Pubdate: Thu, 20 Jan 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/
Author: Don Van Natta Jr.

DRUG OFFICE WILL END SCRUTINY OF TV SCRIPTS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 - The White House has announced that it will stop
scrutinizing scripts of television shows under a widely criticized
financial agreement with the networks that had encouraged them to include
antidrug messages in the plots of programs.

As part of the two-year-old arrangement, White House drug policy officials
reviewed more than 100 episodes of shows like "E.R." and "Beverly Hills
90210" before they appeared.

White House drug policy officials announced that they would continue to
reward networks for showing programs with strong antidrug themes, but they
said they would not review the programs' content until they had been shown.

The office changed its guidelines after the practice was described last
week in a report in Salon, an Internet magazine. Some critics said the
practice by the networks amounted to self-censorship in exchange for a fee.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, a
public-interest law firm, called the arrangement "an outrageous abandonment
of the First Amendment."

The White House press secretary, Joe Lockhart, said the White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy had decided to adopt "new guidelines" that
eliminated the practice of advance screening because it would place "the
program on a track where it will get universal support."

"They've revised their policy to no longer look at scripts or do changes in
programming for credit before a program is finished," Mr. Lockhart said.

Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the drug policy office, said the
changes were made "to eliminate any misunderstandings and prevent any
inference of federal intrusion in the creative process," The Associated
Press reported today. "We have forged a strong partnership with the
entertainment and media community and look forward to continuing to
strengthen those times."

Although the arrangement, which involved all the major networks, was not
widely known, it was revealed by General McCaffrey at a Congressional
hearing last October.

The arrangement began in 1997 shortly after Congress approved an ambitious
antidrug advertising campaign that required media outlets to match any
advertising time bought by the federal government with public service time.
Essentially, it had given the drug office and other government agencies the
ability to buy television commercials at half price.

But since 1997, the demand for television advertising time has sharply
increased. With the networks seeking ways to sell more time at full price,
they struck a compromise with the government to reduce the amount of
advertising time they were required to provide by broadcasting antidrug
shows. That allowed the networks to sell the air time that would have gone
to the government for half price to regular advertisers for full price.

The networks have strongly defended their role in the practice, saying they
never relinquished creative control of any programs to the government. But
several network and television studio executives had conceded that they did
search for episodes with story lines that they assumed might satisfy
officials in the White House drug policy office.

A new and smaller network, WB, had said that it had submitted scripts in
progress from "Smart Guy" and "The Wayans Brothers." Both shows had
episodes with the theme of drug use, and producers for both shows altered
their scripts at the suggestion of government reviewers.

When first confronted with the publicity last week, drug policy officials
defended the arrangement, saying it was an effective way to spread antidrug
messages to young people without infringing on the creativity of producers.

Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is chairman of
the House Commerce Committee's telecommunications subcommittee, announced
that he would hold hearings on the matter, and he is still planning to do
so this spring despite the White House's change of guidelines.
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