TELEVISION: What’s His Line?

To millions of TV watchers, John-Charles Daly is the melon-domed man with the slightly pained smile who tosses those amusing polysyllables at the panel on CBS’s What’s My Line? To a considerably smaller group he is a glib, able TV and radio newscaster who for seven years has held the job of vice president in charge of news, special events and public affairs at ABC. Last week, plainly not quite sure any more what his line was, Daly angrily resigned his ABC post, citing “fundamental policy differences” with Leonard Goldenson, president of American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters, Inc. Slated to reorganize the network’s whole news operation is Presidential Press Secretary James C. Hagerty, who will move into ABC as a vice president after he moves out of the White House.

Daly presumably could have continued under or alongside Hagerty, but he has long been at odds with ABC management. On election night Daly simmered when Goldenson usurped an hour of news to carry Bugs Bunny and The Rifleman. Last year, fighting against network use of information programs produced on the outside, Daly got ABC to reject an independently made documentary, The Race for Space. The last straw, explained Daly last week, came when Goldenson decided, without consulting him, to take on a series of new documentary programs to be co-produced by TIME Inc. (the first, about Latin America, will be shown on Dec. 7).

Daly’s main trouble with ABC has always been that it is something of a bargain-basement network, fighting hard to win ratings and income away from its two bigger competitors through relentless peddling of westerns and cop shows. Even this season, despite such new ABC efforts as Close-Up! and the series based on Winston Churchill’s memoirs (beginning this week), the network still rarely schedules public-affairs shows in prime time, devotes roughly less than half as much time to such shows as NBC and CBS, and employs only about a fifth as many news staffers.

Considering these limitations, Johannesburg-born Reporter Daly did well enough. CBS Radio’s White House correspondent at 23, he broadcast from Anzio beachhead during World War II and obtained a notable scoop of F.D.R.’s bypassing Henry Wallace at the 1944 Democratic convention in favor of Truman. Daly often stole the show from the competition’s high-priced, gimmick-armed task forces, even if his portentous, pear-shaped tones now sound somewhat oldfashioned. Insists Daly: “By the old standards by which I was brought up, most of what passes for public-service programing today is nothing of the sort; I don’t know how they get away with it.” As for his future? “There simply hasn’t been time to plan anything.”