May 4, 1986

Twenty-five years ago, Newton N. Minow, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, borrowed an image from T. S. Eliot and publicly labeled much of television's programming ''a vast wasteland.'' With some updating for subsequent technological developments, the bulk of that speech's criticisms remain surprisingly valid. Still locked in pursuit of the biggest possible audiences, television has become a citadel of the safe and the conventional. Formulas and stereotypes are the norm. Controversy or even mild discomfort are frowned upon. One glaring paradox: In a nation that traditionally celebrates rugged individualism, television actively discourages personal statements that might be deemed unsettling. Mr. Minow leveled his charges on May 9, 1961, in a speech before a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. The commissioner, a former law partner of Adlai E. Stevenson, was blunt: ''I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public's airwaves.'' He reminded the industry that the airwaves belong to the people. ''You earn your bread by using public property,'' he said, and ''when you work in broadcasting you volunteer for public service, public pressure, and public regulation.'' Citing the industry's self-serving bromide that the public interest is merely what interests the public, the commissioner simply said, ''I disagree.''

IT may be months or years before the world learns exactly what happened at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power station and why radiation was spewed over much of Europe. But one thing that emerged with striking clarity in the days after the incident was first reported was the profound difference between the surfeit of speculation, questioning and information that flooded the West, and the few bare facts divulged in the East. By week's end, a resident of Kansas City, half a world away, probably knew more about the incident and its potential effects than a resident of Kiev, 70 miles from the damaged plant. Across the West, ominous talk of meltdowns and gamma rays revived anxieties about nuclear energy. Newspapers and television were filled with reports, sometimes exaggerated. Western tourists, students and workers were advised by their Governments to leave Kiev and were tested for radiation on departure.

AFTER years of planning and a few false starts, work has begun on a $6 million multi-level parking garage that will cover a section of the Metro- North New Haven Line railroad tracks set in a 26-foot-deep ''cut'' running through the center of Mount Vernon. City officials said they hope that the new facility, which will provide 411 spaces and is expected to be completed by next June, will help unite a community that they say has been ''physically and psychologically'' divided by the 92-year-old chasm. They are also looking to the project to invigorate the surrounding central business district. A ground-breaking ceremony for the garage was held last week, although construction actually began earlier in April. A similar ground breaking that was held more than two years ago proved premature when the city could not complete an agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to lease the air rights over the blocklong portion of the cut between Mount Vernon's Fifth Avenue and Wilson Place.

Federal officials said today that the latest information they had received on the Soviet reactor accident confirmed that it was the worst such accident in history but left many critical questions unanswered. After Federal task force reviewed the latest data at a two-hour meeting this morning, Lee M. Thomas, head of the group, said that ''not a lot of new conclusions'' could be drawn about the accident and its consequences. But Mr. Thomas added that American estimates that highly lethal radiation must have drenched an area several miles around the stricken reactor appear to have been confirmed by a Soviet official interviewed in West Germany. Area Still Radioactive That official, Boris N. Yeltsin, the Moscow Communist Party leader, said that water reservoirs near the crippled reactor were contaminated and that the region around the reactor was too dangerously radioactive to allow evacuated people to return. He also put the number of people evacuated at 49,000.

FIVE years into the state's pay-by-the-illness approach to controlling hospital rates - a period ended in December 1984 - hospital care in New Jersey cost less than the averages for the Northeast and the nation, according to the latest statistics from the Princeton-based New Jersey Hospital Association. But a research team from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded that the approach - the Diagnosis Related Groups (D.R.G.) system - has been no more effective than the far simpler regulations that preceded it. In a study scheduled for publication in the summer issue of the magazine Health Affairs, the researchers note that hospital-cost inflation in New Jersey has been below regional and national rates since 1976, when the state began regulating some hospital costs. According to the study, that record continued, but did not improve, after the D.R.G. system began in 1980. Researchers also found scant evidence that the state's D.R.G. system, the first of its kind in the country, had significantly changed the behavior of doctors or hospital administrators.