The Playboy Panel: TV'S problems and prospects

Panelists

John Crosby, syndicated columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, has long been one of television's ablest and most trenchant critics; though he now levels his sardonic gaze on the world at large, he still maintains an incisive interest in the unhappy medium. He is known to Playboy readers as an author of both fact (It's Like This with TV, Playboy, May 1957) and fiction (A Star of the First Magnitude, Playboy, May 1961).

Mike Dann is CBS Vice-President in Charge of Network Programs; prior to 1958 he was Director of the Program Department and Vice-President in Charge of Program Sales for NBC; he is, thus, an exceptionally qualified spokesman for the network point of view.

John Frankenheimer is, at 31, among the country's most admired and iconoclastic directors (On the Scene, Playboy, December 1958); though his major work has been in television (most notably the defunct Playhouse 90), he has also directed for Hollywood and Broadway.

Stan Freberg is an irreverent satirist and outspoken gadfly who has enjoyed success with his own radio show, his humorous records (Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America), and his production of bright TV commercials. Thus far his appearances on TV have been limited to guest shots and one-shots.

Mark Goodson is a prolific television producer whose firm, Goodson-Todman Enterprises, Ltd., is among the largest and most successful packagers of TV entertainment, specializing in panel and quiz shows such as What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and The Price Is Right.

Gilbert Seldes, author and critic, is one of America's most energetic commentators on the popular entertainment scene. Director of pioneer television programs for CBS from 1937 to 1945, he has authored numerous TV and movie scripts; his books include The Seven Lively Arts (1924), The Great Audience (1950) and The Public Arts (1956). Seldes is TV critic for the Saturday Review and Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rod Serling is perhaps the most outspoken of today's practicing television dramatists. The winner of innumerable industry awards for such literate studies of the contemporary scene as Patterns, The Rack, Requiem for a Heavyweight and Rank and File, he is also Executive Producer and sometimes writer and director for Twilight Zone.

David Susskind heads Talent Associates, Ltd., is perhaps the most widely known TV producer. He has achieved commercial and critical success with such productions as Marty, The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Winslow Boy; he is also responsible for The Play of the Week and hosts Open End.

Playboy: Television -- the most massive of the mass media -- has been subjected to a closer scrutiny in the past months than has befallen any other medium, or TV itself, up to this time. Particularly since Newton N. Minow described it as a "vast wasteland," it has not only been discussed and dissected, it has also been belabored in terms almost as extravagant as those its PR men have mustered in its defense. It has been accused of perfidious greed, playing fast and loose with the public good, corrupting the morals of the young -- and being just plain dull as mud. As panelists who have been in the thick of the game for years, you will not be asked to re-explore the ground which multiple hearings and symposia have trod so diligently before the public eye. Let us, instead, proceed at once to the question of TV primarily as entertainment, to an exploration of its present, as such, and its future, as such, too. The charges leveled against it have become truisms, as have the righteous cries of "censorship" which have been raised against those who would improve it via legislation. We will strive to be both more practical and more imaginative in our probing of the medium to which this panel devotes so much professional attention. Gentlemen, let us begin our discussion with a quote from an article in the anniversary issue of Variety entitled What Price Mediocrity? "It is obvious to all but the programing executives of the networks that the masses are being cheated of real entertainment. That the millions who dutifully buy the soap and the beer and the deodorants are a sad, clubbed, captive audience who would love to be surprised and intrigued and charmed and entertained -- but just don't know what to do about it." Mike Dann, since you are a programing executive, what's your reaction to this criticism?

Dann: Well, I don't think that you can make any blanket statement about television in general. You have to address yourself to trends, kinds of programing or a specific program in evaluating it. First of all, programing can be divided into two kinds: entertainment programing, and then the coverage of the real world, by which I mean news, public affairs and documentary. In the news or public affairs or real world area, there has been a steady spiraling upward, both in the quality of the coverage and the amount of the coverage. In particular, during prime evening time -- the important hours when people watch. So if we evaluate television trends of recent years in the real world area, we can be very happy, optimistic, upbeat and positive. On the other hand, if a critic wants to evaluate the entertainment area trends, then that's quite a different kind of evaluation. I am not as happy about conditions in the entertainment area as I would like to be.

Crosby: Yes, but this is a rather false way to look at things. In the first place, I think that public service is exactly what television was set up to do. This is the kind of service they ought to perform all the time rather than, you know, applauding themselves whenever they do put on a particularly good program. If you look into the percentages of just how much public service there is and exactly when it's on, you find out it's pitiably small, it's usually on at the worst hours. I think that most of the improvement in public service programing has simply come about in an attempt to forestall criticism.

Serling: But, precisely how much the bulk audience wants to be surprised, delighted, enthralled and uplifted is a moot question. That's got to be proven. Too often, when the competition is very explicit between a cowboys-and-Indians and an Omnibus, the massive audience immediately proceeds to go out under the plank. No, you've got to prove to me yet that the audience by and large is as astute as you claim.

Goodson: I think most of the mass audience is mediocre. When I use the word "mediocre," I don't mean I have contempt for my audience. Mediocre merely means technically down the middle. I used to pick pears when I was very young, in the San Leandro Valley in California, and we would divide them into boxes. You know, the choice ones would always go to New York and the crummy ones would go to the cannery and most pears would come out in the middle, and most of everything is mediocre. I think there are distinguished television programs, and there are terrible programs, and most of them are in the middle, and that's mediocre. And I think that audiences get pretty much what they want and demand.

Freberg: Well, the only real way I have, in my own experience, of evaluating the intelligence level of the audience or their desire for a more intelligent approach to, let us say, humor and advertising -- which are the two fields that I am mostly involved with -- is the fact that I have sold over 5,000,000 single records -- records which were admittedly sharp and sophisticated. Now this says something for the intelligence of people, because they went in and laid down $4.98 for those things. But that is only half the picture. All of my commercials that I have done for various clients have been very sophisticated -- by advertising standards. And the products they have moved is gratifying indeed, because it proves that people, when you approach them, not with a baseball bat, but in an intelligent manner that gives them credit for some intelligence, and you amuse and entertain them with soft sell, evidently they're so grateful they rush out and buy the product.

Playboy: Newton Minow himself, speaking at a Northwestern University symposium, said that in his view, some commercials were more imaginative than programs. And yet, when TV Guide published an open letter to Minow -- this was before he had called television a "vast wasteland" -- in which they were critical of television, they received about 200 letters from readers, with the count running about three to one against their position, saying, in effect, "Why don't you and Minow shut up -- we like television as it is!" Whereas, when TV Guide included a parenthetical phrase in a piece about Rod Taylor, star of Hong Kong, saying "... there is only a faint hope it will return to the air next season," they received over 3700 letters and cards to be forwarded to the sponsor, virtually all asking that Hong Kong be returned. Whereupon TV Guide editorialized: "At face value ... more viewers are concerned with bringing back Hong Kong than with broad, drastic steps to improve the quality of programing ..."

Susskind: Look, this is an extension -- of a piece, really -- of an ancient and rather dull argument that what television is now doing is giving the public what it wants. George Bernard Shaw once said, "If you give the public what it wants long enough, pretty soon the public begins to want what it gets." Now, the public has been fed an almost unending diet of trivia. When it isn't mediocrity, it's shockingly bad, for the most part. They've been bred on that. This is the tradition of the television dial, with some brilliant exceptions. After a while, they become inured to it; they get used to it and they like it. However, that begs two questions. The first one is that the television airwaves are in the nature of a public utility. They are owned by the people of the United States and leased by the Government to private contractors who swear that they will use them in the public interest. And the use of it for Hong Kong and Roaring 20's and The Untouchables and Lawman and Cheyenne and Rifleman and The Price Is Right--the excessive number of pap programs--is shortchanging the public interest and doing it incalculable damage. Now, if the public interest is to be honored in the observance as opposed to the breach, it is the responsibility of the broadcasters to exercise leadership--and this is the second point I want to make: it is not the business of broadcasting to essentially give a balanced programing diet to a public that needs it through an instrument that has become the greatest information, education and entertainment medium ever invented. It is their job to lead, not to follow the horde. If the public voted overwhelmingly for an unending diet of Hong Kong and Roaring 20's and Maverick, the public would be wrong and responsible leaders would attempt to divide the load to give pure entertainment, pure escape in some proportion to meaningful programing. On the other hand, I think that if Gilbert Seldes had his way, he would turn television into symphony, ballet and Shakespeare. I think that would be as oppressive in its own way as the ridiculous diet we now enjoy. I think balance, again, is the watchword, and I think pure eggheadism overdone on television would repel.

Seldes: What I am interested in is that what most people see most of the time should be constantly improving in quality. I don't give a hoot if I could never see Shakespeare on television until twenty years from now. I would say, all right, provided that the shows that you do put on do get better from year to year to year -- that is the way to get people to watch Shakespeare. Actually, Shakespeare is rather roughly popular at present, but suppose you say Henrik Ibsen -- who is, as a matter of fact, a rather dull writer, but he has something to say -- and if you put before your public a series of things which constantly rise in their quality, that is the way in which eventually they will say, "Now we'd like to see Ibsen," and so forth. But if I had to make a choice between improving the quality of the Westerns and adding ten percent of Shakespeare, I would say improve the quality of the Westerns. I am saying the opposite of what David just attributed to me. I have been saying that for 25 years. The middle book of the three books I've written basically about this is called The Great Audience, which means I am interested in the audience and not the creator. I am interested in putting before the audience; exposure is the basic thing. You put things in front of people and you find out what they want. You cannot find out what they want by putting things in front of them which they obviously do not want.

Freberg: What makes sponsors think that the poorer the quality of the show, the larger audiences they'll get?

