Networks refuse Ford air time

The other night, two of the three television networks that cover the whole country did an extraordinary thing – unique, in fact. For 50-odd years, whenever the president felt he had an important message to bring to the people, he has simply requested the time from the networks and whatever their commitments, however juicy the revenue from an advertiser, the arranged programme has been promptly cancelled and the president took to the air.

Last Monday, however, to everybody's surprise and the rage of the White House, two of the three national networks refused the president time for a speech he'd prepared about government spending and an impending tax cut. It was not the topic of the speech that caused their decision. They announced on un-debatable grounds that President Ford is now also candidate Ford, a declared candidate for the Republican nomination in next year's presidential election. 

The law – to be exact, Section 315 of the Communications Act – says that if a candidate is given time on the air to make a speech on any topic whatsoever, a network is obliged to give equal time to any rival for the same nomination. This does not mean, heaven forbid, any rival for the same office put up by another party – that would entail the networks in giving equal time to the nine men who have declared themselves available for the Democratic nomination, not to mention the unknown nominees of the Greenback party, the No Nothing party, the Prohibition party, the Save a Tree party. But there is another Republican seeking the presidency, an absolute unknown from Worcester, Massachusetts, not to mention the impending shadow of Ronald Reagan. 

So the National Broadcasting Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System were legally correct in saying that they would have to give equal time to the gentleman from Worcester and they weren't going to do it. Accordingly they announced that they would pick out what seemed to them the core of the president's speech and play it over as a snippet in their usual news programmes. And that they did. They, alone, reserve the right to decide on any future occasion whenever the president wanted time for a speech plainly in the national interest or during an obvious national emergency, then they'd carry him to any lengths he cared to go as the one and only President of the United States. But last Monday, they looked on him as candidate Ford and their action implied that his speech, however eloquent, could be considered that of a man privileged to use the networks for sweet talk calculated to cajole votes for him next November. 

It was a fair enough implication. Since the Greeks invented the word 'politician', it has been the First Commandment of the breed in an election year to promise to cut taxes and keep everybody happy. And last week Mr Ford said that's what he intends to do. 

It's not fanciful to imagine Mr Ford as a very miffed president the night they gave him, or rather refused him, the air. But he must have recognised with an extra twinge next morning the pain of being a candidate and a president at the same time. When the papers carried despatches from Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Cologne and London reporting for the first time alarm among the bankers and the governments of Europe at the prospect, which is looming very close, of New York City's going bankrupt, actually defaulting on all its debts and obligations. 

Candidate Ford is not going to garner votes in Michigan and California and Illinois and Texas by telling the people that they had better brace themselves for stiffer taxes in order to bail New York City out of going broke. President Ford, however, has been told that, unless the federal government intervenes in some way, New York City will have to default, maybe as soon as a month from now. It's inconceivable that the Congress would sanction a direct loan to the city itself. It would be bombarded by pleas from other cities. The help would have to be to New York State. An emergency would be declared by the president and then the state might get a direct loan at a kindly rate of interest or, more likely, a guarantee against the city's current indebtedness of $3.8 billion. 

A municipal bond expert, speaking before the American bankers' convention which was meeting here last week, predicted that if the city defaults and therefore has to stop the wages of all the people who run the schools, the hospitals, the police, firemen, garbage men and so on, there would be an imminent threat of civil disorder. 

Before the reports came in, Mr Ford had slapped at this city like a sleepless man swatting at a bothersome fly. He has massaged the local pride of audiences around the country by more or less congratulating them on not being as improvident or loose in their fiscal habits as New York City. This kind of talk is now going to have to be dropped. New York City may have been very wicked – at best, irresponsible – in the way it concocted its budgets down the years but the causes and recriminations are all in the past, even among the enemies of the most distracted little man in public office, Mayor A. Beame. 

He's tried everything. He went on his knees to the New York state legislature in Albany and from them he got a new Municipal Assistance Corporation, 'Big MAC' to take over some of the debt in exchange for taking over the city's taxing authority. The corporation issued bonds. Nothing happened. Hardly anybody would buy them. The issue flopped before it was floated. 

