Television Broadcasts

NBC has signed a five-year deal to televise games from the Women's NBA, an eight-team league to begin play next summer, NBA Commissioner David Stern and NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol announced Thursday. Stern, who said the WNBA will begin its 10-week summer season next June 21, said he is still negotiating for a cable TV deal as well. Ebersol said NBC will televise a Saturday game of the week.

It was a Tuesday early in June, heady times up there on the high road of television journalism, with cheers and applause bouncing off mellow, gray walls in a corner of the arena-sized, geometric-modern newsroom at KVUE-TV, the ABC affiliate here "Where the News Comes First." Flash back a few minutes and picture this: A sleek building in suburban north Austin. Outside, temperatures in the sizzling 90s.

With a film crew crouched round her, Julia Louis-Dreyfus sits alone at a table in a hotel bar. As cameras roll, she starts fishing an olive from her drink with a cocktail stick. Behind her, through a window, traffic hurtles down Park Lane, on the eastern edge of Hyde Park. At last she extricates the olive, but drops it on the carpeted floor. Horrified, she searches frantically for it beneath the table. "Aaaaaaand cut," director Jay Sandrich says as everyone chuckles at Louis-Dreyfus' antics.

The current blackout of City Council meeting broadcasts on cable television will continue through the summer, a divided council recently decided. Since March, the council has been holding its twice-monthly meetings at the Westminster School District headquarters while the council chambers at City Hall are remodeled. Officials decided to discontinue broadcasts of the meetings while at the temporary locations because of technical difficulties. Councilwoman Margie L. Rice and Councilman Frank G.

The chairman of a state task force that recommended a partial ban on cameras in the courtroom described the proposal Friday as a "compromise" intended to appease the news media and judges who favor ejecting cameras altogether in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial. San Diego Court of Appeal Justice Richard D. Huffman, who chaired the task force of the California Judicial Council, noted that 55% of judges polled favored a total ban.

The board of the state's judges organization has narrowly voted to oppose a ban on cameras in the courtroom. The California Judges Assn.'s executive board voted 10 to 8 against endorsing the proposed ban, which is to be considered Feb. 23 by the Judicial Council, the policy-making body for the state courts. That vote was close to the breakdown of judges' opinions in a statewide survey that has not yet been released, said association President Paul Boland, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

A state task force appointed after the O.J. Simpson verdicts will recommend today that cameras be banned from all criminal pretrial proceedings and from most trial sessions where a jury is not present. The report, to be presented to the state Judicial Council today, also recommends a ban on broadcasting pictures of courtroom spectators and urges judges to consider a variety of conditions, including whether both sides in a case want cameras, before allowing electronic coverage of trials.

All 64 soccer games of the 1998 World Cup in France will be broadcast on English-language television in the United States under an agreement announced Thursday by FIFA, world soccer's governing body, and ABC Sports. Dennis Swanson, president of ABC Sports, said the network will broadcast a minimum of 14 games--live and without commercial interruption--and ESPN and ESPN2 will carry the remainder. In securing the U.S.

When Oklahoma City falls silent Friday for 168 seconds, the moment will be carried live on network television. ABC, CBS and NBC will begin their coverage shortly before the silence at 7:02 a.m. PDT, followed by a recitation of the names of the 168 people killed one year ago in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. CNN's coverage will begin at 6 a.m. PDT and will continue through the memorial procession to the city's convention center and the formal memorial service.

In dramatic videotape aired repeatedly on local television, Riverside County sheriff's deputies on Monday violently clubbed two suspected illegal immigrants in South El Monte after a high-speed, 80-mile chase of a battered pickup crammed with 21 people. The videotape--filmed by a camera crew for KCAL Channel 9--shows a man and a woman being beaten as others flee from the pickup, which reportedly had evaded an Immigration and Naturalization Service checkpoint on Interstate 15 near Temecula.