Swinging Voice

Negro Comedian Bill Cosby wisecracking about the culinary problems of primitive man. David Brinkley speculating on how J.F.K. would have handled Viet Nam. Frank Sinatra "dooby-dooby-doing" through Strangers in the Night. That combination would be pretty good radio fare in St. Louis or Atlanta. But to foreign listeners from Asadabad to Zamboanga, accustomed for years to more somber programming, the Voice of America's swinging new broadcasting format sounds almost as far out as a piccolo solo by Lyndon Johnson.

The "new sound" of the Voice, inaugurated last month, and so far audible only on English-language broadcasts, is adapted from the highly successful "magazine formats" now popular in U.S. radio and TV--an amalgam of music, news, discussion, comedy and anecdotes, with hardly any item running for more than four minutes.

As a result, a discussion of how to save Venice from the sea might run next to a "Fatha" Hines jazz recital, which, in turn, might yield to a summary of domestic opposition to the war in Viet Nam. The propaganda "commercial" may be nothing more than a familiar American melody or a discussion between a Democrat and a Republican, to show without sermonizing that the U.S. does indeed have a two-party system. News, in accordance with listeners' habits, is still presented every 30 minutes, but a sprightly rendering of Yankee Doodle has replaced a pompous version of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean as the break tune.

First with the Latest. The Voice grew up in the days when thousands of people in Occupied Europe would risk death to hear news broadcasts from Britain or America--and never got over its early success. The format was never basically changed. Voice programs came to have, says one observer, the "sound of measured senility," or, in Voice Director John Chancellor's kindlier description, "an institutional sound."

Whatever the sound was, it was not keeping pace with the competition of Radio Moscow and Radio Peking--not to mention the BBC and a score of new national stations. Shortly after he became director in July 1965, Chancellor decided to find a new format, and with the help of Richard Krolik, an executive of TIME-LIFE Broadcasting, devised the "new sound." With the wholehearted approval of Leonard Marks, director of the parent United States Information Agency, the Voice has now set out, in Chancellor's words, to be "vigorous, amusing, avant-garde--the first with the latest."

Precursor of the new sound, and still its most prized ingredient, is the universally acclaimed jazz and pop-music program, Music USA, that Willis Conover has broadcast on VOA for nearly 13 years. Conover is mobbed whenever he makes personal appearances in Eastern Europe--almost, notes one newsman wryly, as if he were one of the Kennedy brothers. Voice officials rate Conover--and his music--their most powerful opinion molder. As Conover himself puts it: "Jazz tells more about America than any American can realize. It bespeaks vitality, strength, social mobility; it's a free music with its own discipline, but not an imposed, inhibiting discipline."

Also unchanged is the Voice's basic approach to news, which is to tell it straight. "You can't talk down to people," says Chancellor, a former White House correspondent for NBC. "They won't listen. And you can't lie to people. You'll get caught." Despite sporadic grumblings from congressional flag-wavers, the Voice scrupulously tells both the good and the bad about the U.S., presents both sides of all major issues.

Polyp Problem. Translating the news into 37 languages presents perennial difficulties (President Johnson's throat polyp came out in Vietnamese as "a boil in the side of the throat"), but the Voice, particularly in Communist countries, often scoops the local radio and press. In 1964, its Russian broadcasts beat the state radio by 1 1/2 hours with news of the fall of Nikita Khrushchev; this year it carried the most complete accounts of the trials of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. Red China, North Korea and North Viet Nam still try to jam VOA transmissions, but all the Communist countries of Europe except Bulgaria have quit jamming.

In Europe, VOA remains second in credibility to the BBC, whose wartime broadcasts won it a lasting reputation for reliability. But it has greater respect in many parts of Africa, where, says a Nigerian newspaper editor, "it appears the BBC regrets that Britain ever abdicated power." In the credibility race, both friendly rivals far outdistance Radio Moscow and Radio Peking.

Multiplied Wattage. In total hours beamed over short wave, VOA, with 854 hours a week, is behind Russia (1,403 hours) and China (1,015 hours), and is only slightly ahead of the United Arab Republic (827 hours). However, by freely offering local stations tapes of its own programs and live broadcasts of special events, such as U.S. space shots, VOA vastly multiplies its wattage.

The competition is at least as stiff as any commercial broadcaster faces. Even so, Red China's Foreign Minister Chen Yi has described himself as a listener of Voice newscasts. Captured Viet Cong posters warn direly that "listening to the Voice of America is like letting a thief in your house who will steal your soul." Graduating Moscow high school students danced until dawn to VOA music in Red Square last spring. In the forests of Togo, one Christian Agbeze spends three hours a day--one hour down a mountain and two hours up--walking to the nearest village with a radio so that he can catch Voice broadcasts. Never one to let a listener down, VOA is sending him his own transistor.

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