The Spoken Word at Its Best
HOWE, QUINCY
The Spoken Word at Its Best CLEARING THE AIR By Edward P. Morgan Robert B. Luce. 267 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by QUINCY HOWE Editor, "Atlas," radio commentator Like most first-class...
...And this comes through with special force at the hands of a man with Morgan's talents, industry and temperament...
...It provides ideal coverage of such events as political conventions and United Nations debates...
...Some independent and FM stations, though, have begun to offer their own answer...
...Morgan also delivers a tribute to radio as a news medium which combines mobility of movement with mobility of mind...
...Television now carries superb and costly documentaries...
...Indeed, since the printed word is derived from the spoken word—and not the other way around—the journalist who habitually writes for radio more often than not develops a prose style of unique clarity...
...I began reporting and discussing the news over the American Broadcasting Company's radio network just one year before Morgan did...
...Consisting of 120 of the 5-minute commentaries with which Edward P. Morgan winds up his weekday 15-minute network radio broadcasts, it has a ready-made audience...
...Students of history will find in Morgan's book the living contemporary record, written about events while they were occurring...
...Aside from raising such questions, Clearing the Air, which covers the period since Morgan began reporting in 1955, proves that radio still offers a talented reporter as much scope as any medium around...
...The answer to this last question lies primarily with the networkaffiliated radio stations which, for the present, prefer their own disc jockeys and jazz records to the news programs that the network provides...
...Students of modern journalism will find the author a reporter's reporter, the very model of clarity, precision and perception...
...Even before Edward R. Murrow left CBS to work for the Government two years ago, his radio news program had already gone off the air, and television claimed most of his time...
...Many of Morgan's regular listeners will want to recall and preserve some of his representative work, which in this book he has broken down into 11 categories, including "People," "Strictly Personal," "Holidays and Heroes," as well as "Politics," "International Affairs" and "The American Scene...
...And if it does, will the independent station, the regional or FM network move in to fill the vacuum...
...True, radio networks still present excellent news round-ups in which correspondents all over the world make reports that run from one to three minutes...
...For myself, both for personal and professional reasons, I wish to concentrate on the fact that perhaps no one else will ever be able to write a book like this one again...
...There are few broadcasting experiences that I treasure more highly than the occasions when I was able to fill in for him...
...As for the broadcasting industry and those who work for it, will the broadcasters themselves see fit to encourage younger men to pick up the torches that used to be carried by men like Elmer Davis, Raymond Swing, H. V. Kaltenborn, Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith and Chet Huntley (who originally made his reputation on radio...
...Reviewed by QUINCY HOWE Editor, "Atlas," radio commentator Like most first-class journalism, Clearing the Air offers many different things to many different readers...
...Apart from his stimulating foreword, the broadcast scripts provide the substance of Clearing the Air, offering conclusive proof that radio reporting and commentary demand journalistic talents of the highest order...
...Yet changes in our society are moving with such speed that even a pioneer can find himself outdated before he reaches the promised land...
...First, will the field of network radio news commentary continue to shrink...
...My own job kept me in New York, while he worked the Washington beat...
...Given this wonderful flexibility it seems downright criminal to me that it is not more meaningfully exploited...
...But he ploughs a lonely furrow...
...But the 15minute network news commentary has gone the way of the soap opera...
...Yet, as Morgan points out in his foreword, "Regular TV news programs . . . are too often limited to film strips of fires and bathing beauties and shots of dignitaries arriving at and departing from airports with vapid remarks...
...Radio," he writes, "can alert the inner ear and the mind's eye to broad horizons in a twinkling...
...The appearance of Clearing the Air poses several questions...
...Today, thanks to the sponsorship of the AFL-cio, most of the ABC radio network still carries Morgan's broadcasts at an early evening hour...
...Because radio uses the spoken word, in many ways it requires those who write for it to set themselves loftier standards of clarity and precision than those whose writing appears in print...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 7
