he had been deluging NBC for months with "our objections to gory programs of all kinds. We're convinced that horror on television is a mistake and bound to bring unfavorable mass reaction sooner or later." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, owner of KSD-TV, editorialized: "Dramatic murder ... is older than Sophocles. But ... the most popular dramas have never displayed, as their principal reason for being, bashed heads and riddled bodies. As employed by television, these are the devices of third-rate drama and first-rate irresponsibility."

Bad Marks. Finally, in the East, someone mentioned the word that TV fears more than any other. Baltimore's Catholic Review, accusing NBC's adapters of "outdoing Mr. Poe himself" in televising The Fall of the House of Usher, warned: "When one considers that young children view television, it amounts to something that needs censorship."

Variety reported that the panicky industry was passing the buck to "outside producers and advertising agencies" and hastily contemplating a self-governing "code." While it considered what to do, it got the worst blast of all. In Clifton, N.J., Elementary School Principal Charles M. Sheehan flatly blamed "the late hours kept by children due to television programs" for schoolwork "inferior to my accepted standard." As an anti-TV clincher, Schoolmaster Sheehan announced some damaging statistics: "Last year at this time there were but two failures in one class. This year, in the same class, there are 30."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.