Prostitute of Merchandising

Beyond all the charges and countercharges that rocked television, there was evidence of real concern for the corruption of a major communications medium. The Christian Science Monitor's call for a government-established network, run like the BBC by a "public corporation" and paid for by the licensing of TV receivers, seemed a logical solution to some. Last week Pundit Walter Lippmann advanced a similar idea for a new network dedicated not to private profit but to public service.

There is sure proof, wrote Lippmann, "that there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which TV operates." The U.S. laissezfaire policy, he argued, has turned TV into "the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising."

Carefully avoiding any suggestion that his suggested nonprofit network should be Government controlled, Lippmann argued that its virtue would be its freedom to produce "not what will be most popular, but what is good." TV violence, degeneracy and crime, said he, would be replaced by "effective news reporting, good art and civilized entertainment."

"We should not," said Columnist Lippmann, "shrink from the idea that such a network would have to be subsidized and endowed . . . Why should it not be subsidized and endowed as are the universities and the public schools and the exploration of space and modern medical research, and indeed the churches--and so many other institutions which are essential to a good society, yet cannot be operated for profit? . . . Among [the mass communications media] there must be some which aim not at popularity and profit but at excellence and the good life."

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