Frankenheimer: Well, when we were doing shows like Playhouse 90 and NBC Sunday Showcase and even Ford Startime -- the Ingrid Bergman thing which got a huge rating, maybe because Ingrid was on it -- most of the time, programs like Tennessee Ernie -- and I think he is a very talented man -- consistently beat us. So, I think that when the vast audiences had a choice they went for what is currently called bad entertainment. And I think that the tragedy of the whole thing, really, is that when you consider that a show like Playhouse 90 was reaching upwards of twenty, 25 million people every Thursday night and the network officials called it a failure, that's the tragedy of the situation, you know. It isn't so much that it didn't get a huge rating in the range of 50 million people like some of the other shows did -- like Ed Sullivan does, or something like that -- but the fact that you can be a failure and still reach twenty million people. Playhouse 90 was opposite the Tennessee Ernie show, and then The Untouchables came on and really creamed Playhouse 90, just in terms of mass popular appeal.

Seldes: I've heard this from far less esthetic people than John Frankenheimer. A TV executive, Ted Cott, once said to me, "This is a hell of a business, where 40 million people is considered little if someone else has 40 million and a half."

Freberg: That is a tragedy, though. Twenty million people are a lot of people. In radio that was considered a tremendous mass audience. And it still is a mass audience. My gosh, that's insanity, to look at it that way. I'm in a unique position -- I am dealing now, through advertising, with clients who will gladly settle for an audience of twenty million if that twenty million becomes militant and goes out and buys the product, you know?

Goodson: Let's put it this way. In New York I can read The New York Times to get a full story of the news and to get interesting comments by James Reston; and then I can also, if I have the time, read the Daily News, which, in its own way, is an excellent newspaper which does human interest, scandal, gossip and is an exciting, bizarre newspaper. But if that were television as we know it, both these newspapers would come on at the same identical hour, wouldn't they? You have a choice to make. You've got to take one or the other. That's what happens in TV. And it is a tragedy that a program with millions of viewers is considered to be a failure because it's opposite a program with maybe a couple of million more.

Serling: That, of course, is a major problem -- there is such a totally quantitative approach to what constitutes success.

Playboy: It might be interesting, at this point, to hear the words of Roscoe L. Barrow, Dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and FCC consultant, who spoke them at a symposium on "Responsibility in Broadcasting." Barrow said, "... Marketing motives are a major factor in the network program selection process. This is the strongest influence in the character of television programing today. ... A program is sponsored because it is deemed a good vehicle to carry the advertising message. With rare exception, a program does not stay on the air unless it sells the product. Omnibus, a show of great cultural and educational quality, could not survive the hot sun of commercial analysis." He went on to point out that the advertiser who pays the bill for "free" TV (up to three million dollars for a season's alternate sponsorship of a half-hour show) has to recoup through sales of this product, and that few advertisers who sell quality products to a limited audience want -- or can afford -- network advertising. The mass marketers, on the other hand, require the largest possible audience. He then cited Playhouse 90 -- with an audience of twenty million, for four years -- giving way to a Western. Would you say the economic motive is at the root of TV's troubles -- any more than any other communications medium is detrimentally influenced by this motive?

Susskind: The increasing, spiraling astronomical costs of television have driven people in their frenzy -- the advertising agencies, the sponsors and the networks -- to seek the largest audience at the lowest cost. Numbers have become the be-all and end-all of the broadcasting industry. The ratings are the Ten Commandments of our life, and if that be true it would seem that the largest number of millions can be captured by the cheapest kind of programing. The ultimate low level of this kind of thinking is probably pornography, but short of that, this kind of price frenzy, equating cost per thousand with value received, has led to television's being turned into a giant comic strip.

Crosby: I reject the whole concept of television as a popular medium. In the first place, I don't believe in ratings. I think it's absolutely immoral to run a system as a popularity contest, anyhow. But I don't think the ratings are any good. In other words, I don't even think it's a true popularity contest. I have lectured up and down the country. I've met many, many people, and I find almost nobody in the business who really has a great deal of respect for the ratings. If they get a good rating, they won't run them down, but they don't really believe them. However, even if the ratings were perfect, I don't think that this is an adequate way to run a huge communications industry. These people have a responsibility and they're not fulfilling it. I think the way things have been going, up a blind alley, that television has so completely lost its interest, they're losing their audience. However, they are all defending the rating system which, again, I find hopelessly false. I mean, you take an outfit like Nielsen. Nielsen is kept in business by the television networks, which pay them millions of dollars a year. They're not going to tell them that they have no audience. If they did, they'd get another rating service that would tell them what they want to hear.

Frankenheimer: The way television is set up in this country right now, it can in no way be called an art form, because basically what you're doing, when it all comes right down to it, after everything has been stripped away, what you're doing is selling a product. Now, whether you're doing it by means of a soap opera, an old movie or a television dramatic show, the result that really is counted by the network officials and by the sponsor is how many tubes of toothpaste you've sold. And I don't think that in those terms television can be called an art form any more, I really don't.

Dann: Good programing, as in any other creative area, comes from good, able people. Television's growth can only take place by experimentation and doing things effectively. This means that bureaucrats like myself, program executives, must be willing to take gambles. We must be effective in building good pilots so the advertisers will participate in these gambles, and then we must be effective in carrying out the series.

Frankenheimer: Oh, sure, in the beginning, when we were all new at it and when the medium itself was new, the relative cost of a television program was so small that the advertiser decided, "What the hell, let these guys do what they want to do, and we'll see if it works." In other words, they were experimenting, too. That was before they realized the full potential of television as a sales medium. The result was that some wonderful shows were done. But gradually, as the cost of television programing became greater, the advertiser got more and more cautious, and also as the climate of fear began to hit this country with Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee and all those pressure groups -- you know, fear began to be more and more a problem. In every area, not only television. There began to be, in a sense, almost a form of mental isolationism, so that gradually more and more advertisers decided that they really couldn't do anything controversial at all because more and more of these pressure groups would write. And while I am so dead against these pressure groups that I can hardly talk about it, they -- at least on their own terms -- were active. I mean, they wrote, they created a terrible stink so that advertisers would really listen to it. Now the people that just sat back on their rear ends, you know, week after week, and sucked all this free entertainment in, like Playhouse 90 and Philco and Studio One and United States Steel -- all these kinds of marvelous shows -- we hardly ever got any letters that said they liked them. Most of the letters we got were from pressure groups and from cranks who wrote that they despised the shows. Boy, oh boy, and all hell used to break loose! I mean, television is a business. Its primary purpose now is that it is an electronic supermarket.

Serling: An electronic supermarket? Gee, I wouldn't go so far as to say that, because I see too many fine things on television to excuse this kind of generality. Let's say that it conceivably could be far better if it were allowed to be.

Playboy: Possibly, "allowed" is the critical word in your comment, since we seem to have been talking in terms of pressures that prevent quality. But Professor Louis L. Jaffe, of the Harvard University Law School -- a specialist in communications law and hardly an apologist for current practices -- raises another point, or points, rather: the scarcity of talent, and the audience's own attitudes. In the same symposium referred to earlier, he said: "Let's face it: there are a vast number of programs which by cultivated standareds are bores. But surely part of the problem is just that there are a vast number of programs. Mr. Minow seems to think that there are thousands of clever people ready and willing to fill his 'vast wasteland' with an infinity of pleasant prospects. Look at the other media. There are only a few good movies each year, three or four good plays, and a handful of good musicals. Surely there has never before been anything comparable to TV's enormous maw, hungering for entertainment. How is it possible running on a timetable week in and week out to avoid the stereotype? Anyone who sits supinely before TV waiting to be constantly amused deserves no better than he gets. The most alarming thing about TV is not its undeniable dullness, but the apparent fact that so many people have nothing better to do than to sit constantly before it. I insist that these passive sponges are so completely bereft of culture that for them the quality of programs is immaterial."

Of course, we all know pressures do exist. Do they come primarily from the sponsor, or from his ad agency?

Serling: It works both ways. On occasion, a very energetic: ad-agency man will project and make an assumption of fears which he thinks will be held by a sponsor, and blue-pencil even before the sponsor has let those fears be known. On occasion an agency man will be much more permissive and allow a show to go up to the wire, and then suddenly the sponsor himself will take a hand. In my experience this is rarely the case with the networks. They usually are kind of middlemen who respond to the pressures, the external pressures, but they themselves don't generate them -- though this is not to say that the networks are particularly shining white knights and should be decorated for courage.

Freberg: I think that agencies and sponsors and networks have an absolute obligation to television. The airwaves belong to the people, and although it may come as a shock to Madison Avenue, those airwaves are there for a little more than simply getting a "unique selling proposition," as Rosser Reeves, the head of the Ted Bates Agency, puts it in the best-selling book called Reality in Advertising. Mr. Reeves' clients are the Whitehall Pharmacal Company, which is Anacin and Carter's Pills; Preparation H for hemorrhoids; Colgate's don't let romance fade, fade, fade away. I call Mr. Reeves the dean of the gastrointestinal school of advertising. I think advertising has a responsibility to contribute to the raising of the cultural level of our society. But in no event must it ever contribute to the lowering of the level. Television is the world's most enormous bulk of audio-visual garbage, but I still think that we cannot blame the sponsor, be cause the average client is like a child who needs to be led by the hand. Anyway, it's more important to me that television be improved as a mass medium than that a client use it as a more efficient tool to sell his product. I'd rather see advertisers forbidden by law to use television if they couldn't show more responsibility in their control of it.

Crosby: In Great Britain they have commercial advertising, and there it's against the law for the advertisers to attempt to exercise any control at all over programing.

Goodson: Could I cut in for one second? Don't you think that it's interesting, we are not only Anglophiles in America -- we love English tailoring and English pipes and English tobacco and English accents and titles -- but we also, among our eggheads and critics, have this feeling that English television, both the BBC and commercial, is somehow inherently superior. That is particularly true of those who haven't seen English television, you know? Well, I just got back from Europe yesterday, and I've seen a great deal of it. Goodson-Todman has four shows on English television, which are done by English panels. And I've seen their programing. I think it's a kind of amusing commentary that Wagon Train is the number one show in Great Britain.

