Radio: See It Now

The trouble with television, says CBS Vice President Edward R. Murrow, is that “a studio in San Francisco looks exactly like a studio in New York.” This week, on his ambitious new See It Now (Sun. 3:30 p.m., CBS-TV), Ed Murrow got the TV cameras far beyond the studios, and carried his audience from London to Korea.

See It Now is a natural descendant of Murrow’s radio news program, Hear It Now, and on the opening show it managed to achieve much of the pace of his dramatized radio newscasts. Filmed shots of Winston Churchill speaking in a blizzard of “Hear-hears” to a London Guildhall audience were expertly cut into live news reports from Washington. There was another filmed sequence of Presidential Candidate Robert Taft happily listening to a eulogistic speech by Senator Everett Dirksen, and some biting realism in a 15-minute documentary of a day in the life of Fox Co., 19th Regiment, 24th Division in Korea. Murrow’s aim was to concentrate on soldiers’ faces, and he accomplished it with shots of a regimental commander giving a welcoming lecture to a group of replacements, and a blanket-draped sergeant routing out his squad at reveille.

Cameramen Wanted. Two camera crews — one in Washington, the other in Europe — are working exclusively for See It Now. Others are hired as needed for specific requirements. But Murrow thinks that TV will have to train its own cameramen to look for the offbeat and unusual. Says he: “There’s no sense our trying to be on top of the news with a weekly show.”

In the coming presidential campaign, See It Now intends to let others cover the major speeches, and may, instead, seek out people who have listened to them and get their reactions. Because the Paris meeting of the U.N. is already given adequate film coverage by both CBS and NBC, See It Now plans only to get the highlights of each week from CBS’s European Bureau Chief Howard Smith.

Accolade Granted. Radio-trained Ed Murrow misses the flexibility of his old medium, where “with the help of a listener’s imagination you can tell a story with 200 words in 45 seconds. The same story, translated to TV, may take ten minutes to create the same impact.” But there are compensations: a camera crew sent out to Paramus, N.J., where a school building program was hamstrung by a shortage of steel, was able to return with hundreds of feet of film showing plenty of steel being used in the construction of nearby movie theaters, restaurants and apartments.

With See It Now, TV Newcomer Murrow and his co-producer Fred Friendly have produced television’s best and liveliest news show. Next month they will get the accolade that really counts in television : the Aluminum Co. of America will become their first sponsor.