The Press: Taking Out the Splinters

The tubby little man in the front row was so short that his primly polished brown shoes barely touched the floor. Eyes blinking behind rimless glasses, he strained last week to catch every word at the Senate Communications Subcommittee hearing. There was much at stake for Homer A. Tomlinson, 66, the general overseer of the Church of God sect and self-proclaimed king of the world. He intends to run for President of the U.S. again in 1960 (his big white Panama campaign hat was at his side), and the subcommittee was struggling to find a way to keep Homer and other splinter candidates from claiming—and getting—as much time on newscasts as Republican and Democratic candidates.

The startling new problem of keeping far-out candidates like Homer out of newscasts arose because of the Federal Communications Commission’s overly cautious interpretation of the Communications Act, which declares that any station that lets any legally qualified candidate use its air time must give equal opportunities to competing candidates. Until last February, this provision was interpreted to cover political campaigning. Then a perennial also-ran in Chicago named Lar Daly (TIME, March 30) claimed that it also governed straight newscasts, charged that WBBM-TV had violated the act by not giving him equal time after showing film clips on a newscast of two of his opponents, including Mayor Richard J. Daley. Rereading the law, the FCC agreed with Lar Daly, 4-3, and last week, after the networks had pleaded for a reconsideration, the FCC stubbornly reaffirmed its opinion.

To President Eisenhower the ruling was still “ridiculous.” But the FCC lamely argued that the letter of the law left no other choice, said that it was up to Congress to put some common sense into the law. Hustling to do just that before the 1960 presidential campaigns begin in earnest, the Senate subcommittee took under consideration eleven bills to keep splinter candidates from snagging newscasts, heard CBS President Frank Stanton declare that it would have been impossible to give equal-time coverage to all candidates of the 18 parties in 1956. If the rule is not changed, said Stanton, “simple mathematics establishes that we will have no choice but to turn our microphones and cameras away from all candidates during campaign periods.”