Crosby: That's just getting very popular television. It has brought about a decline in standards, but nothing like the decline in our own country. There's nothing like the direct control by the advertiser there. It has been said that the philosophical basis is wrong, but there's no reason why it should be wrong. By the same reasoning, the newspapers are slaves to the advertisers, except they're not. They're supported by the advertisers but they're not enslaved. Now, there's no reason why television has to be the slave of the advertisers.

Playboy: We're now getting into an area in which there's been a lot of allegation without too much supportive evidence. Quoting Dean Roscoe L. Barrow again, we find an advertiser in the situation of having no control whatever; in this case, it was the network that dumped a quality program: "An example of conflict of interest between advertiser and network is provided by the demise of the Voice of Firestone. In 1954. NBC pre-empted the time period used by Firestone in order to include the Sid Caesar Show. Firestone was unwilling to sponsor the Sid Caesar Show because it was not deemed to reflect the corporate image of Firestone. NBC was unwilling to continue the Firestone musical show because the show was not achieving audience ratings comparable to those of CBS' Arthur Godfrey Show. The Firestone show then found a place on ABC, where it was subsequently replaced by Adventures in Paradise. Thus, a high-quality show, attracting a substantial -- but not the greatest possible -- following, could not maintain a place in prime time although the advertiser desired to continue it."

This may be an exception, of course. A widely read book, The Big Picture, avers: "Television's greatest handicap is the way it is financed. It is a slave to the advertiser, who, in turn, must be a slave to the bland formulas that guarantee him the greatest possible audience at the least possible cost..."

Goodson: I have mixed feelings about that. Frankly, I would prefer a system whereby the networks had total say over what went on. On the other hand, if the networks had absolutely untrammeled control, it would really mean that a tiny group in one network -- we only have three places in which to sell our shows -- would have sole determination. Right now, it's tough enough to get your programs on because the networks still really have to approve your show, but if a big sponsor wants the program badly enough he can apply pressure to help you get it on. And, incidentally, you do have to face the fact that in spite of all the crying and shrieking on the part of the egghead packagers about the naughtiness of sponsors, there have been situations where sponsors have wanted to keep programs on the air that had less rating, but that they liked, and the networks have booted them off. We know the situation of the Firestone hour of music, where the sponsor said, "We like it, we don't care if we get a minority audience," and the network said, "We don't want you on." There have been instances, I think, in the public affairs department, where the networks, in order to maintain absolute authority in that field, have turned down outside public service shows purportedly on the grounds that they did not like those shows, but, I think, more realistically on the grounds that they didn't want packagers monkeying around with a field that they would have control over.

Playboy: David Susskind, wasn't that your experience in trying to sell a series on President Truman?

Susskind: Yes. I think this would be a program of real consequence to the American people. It is the first time that a living ex-President has consented to tell the story of his seven years in office -- the great events, issues, decisions, the motives that impelled him, the opposition that he encountered, an evaluation of what he did and how he feels about it today. And I have found, up to this point, no takers.

Playboy: Mr. Dann -- any comment?

Dann: On the President Truman thing, that was in a different department at CBS. I only handle entertainment programing, and that went to our news and public affairs department ----

Susskind: Let me say that Mike Dann is an exception in the industry. He's a bright man, a cultured man, a man with a conscience and a sense of responsibility, and Mike personally represents the best kind of instincts about television. He is caught up frequently in the corporate thrust for profits and ratings and competitive standings and is not always empowered to do what he would like to do as a broadcaster.

Dann: I'm very complimented that anybody would say anything nice about a network bureaucrat.

Susskind: Broadcasting is a labyrinth of conflicting motivations, of aspirations with the necessity for compromise, with desiring to capitalize on the medium's peculiar strength to do a job for a free electorate, together with the need to place them in a hypnotic trance so that they'll buy cigarettes and gum; and these compromises are abundant and everywhere. But I can't believe that this industry will not finally come to the awareness of the importance of this Truman program. I think it will become an absolute must for scholars of this period in history when they come to do their theses and books. It's a unique opportunity, because other series such as Winston Churchill's were essentially compilations of old film clips. Churchill was unable to function on the series. The F.D.R. story will be, again, old film clips and narration. But we have ex-President Truman. He is available for retrospective analysis and introspective analysis and factual reporting on great events -- the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Berlin airlift, the Korean invasion, the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan -- the events that affected our lives and the lives of the entire world. I feel that Mr. Truman said it better than I can. He said, "If only we were able to have such reportage, in television terms, on Lincoln and Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson. How much richer the historical record would be." It's more than entertainment, the Truman program; it's absolute education. One network said of it: "We're up to our navel in Presidents." Another network said, "It's one of the most exciting programing ideas I've ever heard, but it does invade the area of public affairs programing and that is a network exclusive. That domain is ours alone and we will suffer no independent production." The third network said, "We pass." All of these add up to "Not for us, thanks."

Playboy: If what you say is true, don't you find it surprising that the networks would pass up what might also be a large audience-attractor?

Susskind: Yes, but you have to be careful in television. There's large, larger, largest. This will not compete with I Love Lucy, and it will not compete with The Untouchables, in terms of largeness of audience. It will have a huge audience by any reasonable, sane standards. I would guess, ahead of time, that this program would be seen by something like nine to fourteen million people. In any economy in the world, that would be a huge number of people and very worthwhile. By television standards, nine to fourteen million is just an average rating and a little depressing if contrasted with The Untouchables and the Ed Sullivan show. We've got to get back our sanity, we've got to begin to realize that nine and fourteen million are not no people. It is not a programing disaster. It is a terribly important segment of the population which must be fed the diet it wants on television.

Goodson: What I object to is the position taken by certain critics that the public ought to be told what it should like. I think the head of the FCC said that, just as you don't give children ice cream three meals a day because they want ice cream, likewise you merely can't give people what they want in entertainment. I think that basically is slightly antidemocratic, because when you're an adult, if you want ice cream three times a day, you've got it.

Playboy: There seems to be some confusion as to the FCC's possible violation of freedom of speech. The Communications Act forbids the FCC to censor; that is, to prevent the broadcasting of any individual program on the ground that its content is objectionable. It also forbids the FCC to select broadcasting licensees on the basis of the social, political or economic views embodied in their programs, or on any other arbitrary basis. However, the Communications Act both permits and requires the FCC to make reasonable judgements as to the nature of the broadcasting program service which serves the public interest and to carry out its licensing functions on the basis of such judgments. In fact, a largely ignored statement by Minow in his "wasteland" speech was this: "I am unalterably opposed to governmental censorship. There will be no suppression of programing which does not meet with bureaucratic tastes. Censorship strikes at the taproot of our free society." The link between Mr. Minow's position and Mr. Jaffe's, previously quoted, was provided by a viewer who wrote to the FCC wanting to know what channel Vast Wasteland was on.

Goodson: That's a good title for a show -- What's My Wasteland? -- could be a good quiz.

Seldes: I'd say this. First, I give you a quote and then I'll tell you who said it. The quote is "There is never any need to apologize for entertaining people." Now this, you would think, would be a network president. It is actually from a work by Bertolt Brecht, who was the most advanced -- and, as it happens, in the end, the most communist -- of people, who was defending pure entertainment theater. Now, what we are getting on television is an appeal to a very limited, but basic, set of appetites. Among the things that the industry has to be troubled with is that it begins to be terribly expensive to feed them. It is particularly expensive to change the formula. Now, what I'm saying is that the multitudes are not being cheated in the sense that they want anything else terribly. I don't think they do. But the thing that interested me is that I think that every once in a while -- and I think the last two years have been a case in point -- in a sense the quality of the ice cream has gone down. Now, 90 percent of the people who object to the fare on television object on a ground which I find absolutely untenable. They say they -- the ten percent at most; actually, about one percent -- are not getting as much as they're entitled to. Or, I'll put it the other way. You could have a television programing system in the United States which would be almost without criticism if you had ten percent more highbrow stuff. And to me this is sheer, bloody crap. Let's go back to this famous phrase that television is a "vast wasteland" -- in the first place, I don't think that T. S. Eliot is a name to invoke when you're talking about a popular art. In the second place, it's not a wasteland, it's a jungle. It's overgrown with too many different things. But every single person that has used this phrase has indicated, you know, that they're perfectly willing for all the other people to starve in the Sahara Desert, provided you have four more oases. I am totally opposed to this. The point is not the absence of more good things; it is the fact that the average thing is of a low quality in its own category.

playboy: What factors do you think are responsible for this low level of quality?

Seldes: Money.

Susskind: It really has to do with a philosophical attitude about broadcasting. The sponsor and the advertising agency have treated it essentially as a purveyor of goods, as a method for selling merchandise and not as a responsible communications device charged with serving the public interest. Now, if it is only a hawker of goods, if it is only a way as opposed to billboards and newspaper and magazine ads to sell cigarettes, soap and detergents, then perhaps that way can best be accomplished by the cheap qualityless programing that we have. But the other philosophy that I think is going to come into currency is the philosophy that this is an important means of instruction, education and enlightenment, and entertainment. And that philosophy, when it takes hold -- and I think it will in the fall of 1962 to a far greater extent than ever before -- will see a new kind of conscience in broadcasting; a serving of the public interest.

