(FORTUNE Magazine) – Being grimly committed to the New York Giants and also the Free World, your correspondent must rate the afternoon of January 5 a definite downer. His entertainment concept for this postmatutinal time frame posited that the Maramen could handle the Chicago Bears even without drawing upon the 8 1/2 points those fellows were giving away for some reason, and also mistakenly assumed that Phil Donahue's A Citizens' Summit could be watched without excessive paranoia inducement. The idea, which has since been downgraded to dumb, was to interstitially ogle a tape of Donahue's NBC extravaganza during commercial and halftime breaks, thusly elevating the household video utilization rate to thitherto unscaled heights. Donahue's exercise in summitry was an example of something called spacebridges. This portentous term refers to television programs in which earthlings around our planet are brought together by satellite and get to gawk at each other on huge video screens, while Mr. & Ms. Home Viewer spectate on both sides via their own diminutive monitors. In the instant case, 170 characters in a Seattle TV studio were communicating with a similar number of Soviets in Leningrad, the objects of the exercise being cultural interaction and Armageddon forestallment. Vladimir Pozner, Donahue's counterpart in Leningrad, said that the program would be ''a first step, albeit a trembling one, . . . toward understanding.'' Phil himself acknowledged in interviews that some people might think the show naive, but he appears to have concluded that it could well be preferable to nuclear winter. ''What's the alternative?'' he asked in one interview. ''Grab the kids and wait for the big one?'' A fascinating premise of A Citizens' Summit was that citizens of the Soviet Union are free to speak their minds in public, just as members of the Giants' offensive line were free to turn back the Bears' pass rush. The opening line of the show states solemnly: ''Participants in A Citizens' Summit are free to discuss whatever they wish.'' Marilyn O'Reilly, a Chicago consultant who once worked for Donahue and who selected the audiences in both cities, assured numerous interviewers that she was free to pick anybody she wanted and also that the people she picked were free to speak up. And yet Ms. O'Reilly's selections somehow resulted in a matchup even less , even than the one in Soldier Field. Every single speaker in the Soviet audience fluently and confidently mouthed the party line on every issue raised, while most of the Americanskis came across as tongue-tied political innocents. Performing on a par with Sean Landeta trying to punt out of the end zone was the lady who inanely observed that she had been a tourist in Leningrad and found life there to be ever so much freer and more relaxed than she'd been led to expect. Equally nadirish was the activist young miss who heatedly proclaimed that life is not all that free in the United States, where the FBI goes around monitoring people, and furthermore there is discrimination right here in Seattle. Alas, poor Donahue is manifestly less at home in Sovietology than in discussing transsexuals' rights or the latest codicil to the feminist agenda. Occasionally, to be sure, he did rouse himself and deliver a few unfriendly remarks about the Soviet regime. Needing to be worked into some trivia quiz game was his memorable complaint that the 260 million Soviet people ''appear to be intimidated by a select few males.'' If you bet on our side, you were entitled to a lot more than 8 1/2 points.