◆ SpookStack

“A # ‘ere % ? Abbott Howard Hoffmax 4 - . - : : i modestly. This matter of corporate control of news in particular, the programing in general something that's concerned me for a long time and the thing that first got me turned on to it was shortly after I arrived at the FCC. We had this little merger involving IT&T and ABC and one of the things that concerned me, although I didn't really know as much about it at the time as I came to later, was the possibility that ITT might want to control the news and if they owned ABC they might use ABC in that manner, And the FCC thought, in order to consider this merger, ali we really needed to do was to invite the two principals, Harold Genene (phonetic and Leonard Gordenson (phonetic) into the FCC for a cup of coffee some morning and we kind of chat about it a bit and later we got a hearing, But during the course of the hearing before the hearing examiner, one of the issues was whether or not ITT would ever try to tamper with the news. And while that hearing was going on, it turned out later in a story that broke in the “Wall Street Journal” while the hearing was going on,on that issue,top ITT executives were out in the corridors working over the press, covering the hearing, they were on the phone to the presidents of the major news media covering the hearing, they were requesting reporters to go to the Justice Department and gét stories and information out of the Justice Department that ITT couldn't get on its own. And all this at the time that very hearing was going on, It just seened to me so outlandish that we should have them prove beyond any shadow of a doubt the suspicion that (unintelligible) raised as a possibility when they set the thing for a hearing. So after that I became kind of concerned about this problem and then I find more and more evidence of it, Bill Greeley provides a lot of it for us in Variety every week and the evidence just keeps amounting. Of courst; of course big business interests control what it is we see in here, you wouldn't expect them to (unintelligible) otherwise, They're used to spending millions of dollers in advertising agencies and public relations firms to do exactly that and of course that's what they do. Of course, that's what they do....they never bother me about the discussion this evening really is that....it seems to me it's possible to put too much emphasis on the news. As many (unintelligible) the things as you can say about the news, and there're a lot of them, the far worst sin in my judgement is not the stuff on television that's news but the stuff on television that's oe ome a a a eT ae to ee ee