Dann: There has been less and less influence by advertisers and agencies in what goes on the air as the networks have assumed more responsibility for what goes on the air. Agencies and clients, despite what has been said, have very little influence in what goes on in a dramatic anthology series, like a Playhouse 90. There may have been, from time to time, objections to a certain word, like the gas incident, which we were wrong on. I think we made a mistake in deleting the word "gas" in a Playhouse 90 production, Judgement at Nürenberg, sponsored by the American Gas Company. We make lots of mistakes. But that isn't just because of advertisers or agencies. We make mistakes because we're only human, and some of us aren't very good, maybe. But that's true of many creative areas: mistakes are made. But very few of our mistakes can be attributed to advertising or agency pressures. Advertisers and agencies do not want bad programs. They are not the ones who are clamoring for action shows, if you please. They are interested in getting good value for their money. But I have yet to meet a client who wouldn't rather be identified with an important program versus a less important program, or a quality program versus a nonquality program. Their only requirement is that they get a certain circulation, which is their business. They should ask for that. They're selling goods and services and want to do that as cheaply as possible. The clients do not advocate mediocrity. They do not advocate unoriginality. They want success, as a backer does of a Broadway show. But they never have determined for us or defined for us what makes the success. That's our business.

Frankenheimer: In the setup that television has found itself in over the past ten years, the elimination of the word "gas" was inevitable -- absolutely inevitable -- I mean it couldn't have been anything else. You know, that was one of the few things that ever reached the public. That kind of thing went on every week. For instance, we did a show called A Town That Turned to Dust, written by Rod Serling, which finally ended up as a show against lynching. Let's face it, that's about as uncontroversial as you can get. There was a lot of noise about the show, but basically it's very uncontroversial. I mean nobody wants to lynch anybody. But that's not the way the show started out. It started out as a contemporary drama about what happened to the two men that killed Emmett Till, you know? Really, what happened was that the whole town, in a a sense, turned against them for reasons of guilt in our contemporary society. It was a very interesting script. And the idea was -- it was played in 1960 or 1959, or whenever it was -- and it was based on fact. Now, what happened was that the sponsors read this thing and said that there was just no way they were ever going to put this thing on the air. I mean they just wouldn't conceive of sponsoring such a program. It had been scheduled for the first program of the second year of Playhouse 90, and we were all set to go with it when they turned it down. Hubbell Robinson [at that time Executive Vice-President in charge of Programing at CBS] fought like crazy for it, you know, but they said no. So, finally, we had to give up and in a sense create a substitute at the last minute that we whipped together, called The Death of Manolete. Now, we practically never worked again after The Death of Manolete. I mean it was a disaster. But part of the reason it was a disaster was that it had to be put together in such a damn hurry, because the sponsors wouldn't accept the original show. Oh, we finally did it, but the way we did it was, we had to make it a Western. We had to predate it 100 years. We had to eliminate a Negro and substitute a Mexican. I mean it was ludicrous, what happened.

Serling: I think that kind of problem will be with us for as long as you have a sponsored medium. There will always be, and forever, with every sponsor and every sponsor, an area timorous as regards the so-called offending of the mass viewers. In other words, I don't think you will ever achieve that degree of quality that, say, the proscenium arch does or the novel or the short story because, unlike any other art form, we are controlled by sponsors. This is just a fact of life we're going to have to live with. Now, within that framework, we can operate in a much more mature fashion, but there is a limit to that maturity and I think we've already reached that. I don't think we can hope to see Play of the Week that often as standard fare on television. I just don't think this medium will ever support it.

Playboy: In our last Playboy Panel, "Sex and Censorship in Literature and the Arts," the panelists pointed out the putative moral reasons behind censorship in books and films. But television censorship comes from a different point of view, doesn't it?

Serling: Even worse than that. I think innate in this is the inability to find a point of view. The censorship that you talked about pertains to objectionable censorship of ideas; of less importance but just as irritating is the censorship of lines in the name of a product. Hence, you can't ford a river because the show may be sponsored by Chevrolet!

Playboy: Along that line, recent FCC hearings elicited testimony that an electric company wanted a different title for Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed; also an advertising agency eliminated Abraham Lincoln's name from a Civil War drama because Chrysler sponsored the program. Are these merely entertaining trivia, ludicrous but not of very great significance -- or are they symptomatic of the industry's malaise?

Serling: Of infinitely more importance, overall, of course, is the whole principle of an American artist being unable to call his shot as he sees it, whether it be in television or anything else.

Goodson: I think Rod was tempted into Twilight Zone not by lack of restriction but by an interesting business offer where he was given, I think, substantial equity in the series. I think it's an excellent series. I happen to love Twilight Zone. But I don't think Rod turned to that merely because they said, "Now you can do it without restriction."

Serling: I've got very little sponsorial or agency or even network interference on any level on Twilight Zone. Part of this can be attributed to a prearranged agreement. I promised I would try to remain tasteful on everything I touched, and they in turn promised me that they would do no specious or capricious blue-penciling. They have no prerogatives in changing a line, even. And this way, we have a pretty happy marriage. Now, much of this, of course, is due to a precensoring on my part with my prior knowledge of those areas which I know would be difficult, so I just don't touch them. They're the usual ones and the very obvious ones. Sex being one, religion being another, color and race being yet another. And these are the three tough areas. The alternative, of course, is to shoot 24 minutes of film at the cost of $50,000 and then have it relegated to perdition in my own projection room where only I will see it, having paid for it. There's an unfortunate economic reality that we have to live with. This is not to say that I deliberately cheat, shortchange and write down. I don't do that at all. On the level and within the framework that we try to operate, I think we're reasonably high in quality.

Playboy: Apparently, then, even in the unusually permissive framework of Twilight Zone, there is a kind of self-imposed pre-censorship resulting from your knowledge that to do otherwise would get you nowhere. This seems in line with the other kinds of pre-broadcast control which occupied the attention of the various Government investigatory sessions and subsequent symposia on TV's troubles. At one such meeting, Newton Minow hurled the word censorship back at his accusers: he spoke of "rating censorship -- a result of the almost desperate compulsion ... to work and to plan and to live by the numbers,' and of "dollar censorship" (a phrase coined by Clare Booth Luce) in which the broadcaster "abdicates his own judgment and turns programing decisions over to an advertiser or his agency." This is, of course, a tricky matter -- as all of us in communications know. How and where does one draw the line between prior censorship and the act of selection, economically motivated or not? In the sense that a newspaper editor decides which of hundreds of daily news stories to put into the limited space of one issue, he is exercising prior censorship. For the purposes of this discussion, let's concentrate on that editing, that pre-broadcast censorship, if you will -- which is not self-imposed. Stan Freberg, what are some of the blue-pencilings to which you've been subjected?

Freberg: Well, one time, Orville, my little moon-man, came to earth and he was outraged because his girlfriend, Miss Moon, had not been allowed to enter a Miss Universe contest. It turned out that she stood only 31 inches in high heels, and her measurements were 39-39-39. So I said, "Well, probably she was just too short for the contest." I tried to, you know, make some apology on behalf of the earth. I tried to make Orville feel better. So I said, "Maybe we can have a separate contest for people from other planets," and he looked at me and smiled and said in a kind of knowing way, "You mean separate but equal?" Now, this thing was permitted to go through all the rehearsals all week long, and on Saturday, the day before the show, the executive producer of the Chevy show -- it was his package -- he came to me and said, "Stan, I think maybe you better take out the line 'separate but equal.' " I said, "I'd like to leave it in." He said, "Why?" I said, "It makes kind of a nice social comment at this time." "Well," he said, "I don't think you'll ever miss it if you take it out." I said, "Yes, I will. I'll miss it." He said, "Who will know it isn't there?" I said, "I'll know." So the next day, Sunday, after the dress rehearsal, he takes me to the dressing room, puts his arm around me, walks me up and down, and I could see that he was on the spot. He said, "Stan, I've been on the phone over the weekend with Chevrolet, and they want me to convey to you that they are in sympathy with your point of view on the integration problem. Why, they have many Negro employees working for General Motors. And as a matter of fact, they once had Marian Anderson on a show." And I said, "Wow!" I said, "Well, I guess they ought to get a medal for that. It was good of them to give her a break, because the kid can't really sing very well." So he said, "I think the decision is, we have to take 'separate but equal' out." I said, "No, it stays in." He said, "Well, then, you're off the show." So after due deliberation I thought, "Well, it isn't that important a line to walk off on." In other words, if it had been a line where I made a really great contribution to the Negroes' position, then I would have fought harder. So I did the show and lost the line, that's all. Another time, Orville came to the earth and he wanted to arrange for a cultural exchange with our Government. And he said, "I have here a list of samples of your culture I'd like to take back to the moon. I'd like to have some of your outdoor advertising -- billboards, that is; a couple of Louella Parsons' columns; rock 'n' roll; a little smog; and a piece of Las Vegas." So I said, "I see you picked the best of our culture." He says, "Yes." And I said, "Now, what do you have for us?" He says, "I've got this spaceship full of beads and trinkets -- that's what they said the natives wanted." And I said, "No, no, we're beyond that now. Give me some technical thing." He said, "I know, we'll give you a nuclear weapon." I said, "I'm afraid we already have a nuclear weapon." He said, "Not like ours. Ours is terrific." And I said, "What's so special about yours?" And he said, "Ours doesn't work." I said, "Well, if it doesn't work, what do you do with it?" He said, "All the nations on the moon get together and we hit it with a stick." And I said, "And then what happens?" He says, "Paper hats and toys fall out." So I said, "And then what do you do?" He says, "And then we all go home." So I said, "Do you have some name for this particular type of festivity?" And he says, "Yes -- progress." About three days before the show, they came to me and said, "Stan, we're a little long, baby, so we're going to chop this from page 18 to page 22." I said, "Just a moment, that's the most significant part of the whole bit." They said, "Well, you don't need it, you got a lot of jokes up front." I said, "No, I'd like that to be in." They said, "Well, uh, Stan, uh ----" I said, "Come on, level with me. You don't like me talking about the hydrogen bomb, right?" They said, "That's right." I said, "Why do you not want to mention the hydrogen bomb?" They said, "Well, we'd just rather not mention it." I said, "Do you think by not mentioning it, it may go away?" They said, "Well, we don't like to talk about hydrogen bombs on an entertainment program." So that's the kind of logic you're dealing with, see?

