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CONGRESS CONSIDERS PROPOSALS TO LIMIT UNINVITED PHONE CALLS

Much of America is fed up with automatic, mechanized, privacy-invading phone calls. But nobody has figured out quite what to do about it, though members of

Congress are trying.

Bills to regulate the calls, which have a habit of interrupting sleep, dining or entertaining, are making their way through the legislative process. One, by Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., would bar such calls to hospital emergency rooms and other public-safety numbers and to paging services and cellular phones.

Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D-S.C., would prohibit unwanted calls to homes. His bill would also require auto-dialers to hang up within five seconds after a call recipient hangs up. Yet another bill, by Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., embraces the Markey bans and adds another on unsolicited advertising sent by fax machine.

The Markey and Pressler bills also instruct the Federal Communications Commission to study ways to protect phone customers. All lines should remain open to pollsters and other researchers, even if their non-automatic calls are sometimes annoying. Nor should government, federal or state, silence those who seek with their own voice to market a product or service.

But phone customers who want it deserve protection from the tape-recorded, metallic voices of those who make up to 1,000 calls daily.