Painless News

The air of radio's enormous room still thrummed with the voices of newscasters, commentators and military experts crying "Sleep no more!"--but many of them now had an uneasy feeling that they were talking to themselves.

P: Raymond Moley, after seven months of professorial commentating, decided to call it quits, said that he was too busy with other jobs and besides "there isn't enough to talk about on the air."

P: George Hicks, crack ABC correspondent, who was set to hop to the Pacific when the war ended, got a gravy job announcing U.S. Steel's costly new Theater Guild on the Air show.

P: CBS's even-voiced, levelheaded Charles Collingwood got ready to return from Europe for a lecture tour.

This still left radio a studioful of George Fielding Eliots and H. V. Kal-tenborns, whose jobs were safe enough: radio intended to push out the smaller fry first, cut down on the number of news programs. Latest trend is to make the news painless. Mutual now has Marjorie and Royal Arch Gunnison, the husband-&-wife team who covered the Orient for the Christian Science Monitor, to chitchat the news on a show called Mr. & Mrs. Reporter (1 p.m., E.W.T.). ABC signed up the aging wonder boy Orson Welles. who wants to talk about Shirer's kind of subjects, and sound like Alexander Woollcott.

CBS, disdaining all such fun & games, is betting that the letdown in listening to news won't last. Said CBS News Chief Paul White: "They'll listen again, and if they don't, God knows the war was fought for nothing."

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