Frankenheimer: You know, these sponsors -- these big business concerns -- are not run by idiots. And the agency people are far from idiots, either. These are the same guys that in turn will go to see, say, Death f a Salesman or a fine motion picture with their families or their wives and enjoy it immensely. But then, when they get back at their desks on Madison Avenue, they are working for a result, which is to sell cigarettes. Though they liked Death of a Salesman the night before at the theater, they know damn well it's not going to sell cigarettes, or at least not in their terms.

Susskind: This is the real irony, the real anomaly of television -- that it is inhabited, populated by fine men, erudite, cultured, educated, who personally pursue interesting, exciting and worthwhile investments of their time. But when they put on their professional clothes in the morning they practice a kind of vocational schizophrenia. They drop off their personal ideals and they drop away their personal tastes and they buy for an unknown, unseen, unidentified them. They won't like this -- it's too artsy-craftsy. They will like this -- it's got some raucous, bawdy fun, and it's got violence and murder and mayhem. They make a terrible, and I think specious, distinction between themselves and the audience. The real fine producers all through history -- theatrical, motion pictures and television -- always practiced a single commandment. They tried to please themselves artistically on the theory that what pleased them would perhaps please a large audience. These men are pleasing themselves in their own private time, by never turning on their television sets. None of these men run home and say, "Oh, gosh, Martha, tune in The Price Is Right, it's starting in a minute." He wouldn't be caught dead watching The Price Is Right on his own time. But he will buy The Price Is Right for fifteen million idiots he has never met, doesn't know and totally undervalues.

Playboy: As a selective viewer, would you watch your own productions?

Susskind: Yes, I would watch the Dupont Show of the Month; I would watch the Art Carney shows; I would watch Open End; I would watch The Play of the Week; I would watch Way Out -- it's a fun show; eerie, macabre stories. Now, I think that Mark Goodson's intellectual challenges are richer and higher and stronger than any of the shows he does. He is a bright, intelligent, educated man and, I think, would not tune in the game shows that he produces.

Goodson: Yes, I watch them. It's a little hard for me to be totally honest and say, to ask the question -- would I watch my shows if I didn't have an ownership interest and if I didn't produce them? -- I really can't answer that without qualification. First of all, many of our shows are on five days a week, but secondly, to answer David, I don't really think that is totally the point. I enjoy reading The New Yorker magazine, but The New Yorker only has a circulation of a little less than 500,000. That's a fact of life. I might someday find myself working on Reader's Digest, which has a circulation of 12,000,000 and yet not look forward every month to poring through the contents of the magazine. I will say that there are certain of our shows that I definitely would watch every week. I think our type of programing, by the way, which emphasizes ad-libbing and immediacy, is one of the most novel things that television does. I think that most of David's things have been successful adaptations of already proven works which have been originally novels, then plays, often movies, and then finally television. It seems to me that in that sense television is really a Reader's Digest. It is doing a condensed version of a condensation. I think that our programs, whether one likes them or not, are unique and original; were developed strictly for broadcasting. What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth were developed out of our stomachs, out of our heads, and present interesting people in ad-lib situations with intriguing formats. I watch mainly the nighttime shows. I still enjoy watching What's My Line? After eleven years, I think it's a show which has great appeal, which I sometimes can't even analyze myself. I've grown to like every member of the panel and I think that the audience apparently does, too; I'm always intrigued by the occupations that we can bring up week after week. I enjoy To Tell the Truth. On good nights I enjoy The Price Is Right. I think it's a very exciting, very commercial game; and I watch, occasionally, in the daytime, too. But those are programs which I enjoy watching myself. As I say, if I were not connected with them I would probably watch them less frequently, but I will say that I enjoy them more than I enjoy watching the average dramatic series. Personally, I loved -- even though I had no connection with -- the programs that featured live, original drama.

Dann: The decline of live programing has been because of the economics -- by that I mean we have to commit into a film series maybe 36 or 39 or 52 weeks.

Serling: Leaving live TV for economic reasons carries with it implicitly a guarantee of deterioration in programing, and when they got rid of Playhouse 90 and some of the other live shows, the supplanting shows were not nearly as good, simply because they were done on film by film people who were not remotely concerned with quality. When you're talking about a filmed anthology on television, it usually deals with a specific kind of people, a kind of plot line -- a whole concept of writing -- which is unique and peculiar to the West Coast.

Susskind: Hollywood took over with its assembly line system of turning out X yardage of celluloid per two days, and creative aspiration, creative dedication, creative integrity gave way to the hard-bitten economics of slick Hollywood production -- to the B, C and Z films which now dominate the dial.

Dann: We have found out our mistakes too late. We have put too much emphasis on the film form, with the result that we have had too much repetition and too little experimentation. I am perfectly willing to say, though, that there was a time when we had too much original drama on the air -- twelve, fifteen original dramatic shows. I suppose that's a terrible thing to say -- to have too much original drama on the air -- but there were many of the series that went on all year long that didn't produce a single important drama out of 52 telecasts. Now, I'm not talking, of course, about Philco Playhouse or Studio One, which had gifted producers in charge of them. But I do think that there simply weren't enough good writers around. That's why the programs with continuing characters often had better drama on them than the one-shot dramas had -- because you could call a writer in, tell him about the characters, the form of the show, and he had a framework in which to write. This is much easier drama to write. You could call somebody in and say, "Write a Route 66 for me" or "Write a Checkmate script for me" and sometimes have fairly good drama as compared to some of the drama on the anthologies, simply because it is much more difficult to write from scratch than it is to write once you have a form to work with. I'm not now advocating that we don't have original drama; I'm trying to say why it's more difficult. Original drama today presents a very complicated problem. I had a meeting at my home with a number of top dramatic producers and all agreed that today it would be impossible for any one of them to do a whole series like we did previously on Playhouse 90 or Studio One. They all thought they could do no more than thirteen or fifteen shows. This is compared to the old days when they did anywhere from 40 to 50 shows. The requirements are much more complicated today, due to the size of the production and the qualities of the scripts demanded, and dealing with the talent. One of the problems in the decline of the anthology form has been that television writers cannot be developed in a vacuum. They have to have their work on the air, but, much more important, they have to work with producers. The great producers were able to work with writers on a continuing basis and were able to develop them. As the original-drama field declined, the number of writers who were coming along declined, with the result now that just recently, when we announced we were going to do six original dramas for next year, we went to the top twenty writers in the business and said, "You can write about any subject you want." Of that number, fifteen were involved in other projects -- in Broadway theater, books, travel -- and were not interested in writing for the series. The really great writers that were developed in the '50s by and large are not interested in working for television today. It also follows that many of the great directors whom we developed in the '50s are not interested in working in television today. They graduated. Television was a college that they went to, which they graduated from, because, after all, the economics and the creative challenges are more satisfying on Broadway in particular and secondarily the movies and maybe writing a novel.

Sterling: I think that's pretty much been the case throughout the history of television, and it seems evident because of the fortunes of most of the writers who made their early marks in TV -- the Bob Aurthurs, the Paddy Chayefskys, the Gore Vidals, the rest of them -- who only stayed around long enough to pick up small checks and smaller name credits and then went on to bigger and better and more adult things. I personally find no fault with this at all. I think they've probably done the very right thing. Television at its best is a kind of finger exercise for the more important things later on -- but it is the dictates of television that made it so.

Crosby: Yes, you're right, they have graduated, and I think it's been a good thing. In the early days I think that television was a marvelous training ground for playwrights. Under an ideal situation these young fellows would have been followed by other young fellows. But all of the shows that these guys wrote for have gone. The hack writers, of course, have all gravitated to the West Coast. All the good writing, incidentally, was done in the East. Today, it's a boiler factory. Warner Brothers, Desilu, Ziv -- they're just turning out comic strips now and this doesn't take writers. All the excitement has gone out of the business.

Susskind: There's always a problem where creativity is concerned. There are too few gifted artists -- directorial, acting, writing -- for any medium at any time. There are too few in the theater today -- the theater season last year was almost embarrassingly bad, with some notable exceptions -- there are too few in the motion picture business at any one time, and there are certainly too few in television. There is, however, an opportunity for the artist in television, if he would be granted it. I mean, to express himself to the largest and most vocal and the most electric kind of audience in the history of the world. The good writers of television never really looked on television as a stepping-stone when they had their baptism in it. It was a creative effort to which they dedicated themselves completely. They found a kind of magnetic joy in the expression of their work and the response to it. They went out of television, most of these fine craftsmen, because television began to create so many inhibitions, frustrations and fetters that they couldn't live with them any more. It was less price that drove them out, or greener pastures, than the noxious clamp on their creative brains. You know, they couldn't live with that. You couldn't write about integration, you couldn't write about underpaid schoolteachers, you couldn't write about witch hunting. Now, the really fine writer of our time is probably not oriented to boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl. He is living in a world of tension and conflict and desperate turbulence. He tends to be throbbing about the issues of our time. Scripts about the issues of our time are largely untenable on television because they will have a point of view and because they will evoke some controversy, and controversy is anathema in television.

Goodson: Baloney. It isn't only restrictions on them. There just frankly is more money available elsewhere. Anybody who tells you that he can write and is willing to write a television drama for $10,000 -- which is a lot of money for television -- when he can instead take his time and write a movie which will pay him perhaps $50,000 plus enormous subsidiary rights that will continue ... I mean the reason George Axelrod, who is a man that I respect and admire, who used to write for radio and television and who now doesn't -- it's not because he has restrictions, it's because, frankly, television can't pay him the money. It can't pay Abe Burrows the money. One good Broadway show can pay Moss Hart more money than he can make in twenty years of television, except possibly for the tax gimmicks involved and the ownership of film series, but those are generally not of the quality these men would like to turn out anyway. I think that I'd be very happy to do a series with Paddy Chayefsky and give him no restrictions. I don't think that's the reason that keeps him from television. I think that he can make five times as much writing carefully selected screenplays which he can produce independently or have done in a joint venture. Maybe pay-TV will change that.

