Swing (Feb-Dec 1952)

74 ivinc February, 1932 enormously impressive new television news show. He was seated in the control room of Studio 41 — a logical spot, he explained, to start out from — and presently he called on Camera 1 to bring in the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Ocean, a small wet seg' ment of it, swam into view on one monitor screen. Then Murrow called on the crew in San Francisco to show u? the Pacific. The Pacific, overhung with San Francisco's customary fog, was a less telegenic body of water, but we did catch a glimpse of it. Then Murrow, more or less acting as quarterback, called on his crews to show us first the San Francisco Bay Bridge, then the Brooklyn Bridge, the New York sky line, then San Francisco's skyline — all on live television. "We are impressed," said Murrow, "by a medium in which a man sitting in his living room has been able for the first time to look at two oceans at once." I am too. I am also impressed by the intelligence of the men — -chiefly Murrow and his producer, Fred W. Friendly — who dreamed up this simple trick to bring home to the viewers the wonder of this electronic miracle. "See It Now," which has been in preparation for six months, is the logical extension to the highly successful album of records, "I Can Hear It Now," and to its radio counterpart, the Peabody-award winning "Hear It Now." It is not — and is not intended to be — a complete review of the week's news; it is instead an almost entirely new form of journalism, "told in the voices and faces" of the people who made the news, a technique that offers a deeper insight into the headlines and the people who make them — who they are and what sort of people they are. There was, for example, a film of Winston Churchill during his London Guildhall speech, an aged, aged Churchill, the great voice dimmed by time, the prose style — though a great improvement on Clement Attlee's — subdued into just a whisper of its former thunder. A deeply revelatory picture it was. There were other pictures — of Eden in Paris telling Vishinsky to stop laughing and read the disarmament proposal, of Senator Taft purring with a cat-like contentment while Senator Dirksen told an assemblage what a great candidate he was. Murrow — handsome, relaxed, urbane — sewed the pictures together with a running commentary which, I should say, neither over-played nor under-played the significance of the events, and also conducted interviews with some of the C.B.S. news staff members — Eric Severeid, in Washington, Howard K. Smith, in Paris. Smith remarked good naturedly of the relations between Russia and the West that "the mutual ill-will is entirely unimpaired." Then Mr. Murrow shifted us to Korea for one of the most intimate and instructive glimpses into that battleground that I have yet seen. This bit was especially remarkable in its avoidance of all the newsreel cliches. There wasn't a single shot of a soldier yanking a lanyard on a 105' mm. cannon, no shots of bombers tearing great holes in the Korean real estate. Instead, the cameras concentrated on the soldiers of Fox Company of an infantry regiment, catching them as they ate and slept and gambled and groused and joked, catching the tedium of warfare, the wait' ing, the humor of an essentially unhumof ous occupation, the humanity of an essentially inhuman profession. We followed Fox Company, as it took position in the front line on a mountain' top and left them there, anticipating trouble that had not yet come. Evening had fallen; the rocket flares were out; a few shells sounded their cricket calls in the distance; the Chinese were astir; but nothing had happened yet. It was a dramatic close. "We wanted," said Mr. Murrow, "to narrow the distance between those of us sitting comfortably at home and those in the line." The news of the week from Korea was the murder of 5,500 captive