No Deal for Public TV

After years of kicking public television around as intolerably liberal and Eastern-oriented, the Nixon Administration seemed ready to settle its long war with the Public Broadcasting System. If public television would stop trying to be "a fourth network," said Clay Whitehead, 35, the President's chief television adviser, the White House would press for the long-term federal financing that PBS officials felt was needed as insulation from political pressure.

PBS certainly carried out its part of the bargain. In the past 18 months, such liberal commentators as Sander Vanocur, Bill Moyers and Robert McNeil have disappeared from its schedule, although its public-affairs coverage has not been substantially reduced. It has also brought what the Administration fondly describes as "grassroots democracy" to the system by giving the nation's 246 local PBS stations the budgetary power to control programming by buying or rejecting possible PBS shows in a form of program "auction." Only those shows winning sufficient financial commitment from local stations will be included in the PBS lineup.

But now Whitehead seems unable to hold up his end of the deal. As reports filtering out of the White House have it, President Nixon "flatly rejected" a Whitehead-drafted bill that would have put federal support of public TV on a five-year basis and increased it from $60 million a year as of July 1 to $100 million by 1980. In a fit of pique at the proposal, Nixon left word as he set off for the Middle East that he wanted to cut rather than raise PBS funding and, above all, keep it on the short leash of year-to-year financing.

Nixon's switch deeply embarrassed Whitehead, who had planned to leave the White House after sealing the PBS deal. Whitehead personally leaked the story of Nixon's turnabout, evidently in hopes of forcing his boss to reconsider. But "it will take a miracle to turn him around," swears one Nixon aide. "He does not like public television, and probably never will."

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