Susskind: Well, I'm a pragmatist and I don't really subscribe to many illusions. I think there will be pay-TV and I applaud its coming. I hope it comes sooner than I anticipate -- I think it's five, ten years off -- but it would represent another vista of programing, it would represent another competitive level of television with free TV.

Serling: It strikes me that with pay-TV, you'd find yourself operating under the same kind of limitation that you do in commercial television. And that is, making an assumption that you must hit the biggest audience possible with the most quarters. And therefore it would probably behoove them to try to hit popular entertainment rather than very special adult entertainment. So I'm not sure pay-television is the answer at all.

Frankenheimer: Pay-TV will be good for two or three years until the big voices get in again and kind of get the equalizer going -- sort of a national equalizer.

Crosby: I occasionally get the horrors when I think of Jack Warner running off with pay-television and just filling it with a lot of Westerns, but I'm very heartily in favor of it, if only to get the advertisers out of there and put showmen in. Now I don't think this is going to bring on the millennium -- anybody that thinks it's going to be, you know, opera and ballet, is crazy. But at least there will be showmen interested in (continued on page 126) Playboy Panel (continued from page 50) putting on a good show and not selling products. I think the guys whose real rights are being sadly neglected are yours and mine. I mean the viewers. The time on the air doesn't belong to the advertisers any more than the newspapers belong to the advertisers.

Freberg: Actually, there are many fine advertising agencies in the country, but by and large, they simply do what they think the sponsor wants them to do in order to keep the account and the billing, and there isn't enough inner conviction among advertising agencies -- real, ethical, inner conviction -- that says, "By God, when we take up a half hour or an hour of time on television, sure, we want to sell a product, but we want to contribute something. We actually want to give the people something." And I don't think that it's simply that we want to educate them or give them more highbrow stuff. The idea is just to give them better programs. Let's just give them something that's good, something that's funnier or more exciting or more provocative or interesting, something that will stimulate their imagination. And that doesn't have to be Omnibus. It doesn't have to be Frank Baxter reading Shakespeare. It can just be a damned good show, something better than what the people have been conditioned to and what television has sunk to in the last five years.

Goodson: I think it would be very interesting in this country to have an extra channel operated by the Government. I would like to see that. I think it would be wonderful to have a channel where a committee would say, "This is what we think the public ought to see," and would put these programs on. And I think there would be no question that they would have the minority audience, but I think that it would be a very healthy thing to have.

Crosby: I would dearly love to see a Government-supported network based on the present educational television stations which would have no concern about popularity at all. It would try to put on things of the highest merit without the slightest consideration of whether they're attracting any audience whatsoever, because I think this would act as a great exemplar of what should be.

Susskind: Maybe the educational stations will be something of a competitive challenge to the others to do better, but I think that Government-operated TV is largely a myth and a hopeless ideal in this country, because we can't get enough money for old-age medical benefits or education and the repair of roads and urban renewal. I doubt that we will ever get the money for a Government-operated television system and I'm not sure it would be a good idea if we got it.

Playboy: In this connection, Harvard's Professor Louis L. Jaffe says (eloquently and elegantly, if we may be permitted an editorial aside): "Government has a basic responsibility for the maintenance and advancement of our culture ... but it is our philosophy -- the philosophy of the Western World -- that official direction of culture tends toward the academic, the safe, the thrice tried, the inoffensive, the mediocre; that it is the herald and the certificate of sterility." How do you gentlemen feel about the so-called "magazine concept," wherein the advertiser buys network time in much the same way that he would buy space in magazines, with no control of editorial content?

Serling: I'd like to see this tried. It seems to be the most realistic way that you could take away the more-or-less soldered association between sponsor and entertainment.

Frankenheimer: I think it would be great if we could ever get the magazine concept, but I don't think there's any way it could be gotten; I think that if you've got a pattern set up, then neither networks nor advertisers will break it at this point, because if one network breaks it and says, "OK, now you can only buy time and have absolutely no say," they'll all go to other networks, and unless all three networks combine and say, "This is our policy," it will never happen.

Dann: But we do have today in television a modified magazine concept that is growing all the time, which is, essentially, advertisers buying insertions in shows fitting their marketing plans. Under the magazine concept it is true that the networks are responsible, primarily, for the shows that are in their schedules. And that is as it should be. It is our responsibility as broadcasters to determine what shows should go in the schedule, and then it is also our job largely to supervise, produce, monitor those shows that are on.

Susskind: Although we have the magazine concept with us today -- in the expensive shows, anyway: Today, the former Dave Garroway show; the Jack Paar show -- it is never, I think, going to really take hold, because the sponsor tends to lose his singular identity. He's in there with six and ten and twelve other sponsors, and so his pride is hurt, his corporate pride, and his merchandising potential is inhibited.

Crosby: Well, advertisers have pretty well lost their identities anyhow. But I don't think advertisers should be identified with the program, and I have never felt that performers should be identified with products the way they are. I think this is awful. We might be forced into the magazine concept because television is pricing itself out of existence, so that the magazine concept is slipping in by default.

(continued on page 130)

Playboy Panel (continued from page 126)

Frankenheimer: Except that the Jack Paar show is not up against that much competition, so that they have a group of sponsors that really want to buy into it. I don't know if anybody knows it, but about half the time, a third of Playhouse 90 was sustaining. Nobody wanted it. They couldn't sell it. They had a hell of a time trying to sell it in the beginning, for God's sake. I mean it wasn't our idea to have six sponsors and to have commercials every fifteen minutes.

Goodson: You know, here in this country we talk about the horror of breaking into a program in the middle. We say, "Oh, it's terrible, you break into a show in the middle and put a whole 60 seconds right in the middle, and one in the beginning of the show and one at the end -- what a disastrous thing to break it up." But actually, if you tune in to a British television show, you will have between one show and the other as many as eight, nine, ten and eleven commercials, right in a row. You know? Talk about double spotting! I don't know what you call twelve in a row. But they go on and on and on. I watched To Tell the Truth in England, and right in the middle they stop because they are allowed to interrupt a show which is not a dramatic show, and they have a little sign which comes on and says "End of Part One -- To Tell the Truth." And they put on six different commercials in a row, popping them in and out as fast as they can. And while it's true, I suppose, that advertisers have no control, they nevertheless can have the right to say, "We're not going to go" -- a razor-blade sponsor is not going to have his commercial put in the middle of a totally unrelated program; he's going to insist on and get placement that he likes. And they do get it in England, too. And if enough people stop buying a program because its rating has dropped, in effect the same pressure is put on the program to be changed. Now the magazine concept, it seems to me, is based on your unlimited choice to buy a lot of different magazines. But if all you have in America are three magazines and that's it, buddy, that's different. I mean how many magazines do you see on the stand? And they deliberately set out to appeal to very segmented, restricted audiences. That's the big problem, I think, in television today; that, of its nature, by its cost structure, it must cover everybody; while Playboy will appeal to this group and Saturday Review to that group and Harper's Bazaar to a different group and Vogue to a different group and Partisan Review to a different group and Saturday Evening Post to a different one, television can't afford, it seems to me, under the present setup, to go after minority audiences, because the advertiser who goes after a New Yorker type of circulation has to pay Life magazine rates for it on television.

Seldes: There was a man that was the butt of all the jokes in America, and his name was Edward Bok; he was the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and oh, boy, we used to laugh like anything about the Ladies' Home Journal. But Edward Bok said, "Of course we'll give them what they want. But it's going to be of a better quality each year than the year before." And what you got in the Ladies' Home Journal at the time this man took office was the cheapest kind of fiction. It is known as hammock, or summer, literature. The romantic novel. And after twenty years he was publishing Edith Wharton and a batch of other novelists of absolutely first order. What he had done was slowly, slowly to move up the quality of what he was giving.

Playboy: Edith Wharton's name figured in the recent Congressional hearings on TV, in precisely the context of what we're now discussing. Newton Minow pointed out that "... as for Edith Wharton's bleak tragedy, Ethan Frome, the [ad] agency inquiry was, 'Couldn't you brighten it up a little?' " However, Robert W. Sarnoff, Chairman of the Board of NBC, once wrote a letter to Harper's, citing a year in which "nearly one third of all weekly magazine serials (as well as mass-market paperbound fiction) consisted of Westerns -- a ration several times greater than the ratio of Westerns to other programs on the NBC Television Network."

Crosby: But even on a question of popularity, I don't think that Westerns are all that popular. I don't think they're respected by the people who look at them. You know, nobody is going around and asking people -- even the people who are looking -- whether they're enjoying what they're seeing. Besides, I think that Bobby Sarnoff is out of his bloody mind, equating network television with a bunch of pulp fiction. This is really what he's talking about. He's not equating it with, say, Life and some very big popular mass magazines, but with the lowest possible junk on the newsstands. What's he doing that for? I don't know why they want to run a business like that.

Serling: Hear, hear and hallelujah! You know, however we slice it, television exists in the public interest and it's so stated on the statutes that way. And the air that is used is public air. What is deliberately overlooked is this major point: that in judging the proportionate number of intellectual magazines, as opposed to pulp publications, these are privately owned, privately supported institutions, publishing ventures, as opposed to television, which is supposedly in the public interest, owned by the people, and there by the sufferance of the United States Government. The networks themselves, you know, are commerical entities, but they owe their existence to a package of laws. The apologist analogy is not correct at all.

