Hear It Now

Into one hour last week, CBS tried to pack all the news of the previous seven days. Listeners to Hear It Now (Fri. 9 p.m.) heard "drama for the ear" that originated in the trampled snow of North Korea, the drapery-hung walls of Lake Success and on the quarter-deck of the battleship Missouri.

Ballyhooed by CBS as "the biggest project ever undertaken in the field of information," Hear It Now derives from such radio news shows as THE MARCH OF TIME and NBC's Voices and Events; it has frankly borrowed from the techniques of TIME and the I Can Hear It Now record albums created by Edward Murrow and Writer Fred Friendly. With their new show, Murrow & Friendly hope to report and interpret the news with "the actual sound of history in the making."

Particles of Voices. Some of Murrow & Friendly's effects were fairly routine: the railing voices of Communist China's General Wu and Russia's Vishinsky contrasted with the country-lawyer diction of U.S. Delegate Warren Austin. But others achieved a vivid reality, e.g., the flat, unemotional American voices recorded in a command post against the background of artillery fire, and the bitter comment of a wounded marine. There was deep sonority in Carl Sandburg's recital of his The People, Yes. Says Friendly: "One of the nation's troubles is that there's been no one to listen to--no Roosevelt, no Churchill, not even a Willkie. We're trying to build something in particles of voices; but we don't want them all to come from New York, Washington and Lake Success."

CBS searches out the other voices with mobile recording units. From 1 1/2 hours of interviews in Koto, Murrow & Friendly culled a 21-second spot for Hear It Now: for other stories. CBS network stations sent mobile units up to the Canadian border and deep into the backwoods of South Carolina. Shying away from the musical "stings" that usually embellish radio documentaries, Hear It Now employs instead such topflight composers as David Diamond and Lehman Engel to supply unobtrusive incidental music.

Make Your Mistakes. Murrow handles the front-page news and the editorial interpretations. But Hear It Now also has oral "columns" and features. Red Barber talks on sports (Pittsburgh's General Manager Branch Rickey urged the nation to keep its morale high with baseball); drama is covered by Comic Abe Burrows (he didn't like the Broadway revue Bless You All--see THEATER); press by Don Hollenbeck (he disapproved the newspapers' handling of the Truman-Hume correspondence); and movies by Bill Leonard (a vote for Born Yesterday; a vote against Red Skelton's Watch the Birdie). Hear It Now ends with a four-to ten-minute "closeup" (last week's subject: General Douglas MacArthur).

Though the first show did little to illumine or interpret the news, it managed to move quickly and interestingly from event to event. Murrow, who hopes the first few programs will serve as a shakedown cruise, says: "It's something you have to worry over, and make your mistakes and get some informed criticism."

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