Whither the Buck?

A proposal to get the public to share in the responsibility for TV programing last week highlighted the networks' attitude toward their urgent problems. One night last month Board Chairman Sigurd S. Larmon, of Madison Avenue's topflight Young & Rubicam ad agency, suggested to the major network presidents that a committee of responsible citizens be set up to make recommendations for TV reform. The response of NBC's Robert Sarnoff and CBS's Dr. Frank Stanton were made public last week. NBC took up the adman's idea with enthusiasm, expanded it into an elaborate proposal (complete with preamble) as neatly put up as a packet of Sen-Sen.

Responsibility for what appears on TV, said NBC, should be properly spread among networks, local TV stations, independent producers, ad agencies, advertisers, and the viewing public. Possible members of a "public policy committee": the president of the American Bar Association, the president of Vassar, an ex-chairman of General Electric, Educator James B. Conant, retired U.S. Judge Learned Hand.

CBS summed up the citizens' committee idea in three words: passing the buck. Added Frank Stanton: "What is every body's business is nobody's business, and eventually becomes Government enterprise." Television should resist any sort of outside control. "We must be masters of our own house, and rise or fall on our own performance."

With both CBS and ABC against his plan, Adman Larmon conceded that it had little chance of success. NBC bought a full-page ad in eleven U.S. newspapers to say that the network "assumes complete responsibility to the public for what appears on NBC." But the ad also insisted that "TV wins a daily vote of confidence in 45 million American homes," and rejected "grandiose schemes for television's Utopia." Unfortunately, NBC has so far brought forth no notable schemes, Utopian or otherwise, seems to be spending much of its brainpower working over the pity of it all. CBS has reiterated its own notion of responsibility--without having done anything noteworthy about more balanced programing, either--convinced that its function as broadcaster should not be parceled out to committees, however eminent their members.

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