Susskind: I'm sick unto nausea with the argument of the broadcasting officials, be they advertising agency personnel or network, of turning to other media like book publishing and motion pictures and the Broadway theater and saying, "Well, look, relative to those, we do a really splendid job. I mean, how many good books were there last year, how many good movies, and how many good plays?" That's a specious, meretricious argument designed to sandbag the viewer or the listener or the reader, because those businesses are fully empowered to be a bad as they choose. They are private enterprises, to be mismanaged, misrun and misdirected at will. Broadcasting is a public utility. The broadcasting franchise is held from the Government on behalf of the people of the United States.

Playboy: You may be interested in Newton Minow's exact words on this subject: "The trouble, in my opinion, is that far too many licensees do not regard themselves as 'trustees for the public.' The frequency is regarded as 'theirs,' not the public's; and, the license is not one to operate in the public interest but rather to see the greatest financial return possible out of their investment."

Crosby: You know, Sarnoff came out of the telephone business, and this whole communications feeling that he has, has affected the whole industry, which is pretty much like a telephone conversation, that he feels is none of his business, that his business is to provide a service -- to give us the best possible communications system, and what we say is our own business -- they're selling their facilities: MCA [Music Corporation of America] has almost run off with all of NBC's programming now.

Frankenheimer: I think the networks have abdicated their position as producers of shows; they don't want to do them, so they turn them over to MCA.

Susskind: I feel Johnny Frankenheimer has abdicated from television. He has left in high philosophical dudgeon. I think he should stay and fight. He is one of those who has gone on to greener pastures, meaning motion pictures and the theater. There is no greener pasture than television if you speak of its potential; it influences more people at one time than anything else ever invented or than all the other media put together, and if the thrust of the artist is to affect an audience, to influence an audience and have an impact upon it, television offers him the most golden of opportunities. (continued overleaf) Crosby: One of the things that broke me out of television criticism was just the sheer sameness of it. I think that it's almost impossible to write about it coherently even when it's entertaining -- it's a very difficult thing to write well about, and I've noticed that -- well, people like Jack O'Brian are running gossip instead of news; Jack Gould is talking politics, really, scolding the networks. Ten years ago, the television column was one of the most interesting things in the papers. Now nothing could be duller. I think television just has to do something. I really think that they're losing their audience terribly. I meet lots of people who say, "Well, I just don't look at it any more." It's becoming a medium for the shut-ins and children.

Playboy: Apropos critics and TV columnists, two comments by the redoubtable Messrs. Jaffe and Barrow shed interesting light on their plight. Concerning the critical function, Jaffe has this to say: "One practice which enormously and artificially increases the quantity demand [for TV material] is the single showing of programs no matter how distinguished. This is incredible and incomprehensible waste. Could Broadway or Hollywood conceivably function on such a basis?... One of the most important functions of the program critic is lost when the audience cannot respond to a favorable review." Barrow, commenting on the sameness of TV fare which John Crosby blames in part for the dullness of writing about TV says: "Advertiser and agency consult the audience ratings... Programs achieving the highest ratings become stereotypes for imitation. Gunsmoke was imitated by 26 programs and I Love Lucy by sixteen." Both men attribute the conditions they decry to the pressures we've discussed. Perhaps John Crosby will tell us whether any pressures were ever exerted on him by the TV industry because of his critical attitude.

Crosby: Well, NBC took all its advertising out of the Herald Tribune, and it's still out. It's over a year now that they have not advertised in the Herald Tribune. The Messrs. Sarnoff and Kintner have still got the sulks. But I wonder if John Frankenheimer ever plans to get back into television?

Frankenheimer: Yes, I will come back to television any time there's really something that I want to do, and if I can do it the way I want to do it. I really, sincerely, love television. I think directing live television is the most exciting thing I've ever done. I think it's far more exciting than directing films, but it turned out to be impossible, because the pressures that were exerted from both sponsors and network got to be so ridiculous that we all felt, why are we doing this? I mean, we can get the same kind of thing with less pressure, with more time and more money by making films than by directing TV plays or writing.

Freberg: In terms of lowering the cultural level of the medium, in the area of film, I put the greatest amount of blame at the feet of a company like MCA, which is in a position now of controlling the television film business through the great bulk of talent they represent and the shows they own. They're taking the easy way out because they want to be sure and get the hell out of the office by five o'clock, and if they stay and have to sell some client or agency on why they should buy this show because it's better and more intelligent and funnier and more sophisticated and more adult, it's liable to take 'em until a quarter to six. I think this is the real crux of the matter. As I have had a chance to observe Madison Avenue at close range, I think one of the major problems is that everybody wants to get the hell out of there at five o'clock, they want to keep that corner office, and they don't want to do anything that would rock the boat. That applies to advertising agencies and networks, and it also applies to the people at William Morris and MCA.

Dann: The point you've just made is that with so many of our shows being bought from packagers, does that hinder originality? It is true that certain packagers, primarily the film packagers, have a tendency to gamble less than many packagers who are involved with very creative, experimental things. But the record must show that there are thousands of packagers -- anybody with an idea is a packager, let's face it -- of ideas that come to the network all the time: it is up to the network program executives to determine for themselves which package, which program, they want to pick. At CBS there is no particular devotion to one packager over the other. We go for the show, and one of the problems, as I said before, is that too much of the product comes from one particular area, like Hollywood, and there's less of a tendency for experimentation. We have a new series on the air that's called The Defenders, created by Reggie Rose. That is as experimental as any dramatic show I've ever seen, with as high a quality of writing as Playhouse 90.

Goodson: I think that the public will tend to pick out the best of the popular type of programs. I think that Maverick, when it was the most popular, happened to be a pretty good show. I think that My Three Sons, the Fred MacMurray situation comedy, is one of the best situation comedies on the air, and I think that the public found it. I think that there is also a tendency to assume that the masses of people are ... well, in the slums of Harlem, or in the mountains of Tennessee -- and I'm not talking about that as the masses. I'm talking about the great bulk of people. When the average industrialist, or when a former President of the United States relaxes after a day's work. I don't think he picks up a copy of The Iliad or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He probably picks up a copy of Mickey Spillane or a Western story. I think that President Kennedy's favorite author is Ian Fleming. Well, Ian Fleming is one of the great English mystery writers who writes material which is about on the level of a very good television mystery. And a man wants to relax. I think that people basically want to come home -- that doesn't say that this man on Sunday might not like to watch Meet the Press, but who is to say that he wants to watch a live drama about the spiritual and psychic degeneration of an elderly widow? I mean, somebody who worked on the old Philco Playhouse called it "Frustration Playhouse" because some of those dramas tended week after week to get very similar, you see. Some of them were outstanding, and the outstanding ones were picked up and some of them became fine plays and fine movies. But I believe the audience picks what it wants and must get what it wants except under an autocratic system of government whereby you say that because this is a public franchise, we, a committee, are going to say, "This is for you, Mr. and Mrs. Public, and we are going to decide what's right for you" -- the way a college decides what is right for freshmen to study.

Seldes: But I say you can put before people certain things and they'll try them. Now the great example -- although it is a little bit inflected by the fact that people think it's highbrow to listen to highbrow music or, you know, it's chic -- but the fact is that about 1929 or so, Bill Paley [of CBS] said we ought to broadcast the Philharmonic. They said, "You're crazy, there's no audience for highbrow music." He said, "Then we ought to create one." At the end of five years the Philharmonic had ten million listeners. And such ardent listeners that when CBS proposed to shift the time -- that is, do it by delayed recording -- they got a furious protest and had to go back. Now, to the other side. I'm not really basically defending the networks. The other side is that when I pointed this out -- and I think it probably was to a CBS executive -- if you can say, as I think you jolly well can, that you have created an audience of ten million for symphonic music, you have also created the ten million audience for the daytime serial. At this point, they say, "Oh, but God, no, we're only just satisfying a demand." Well, that's nonsense. They created those demands that they can satisfy. That's where I think all broadcasters are really creative: it's not that they create the programs; they create an audience -- and we've got to see to it that this audience has integrity and character. The audience is in danger of being cut down to the size, not of the individuals who write the show, but to the size of what the commercial necessities think they have to demand.

Dann: I do not believe in giving the audience what they expect to find. I do not believe that's television's responsibility. Television's responsibility is to do the most stimulating, exciting programs possible and, if possible at the same time, to do something that's important.

Susskind: Television has become almost an essential of every home. There are more television sets in America than there are bathrooms. That being true, the television set has ceased to be a plaything, and it's become an important part of American life. Now, it's a public utility and it cannot be mismanaged at will except on pain of suspension of the franchise; and, again, the comparisons with the other media are simply not valid. If there were no good books published at all this year, it would be a scathing indictment of the book publishing business, and the public could really feel put upon, but it has no recourse. It does not own the book publishing business. It owns the airwaves and should insist on minimum standards and minimum balance and intelligence.

Goodson: Well, I just want to say this. In the Esquire case of many years ago, the Post Office Department tried to withdraw second-class mailing privileges from Esquire, saying that when the Congress gave a special dispensation to literature and magazines it was their intent to do this to uplift and educate and help the public; that Esquire -- which was at that time slightly unrespectable -- was so obviously not what the Congress had intended, that they should not have the privileges of second-class mailing. The Supreme Court, in its decision, said that the moment any group, any committee, anywhere in America, can start to decide what is or is not literature, this is the beginning of the end; and therefore Esquire continued to receive those privileges. To me, this is identical: just as the Government gives a special economic benefit to all magazines, unless they are just openly obscene and violate the law, there is a public franchise for broadcasting. But the moment the Government or any committee says, "This is not entertainment, this is not good for you," that, too, is the beginning of the end. I'm trying to say that the analogy is between the Government saying that Esquire was below standards in literary fashion and the Government today, through the FCC, attempting to say that there is a vast wasteland and that we must -- if necessary, legally -- discourage by pressure things which are not literary, which are not good for the people. Magazines are a public franchise. If the Government began to charge any magazine today full mailing costs, it could put it out of business. It's like the subsidization -- the underwriting -- that they do for airplanes. The cost of mailing a magazine might be seven cents. Instead it goes through the mail for, let's say, two cents or one cent. That cost is all being borne by the Government. This is the basis on which the Post Office Department took the case to the Supreme Court -- why should we, the taxpayers, underwrite magazines which are obviously not literary, when the intent of the Congress was, by giving this special privilege, to increase literary standards. So the FCC said, why should we permit poor programs on publicly owned air?

