Look Who's Talking

Radio rarely wields any lance more deadly than a squirt of toothpaste. The mere thought of radio talking back to the press gives most newsmen a belly laugh. Yet for the last two weeks CBS has done just that--it has criticized the press with such spirit and point that it has got right under the thick, ink-smudged hide of several Manhattan dailies.

The new program for New Yorkers, CBS Views the Press (WCBS, Sat. 6:15-6:30 p.m. E.D.T.), is aired in the well-known, orange-crush tones of Newscaster Don Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck also writes the script with the aid of the CBS news staff and his own 20 years of newspaper, wire-service and radio reporting experience.

With the first sentence of his first script, Hollenbeck started ragging the rags, especially the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram, the arch-conservative Sun and Hearst's Journal-American for "the great ink-letting which resulted from the disclosure that a number of New York City families on relief had been housed in hotels."

These stories, purred Hollenbeck, "resembled a kind of newspaper lynching party. . . . The families have been hustled from their hotel rooms . . . put into condemned tenements and the city lodging houses. . . . All in all, it was about as sorry an exhibition as the press--or a section of it--is capable of putting on."

The next minute, Hollenbeck caught PM and the Daily Worker redhanded filching an item (which later proved erroneous) from the columns of their archenemy, the Daily News.

Last week Hollenbeck glowed over the New Yorker for "one of the best jobs of journalism about journalism we've ever seen": a three-part profile of Reuben Maury, who writes editorials "on both sides of a question with apparent conviction" for both the Daily News and Collier's. Then Hollenbeck nipped at a cartoonist for picturing a major general with only one star.

The New York Post and PM ("Even if bits of our hide are tacked on the radio tower") gave the show a favorable review. So did the Herald Tribune's Columnist John Crosby ("It took courage . . . zeal and discretion"). Four Manhattan dailies gave it the silent treatment. (Snarled one editor: "The papers could do a better job on radio any week.") But the public liked it; more than 350 letters piled into CBS the first week. Encouraged, Hollenbeck promised soon to turn a "detached, noncommittal eye" on wire services and newsmagazines, as well as on the newspapers' columnists, comic and editorial pages, slanted news, twisted headlines and bent prose. Said CBS's delighted Edward R. Murrow: "I think we'll get a mass audience for this one. But even if we don't, it's definitely not just a summer filler."

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