Broadcasting San Francisco

If the plain citizen is either baffled or bored by the world security conference at San Francisco, it won't be radio's fault.

The broadcasters, aboil with plans last week, hoped to do more than explain, in down-to-earth terms, exactly what goes on. Consciously steering clear of a "carnival atmosphere," they intended, all the same, to liven the conference up a bit.

The big networks, plus BBC, CBC, and some 30 individual U.S. radio stations, had reserved space in the Veterans' Memorial Building for daily, on-the-spot reports of the public sessions. There were also elaborate plots to get inside the smoke-filled committee rooms -- and the extra-special plans grew fancier as the opening day approached. Samples:

CBS was busy with a conference-eve 'round-the-world documentary, Memo to the Future, turned out by radio's Super-scriptster Norman Corwin. To air "the hopes and expectations of the common people," Corwin will bring in short-wave testimonials from six continents (including a G.I. on the western front, a Red Army soldier in Moscow, a U.S. chaplain on Iwo Jima, a Mexican in Chapultepec, a guerrilla in Manila, a schoolboy in Monte video, Actor Paul Robeson in Chicago, Artist Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City, Cinemactress Bette Davis in Hollywood).

NBC, conscious of the dignity of the occasion, announced that Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish would be m.c. of its Foreign Policy series. One NBC official said nervously: "I don't think there will be guys running around with walkie-talkies. ... We don't know how far the State Department will let us go about shoving a mike in a dignitary's face."

Blue will feature "interpretive" broadcasts by Sumner Welles, newly hired as the network's "adviser on world peace," and full color reporting by Ben Hecht, Hedda Hopper, Orson Welles, and "other Hollywood personalities."

Mutual, on conference eve, will play host to part of the U.S. delegation on its American Forum of the Air. In a later series of interviews it will try to present "every person in any way connected with the conference." Mutual's special correspondent: Elsa Maxwell.

All the networks will hurry their top-ranking regulars (some now at foreign posts) to the San Francisco mikes: NBC's H. V. Kaltenborn, Robert St. John; CBS's Bob Trout, Major George Fielding Eliot, William Shirer, Eric Sevareid; Mutual's Fulton Lewis Jr., Gabriel Heatter, Upton Close; Blue's "Principal Interpreter" Ray mond Gram Swing, Walter Winchell, Vincent Sheean, Drew Pearson.

OWI will short-wave daily to every corner of the world in 20-odd languages and dialects, including the Japanese.

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