Broadcast Journalism

The founder of "60 Minutes" delivered a blistering attack on network news divisions Thursday for shoddy quality, an unhealthy hunger for ratings and obliterating the line between news and entertainment. Broadcast journalism is "becoming a lost art and may all but vanish by the end of the century," Don Hewitt said in a speech Thursday night to members of the Institute for Public Relations Research and Education.

Why is Peter Fox directing a play that focuses on women's thoughts about sex? "Because I like women--in fact, I've loved some," says the Alliance Repertory Company's new artistic director, whose staging of Shannon Bradley's one-act "But That Wasn't Sex" kicks off the theater's 1994 Bagel Brunch Series on Saturday. "What appealed to me was Shannon's writing. It could've been about men, women, sea otters."

JOURNALISM is hardly the first American institution to suffer a kind of collective nervous breakdown when confronted with radical and, mainly, unforeseen changes in technology and economics. It is, however, the first to do so having elevated communal self-absorption to an exquisitely neurasthenic pitch. You can't spit these days without hitting a media critic or columnist or some review or chat show that purports to take the pulse of the anxious news media.

20th Century Journey: A Native's Return, 1945-1988, by William L. Shirer (Little, Brown: $24.95, 484 pp). At the threshold of the McCarthy era, William L. Shirer was abruptly fired from his highly rated CBS radio broadcast by the sponsor, a shaving-cream manufacturer, who pronounced him to be "too liberal." To Shirer's shock and grief, the decision was endorsed by CBS as well as Shirer's boss and former comrade-in-arms as a war correspondent in World War II, Edward R. Murrow.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.'s Golden Globe Awards are the big event of the weekend with such films as "The Talented Mr. Ripley," "The Insider" and "American Beauty" leading the nominations. But Hollywood won't be the only one taking home prizes, with journalists also in the spotlight. Jeff Greenfield, the co-anchor of CNN's "The World Today," hosts the 58th annual "Alfred I.

Sometimes, in my darker moments, I have imagined how the victims of the Bhopal disaster must have felt when they lay, gasping and despondent, searching the horizon for salvation, and saw coming to their rescue . . . Melvin Belli. Many people must feel that way, I suppose, when they hear it said that the future of broadcast journalism, growing out of the current disarray of the networks, may be found in . . . local television. Their dismay is understandable.

"LA Shrinks" debuts Monday on Bravo, which may be broadly described as a network on which people who really do not need the money star in reality programs. It focuses on three therapists, hopping from one to the other -- they don't interact -- and following each in and out of the office. In contrast to the house style, the principals are relatively likable and well adjusted, though not without their challenges. For the space of the opening episode, at least, none of them scream. Our practitioners: -- Dr. Venus Nicolino, who lives and works in a big, marbled Bel-Air mansion, with a husband and four kids, two their own and two nephews under "permanent guardianship" (reason unstated)

Simone de Beauvoir and Lesley Stahl may seem unlikely people to link in one sentence, but that's designed to catch your attention. As early as 1952, de Beauvoir spelled out in her book, "The Second Sex," how women were identified as "the Other" and what that meant for both women and men. As recently as 1974, Stahl encountered the truth in de Beauvoir's concept.

For generations of local news viewers, Jerry Dunphy was the familiar and authoritative newsman who began each newscast with a warm smile and his trademark greeting, "From the desert to the sea to all of Southern California." But for numerous colleagues who worked with him during the last four decades in his stints at various stations, Dunphy was a dedicated newsman secure in his standing as the elder statesman of local TV news.

The second World War unleashed a tremendous surge of energy in this country. Fighting for national survival, Americans transformed the nation in a few short years. One of the inventions that sprang from the turmoil of war was broadcast news. Broadcast news meant the Columbia Broadcasting System, and CBS meant Edward R. Murrow and the young people, nearly all men, he recruited to tell over the radio from Europe the approach of war and America's plunge into it.