Playboy: While there is theoretically no limit to the number of magazines which may be published, there is a physical limit to the number of channels the airwaves can carry. Some clarification of what this entails may be useful here. The Supreme Court has been very clear on the subject, stating: "Facilities are limited; they are not available to all who may wish to use them.... Congress acted upon the knowledge that if the potentialities... were not to be wasted, regulation was essential." Reference was to the Radio Act of 1927; Newton Minow applies the same criteria to TV, since the same limitations exist. Louis Jaffe expatiated on the matter this way: "Given the monopoly situation, TV is under responsibility to approximate the variety that could conceivably emerge from pure competition, and so must include something for all tastes.... Why should TV have such an obligation when its cultural siblings -- the theater, the cinema, the newspaper, the magazine -- are free? It is often said that because TV is given a license to use public property -- the air waves -- it can and should be required to serve the public. I do not find this convincing. In my opinion the responsibility of the licensees rests on the present limited number of frequencies. Were it possible for anyone to broadcast I can see no reason for imposing any responsibility on the broadcaster different from that which it would be appropriate and constitutional to impose on the other communications media." We might add to this Newton Minow's quite succinct statement on the subject: "The Commission requires applicants to set out their programing proposals. We take those proposals seriously whenever we grant a license. If the applicant did what he said he would do, there obviously can be no controversy between him and the Commission at the time of renewal. But if he fails to honor his own application for reasons of business expediency, then this constitutes bad faith on the part of the applicant. Then there is going to be a controversy, and the issue between him and the Commission will not be programing -- it will be his character or fitness to be a licensee."

Seldes: I love the question raised there, it's really a beauty: the real function of the FCC. An applicant says, "I will do this..." and he is otherwise qualified. They say go ahead. Then the applicant does what he can or what he wants to do or what makes the most money. Up to now, when the man came up for renewal of license, the effect was this: like a little boy coming home with a report card from school. Papa says, "Have you been a good boy?" The kid says, "Sure, I've been a good boy." Papa looks at the report card and says, "You haven't been a good boy." So the child says, "What should I do to be a good boy?" And then the FCC says, "Catch me interfering with your freedom." Now, at the time that the first hearings occurred about two years ago, I think two things were said that were of extreme importance. One was said by Paul Lazarsfeld, who is the greatest sociologist working on broadcasting. He said -- he was constantly saying -- that you can't decide what's a good program. In fact, I think it was James Thurber who said, suppose that Jack Gould and John Crosby disagree as to what's a good program -- what do we do then? What Lazarsfeld said was, look, of course you cannot say a program, but, he said, "If you will give us a little time and the services of some five or ten people, we will be able to set down standards of programing as a whole which will be acceptable to 99 percent of the people in the United States." This is one of the boldest statements ever made; of course, they did nothing about it. The other statement that I found interesting, I made myself. Which was that -- we were talking about coming up for renewal of license -- what I wanted to do was to have this "talking" thing: every station should put on the air a discussion of what it has done last week or, say the last two weeks. Station WCAU in Philadelphia has done this -- they've brought in a group that really represented the people and said, "What do you think of what we've done?" And they're doing it every month. They come in and they say, "Why did you put on this program, and why did you put it on at this time, and why did you cancel this program?" And so forth. Once the management came off beautifully because a man said, "You had a great program on the air and you threw it off." What really happened was, it went off only for the summer, and they're going to do it every week instead of every month. I do not give one hoot either for the FCC or a few intellectuals that criticize television. I want a minimum of five million people to be actively critical. One thing I want to do, for instance, is to have the material of broadcasting, particularly television, studied in a school, and not only if somebody puts on Shakespeare. I would sacrifice the reading of Ivanhoe, writing a report on Ivanhoe, if students in every school in the country would write a report about Have Gun, Will Travel or Maverick. I want to go beyond that into colleges when you begin to study the nature of the mass media. If we had a GI Bill which said, among other things, that one course you've got to take, or you can take, is The Mass Media, we would now have these five million families who would be critical of what they're getting. That's the only way you're going to have anything worth getting, by having people want more and more and more than they're getting.

Dann: Yes, that's right, but I think that when you educate, you don't educate just for television. You educate for their appreciation of books, Broadway theater, music, movies, conversation. You can't really raise the level of taste just for television. If you raise their levels as human beings, then they're interested in better things in every branch of living, not just television. I think that television does have a profound influence upon how people react and think, and I think conversely that people have a profound impact on what they see. But television will not improve because the Government tells us to do something. Or because of the influence of pay-television. Or because of certain advertiser demands. Television only improves when somebody has an exciting idea, and that exciting idea can come from many places -- from a producer, from a writer, from a bureaucrat, from a packager, from anywhere. And then the networks must have the initiative to develop it, to spend the money and to put that program on the air. I do think it is one general rule that we should aim up rather than down in our programing -- that we should try for things which make people better than if they had not looked at the program. And that's our responsibility. But none of that comes by legislation; none of that comes from ordering it. It comes from aggressive zeal of creative people doing their best in a creative environment.

Freberg: I wrote an hour script which I read to NBC and which they didn't go along with. They said they would put it on in the summer, and I wouldn't go on in the summer. But then Newton Minow made his vast wasteland speech, and the next day I went in to ABC and I read this script, and everybody was standing around mopping their brows, saying, "My God, you know, it looks like we're going to have to do something." And they accepted the script, and within about 48 hours, they sold us time for The Chun King Chow Mein Hour on the eve of the Chinese New Year. Everybody was kind of shaken up by what Minow had said.

Susskind: I challenge that the whole flurry was caused by Minow's speech. Minow's speech capped a rising crescendo of protest. Ahead of it, I believe, was Senator Dodd and his subcommittee in the Senate investigating the undue proportion of violence on television. Along with that was Senator Magnuson's investigation of the rating systems. And previously, Representative Oren Harris held hearings having to do with the morality of broadcasting. Responsible writers in the press, responsible ministers, responsible teachers and educational authorities had been mounting a barrage of criticism that preceded the Minow speech in which he said, by indirection, "The FCC has not been doing its job heretofore, has not been sufficiently vigilant, sufficiently disciplining, sufficiently tough, and there's a new world a-coming, boys, you'd better get with it because we're starting to stare at you very closely."

Crosby: Mr. Minow's statement was promptly squashed by Congress. If you look into it, you'll find a good many Congressmen own television stations, or own parts of television stations. And even those that don't own them are very responsive to the pressures exerted on them by the television-station owners in their own home towns. In the case of broadcasting, we just haven't got a representative government, we have government by pressure group. I think Congress has a great deal to answer for in trying to circumvent the FCC. But I think there has been such a mass of criticism, that Minow's statement -- though it was jumped on by Congress -- has caused a great deal of soul-searching.

[Q] Susskind: I would just like to be optimistic for the first time in years. I feel that the fall of 1962 is going to see a resurgence of quality -- the season after this, because this season's programs were committed before the storm broke -- a rebirth of television and a use of television in some kind of sane, intelligent, balanced way that we haven't had since the very early days of television in 1951, '52 and '53. I think the broadcasters are self-conscious. I think they feel that they've erred. I feel that they now sense that the pursuit of the biggest buck is damaging to our public, damaging to our country, damaging to our national intelligence, and I think they are going to seek to right it. It's the first time I've felt optimism in a long time.

Playboy: We might end on that optimistic note. It's true, not all of you share David Susskind's sanguine prognostication, but we seem agreed that there are signs of a breakthrough, if only in the industry's new posture of agonizing self-appraisal -- even though, as has been suggested, outside forces may have precipitated it. The old fat-cat complacency appears to be gone; the public is more than ever aware of TV's potentialities and its shortcomings. The prospect seems to be for better programs and programing the season after this; as with public opinion, so with TV fare: there is an inevitable time lag.

John Crosby, never a punch puller, concluded his comments with an assertion that in TV, soul-searching is already in progress. Mike Dann -- who might have been expected to defend the network record -- conceded its goofs, predicted its improvement. John Frankenheimer, though highly critical of today's TV practices, asserted his love of the medium. Stan Freberg's ruefully delightful descriptions of the vicissitudes he's survived, concluded with his stated belief that the TV moguls are all shook up -- for their ultimate good and hence for ours. Mark Goodson expressed his faith in the public's preference for the best of the popular programs. Gilbert Seldes voiced his belief in gradual improvement, as opposed to sudden change. Rod Serling is living proof that even today the industry cherishes one of its most original and critical craftsmen.

In our discussion, TV has had a rough time of it -- but the very passion of the attack is testimony to the degree to which you gentlemen care, and with that kind of caring among those so directly involved, there is reason for hopefulness. Yet the best summation of this discussion may well be embodied in the following words from a document just one year old this month. The Report of the President's Commission on National Goals, which was submitted to President Eisenhower on November 16, 1960, says: "The American system of broadcasting is deeply entrenched and is founded on the rock of freedom from Government interference. It is not, however, beyond critical examination in the light of its performance. It is too easy to say that the people are getting what they want. The fact that large audiences can be attracted by fourth-rate material does not acquit the broadcasting companies or the Government, which has an ultimate responsibility for use of this valuable and scarce resource, from asking whether the public interest is being adequately served ... Thus far, television has failed to use its facilities adequately for educational and cultural purposes, and reform in its performance is urgent." Gentlemen, thank you.