RIGHT WHINE CAN'T STOP CHEESY TV.

Byline: PHIL ROSENTHAL 

The French have cultural watchdogs who monitor language usage as zealously as they do the quality of their wines and cheeses. Allowing so much as the wrong noun to enter the vernacular, it is felt, would diminish the republic.

Our cultural watchdogs watch daytime TV talk shows.

"There are still many hours of programming on the air that are degrading, exploitative and deeply offensive to the values shared by most Americans," self-appointed virtue czar Bill Bennett and U.S. senators Joe Lieberman and Sam Nunn wrote in a letter Monday to the more than 16,000 local program buyers here at the annual National Association of Television Programming Executives convention.

For Bennett, Lieberman and Nunn, the letter represents the latest salvo in their very public campaign against the "cultural rot" of daytime talk. It has not hurt their cause that sponsorship - and viewership - of the gabfests began to wane just before they took aim at these programs as catalysts for societal decline.

The marketplace, more than morality, has dictated it.

These annual NATPE affairs tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, anyway. It didn't matter that America wasn't craving a dozen Ricki Lake knockoffs last fall. That's what the folks at NATPE thought last winter, that's what they bought, and that's what America got.

Now that it's clear too few people wanted to watch "Carnie," "Marilyn Kagan," "Gabrielle, "Charles Perez," "Danny!" and even longstanding standard-bearer "Donahue," it is incumbent on the syndicators and the station managers to fill the gaping holes these failures left in their schedules with shows that aren't at all like them.

The show that's expected to create the most enthusiasm is Rosie O'Donnell's talk show. The thinking is that she's both amiable and entertaining on her own, without having to resort to exploitation.

Another leading newcomer is thought to be Maureen O'Boyle, the former anchor of the canceled sleazoid magazine "A Current Affair," who is pushing a supposedly serious-minded issue-oriented show.

Buoyed by the success of Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford - and the unchallenged blandness of rookies George Hamilton and his ex-wife, Alana - several softball talk shows are being pushed here. They include "He Says, She Says" with former Los Angeles TV personalities Mark Thompson and Wendy Walsh and a coffee klatsch with Tammy Faye Bakker and comedian Jim J. Bullock.

Current talk hosts Geraldo Rivera, Mark Wahlberg and others, meanwhile, are backpedaling, telling stations they will keep sex and slime out of their programs. But none of the shows that the do-gooders have labeled as offensive ever said they were setting out to degrade anything or anyone, either.

If these new shows don't generate ratings, the pressure will be on to tart them up a bit. That's what got their predecessors into trouble, and has led to all the grandstanding, politicking and spin control.

"Why do you think people ... are attacking music and the media? Because the reality is frightening," Academy of Television Arts and Sciences president Richard Frank said in a speech Monday.

Frank urged the people who run television to "use your power to do some good. ... It is high time to give something back."