The mayor then bled before the biggest and the most stable of the city's banks but, singly or combined, they couldn't take the risk of assuming the whole debt, but they did keep patiently rolling over the short term notes. The mayor fired 40,000 city workers, reduced the police force in a city where that is a frightening economy indeed. The mayor went to Washington. The state's two senators and all the congressmen from New York begged and badgered the Congress. The Congress is thinking things over. But so far the president has stood absolutely adamant against federal money and on the face of it, you can see why. 

Consider crime, for instance. New York City somehow cannot shake what, by now, is a worldwide reputation as the most dangerous city in the country. In fact, New York is 19th on the list of cities that are, you might say, crime prone – Detroit, San Francisco, Phoenix, Arizona are way ahead of New York as violent cities. Their mayors wring their hands and beg the state legislatures for more money for crime prevention, as also for hospitals, drug addiction treatment, fire prevention, police and so on. If New York gets a massive loan from Washington, the administration will be engulfed in a flood of begging appeals from a dozen states. 

I imagine if the fears of the Europeans prove to be well grounded that Mr Ford, whatever hat he finds himself wearing at the time, is going to have to think up some neat and persuasive explanations of why New York is different – why New York, as the banking capital, the clothes capital, the publishing, the entertainment capital, the money mart of the nation, why 'it' must be rescued? 

In the meantime, Mayor Beame sees the days flicking off the calendar the way they used to show the passage of the seasons in the old movies. He cannot tread water and wait for Washington to take the plunge, so now Mayor Beame has another plan more gruesome in its possible consequences than his first plan. He proposes to cut yet another $200 million from the city's 1975 budget of $12.3 billion. He had already cut out 7,000 city workers in the first plan. He intends to sack another 13,000 or, rather, not to sack them but to coax them with inducements of money – whose money? From where? – to retire early. He also proposes to freeze all wages and cost-of-living increases for the next three years, in spite of the signs of a second round of what they call 'double digit' – namely, ten per cent – inflation. 

The state legislature has already enacted this new plan into law and it's all meant to coax and wheedle high-minded and rich people into buying the un-bought bonds of Big MAC. What it is bound to do is to spark new strikes, new protests and a decline, at least, in the city's public services. There's one big point that New York congressmen keep making over and over to their hitherto deaf colleagues – that New York is the only big city that pays for welfare. 

Now Chicago, by comparison, is preening itself these days. It has not had a budget deficit for 20 years. The police, firemen, sanitation workers are paid less than their fellows in New York but they seem contented with their lot. The garbage men get no time and a half and they have smaller pensions but they retire sooner and make no fuss. Mayor Daley's machine cannily lets the union leaders into the city government so if they... if they struck against the city, they'd be striking against themselves. Mayor Daley balances one ethnic group against the others and distributes his favours evenly among the 30,000 political appointees in a city with 100,000 city employees. 

But, mainly, Chicago pays not a penny for welfare. It's taken care of by the federal government and the state of Illinois. New York City, on the contrary, has to figure 25 per cent of its total budget for welfare. This city has services that no other city has ever heard of. Free college tuition for everybody. Anybody listening like to go free for four years to London University? Also, day care centres, not only for working mothers but for mothers on welfare. Welfare, in fact, seems to be the escape hatch out of bankruptcy. 

If the federal government can be persuaded to take over that one-quarter of the city's debt, there might be a glimmer of light ahead. These, however, are not the preoccupations of the European economists and bankers which are that, if New York defaults, there would be a run of foreign depositors, especially, on the banks. The dollar would weaken abroad, the international level of interest rates would be revised and, in the words of an eminent Frenchman, 'There could develop a catastrophe on the world stock markets'. 

Perhaps if candidate Ford can turn a blind eye to the streets, the garbage, the unemployed city workers of New York, President Ford will not be able to turn a deaf ear to the warnings that come from people even more remote from this city than the inhabitants of the White House.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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