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Throughout the quiz crisis, husky Bob Kintner (5 ft. 10½ in., 178 lbs.) has maintained, at least outwardly, a massive calm and his usual appearance of a battered but unbowed Buddha. From his apartment on Manhattan's fashionable Sutton Place (nine rooms, five TV sets), Kintner Cadillacs to work in the RCA Building by 8:10 each morning, spends at least half of his twelve-hour day group-thinking with the network committees populated by his 39 vice presidents. Few below NBC's top level know Kintner; unlike his chic, gregarious wife Jean, 42, he is not fascinated by his on-camera employees, rarely attends company parties for talent. He keeps a neat, boomerang-shaped desk in an office adorned by a mottled abstract, a wifely gift that he describes as "either an oil geyser or a quiz show going up in smoke." At night Kintner disposes of dinner with a sandwich and watches TV; he tries to catch every NBC show at least once a year.
Proposed Cures. On the whole, Kintner likes what he sees, has little patience with the various prescriptions that are being suggested to cure TV's ills. One proposal that Kintner & Co. disposed of convincingly is an industry-appointed TV "czar" with power to enforce balanced programing. "The concept," said Kintner last week, "is not workable for [television] any more than [for] the newspaper industry or the magazine industry." Kintner did not add the most plausible argument against the idea: the hard-lobbying broadcasters might hamstring a TV commissioner as easily as they have the FCC.
Kintner and all other top TV men are equally opposed to the far more serious proposals from Pundit Lippmann for an independent TV network, devoted to "civilized entertainment," and the Christian Science Monitor's plea for a network modeled roughly on the British Broadcasting Corp. Both the noncommercial BBC and the British commercial ITV probably give a better balance of educational and entertainment programs than do U.S. networks. But as soon as Britain's commercial channel went into business three years ago, its lower-brow fare began to take the bulk of Britain's "telly" viewers away from BBC. To meet the competition, BBC itself has lately turned to less cerebral programing, including plenty of U.S. westerns. The fact remains that ITV furnishes a striking example that a TV network can be run for profit without giving the advertiser control of the programs. British sponsors buy time on ITV as advertisers buy space in newspapers, can choose their time of day but have no say about the program that backs up their commercials. Hence, unlike Madison Avenue ad agencies, they cannot dictate the kind of "programing concepts" that, originality-wise, may be nowhere, but that, rating-wise, are surefire. Nor can they exert pettifogging censorship; e.g., on one drama show, Ford ordered the producers to kill a shot of the New York skyline because it highlighted the Chrysler Building.