From Washington

One of the best weekly jobs of radio journalism rounded out its first year this Tuesday when Report to the Nation (Columbia network at 9:30 p.m. E.S.T.) took its listeners aloft in a Flying Fortress. The 52nd Report, like most that had gone before, combined a cool flow of information with the exciting immediacies of what it meant to human beings--in this case to airmen and ground crews. In authenticity and taste, Report to the Nation has established itself as the nearest thing in radio to a good documentary movie.

Conceived about three years ago on a suggestion of Mrs. Ruth Bryan Leavitt Owen Rohde, onetime U.S. Minister to Denmark, the program took shape in 1940 as CBS's solution to the problem of allocating radio time to the numerous Government agencies that wanted it. CBS elected to tell, each week, the story of whatever U.S. Government activity was uppermost in the news. Assigned to the job were CBS's clearheaded Washington correspondent, Albert L. Warner, and a producerdirector, Brewster Morgan, who had directed a Shakespearean theater in England, worked in Hollywood, got radio down cold in the Columbia Workshop.

The two big pools of U.S. radio talent are in Manhattan and Hollywood. To put on his show in Washington, Producer Morgan had to find and train his own actors. On the reasonable theory that types for a show about the Government could be found in the Government itself, Morgan relied heavily on well-cast amateurs. Of the 200 actors and actresses who are now on call for Report to the Nation, two-thirds are daytime Government employes. Among them Producer Morgan, in search of a regional accent, can be fairly sure to find the real McCoy.

Sensitively directed, Report to the Nation is also knowingly and neatly written. "Truly" Warner, who supervises the selection of topics and acts as narrator on the program, knows Washington thoroughly, has a top-flight newsman's ability to make coherent sense of what is going on. In voice and manner he is also well fitted to carry out CBS's policy on news broadcasts : no overexcitement, no overstatement. But for all its narrator's calm, the Report has dramatized many a big news story at the moment it broke:

> Having written and rehearsed three different provisional scripts on the Lend-Lease bill last winter, Warner and cast got the news of the final vote in the House just ten minutes before going on the air.

> Having dug up the facts from State Employment Agencies and other sources, Report dramatized the struggle, of small business against priorities unemployment (TIME, Sept. 15) early in November, before Floyd Odium's "circus" did (TIME, Nov. 17).

For the true-to-life flavor of Report to the Nation's dramatic episodes, credit goes to a staff of scriptwriters that has included onetime FORTUNE Editor Richard Hippelheuser and Library of Congress Researcher Joseph Liss. Scriptor Liss knows how the U.S. people talk because he has been all over the country recording their voices, tales and songs for the Library's collection of sound transcriptions. On one Report some of the transcriptions themselves were used, putting on the air the reactions of fanners in the Tennessee Valley to the defense program.

Since last summer Report to the Nation has had about the toughest spot CBS could give it--opposite NBC's super-popular Fibber McGee and Molly (TIME. April 22, 1940). CBS regards its Crossley rating, maintained somewhere between four and six, as a triumph under the circumstances.

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