The Fresh Look

For five months 19 guests (of the U.S. State Department) from 13 foreign lands roamed freely and studied U.S. radio and television. Last week the somewhat walleyed visitors -;many of whom had been watching TV for the first time -met in Boston University's School of Public Reations and Communications to compare notes. U.S. technical standards got loud praise, but other features of radio-TV fell under fire. Sample reactions:

P:Norbert H. G. Mai, 35, a West Berlin political commentator, criticized network Drodigality: "The most amazing thing about American TV is the variety. It seems like a waste of money though, because there simply isn't the audience for it all day long." Mai called for more live programming, fewer kinescopes and films. On public-service shows: "Always they seemed to be the responsibility of the men with lesser talent, and usually they had no visual appeal at all." Commercials? "Horrible." But Mai developed "an American attitude" toward them, i.e., "I would go out and get a bottle of beer when the commercial came on."

P:For Jordan's Sari Aweidah, 26, a producer-announcer with the government-owned Hashemite Jordan Broadcasting Service, the junket provided his first professional contact with TV. Biggest beef: the "24-hour-a-day 'disk jockey.' It is just appalling. Perhaps that is because in Jordan we like to think of radio as a field where you transmit education, through entertainment."

P:Julio Galindo, 26, a radio-TV scriptwriter and producer in Mexico City felt that TV has robbed radio. "With the exception of a few shows like Conversation, all the creative thinking and producing has gone into TV . . ."

P:Sunday Sam Young-Harry, 27, newscaster son of a Nigerian tribal chief (and producer of a local version of Twenty Questions in Lagos) rapped the record spinners for "insulting the audience's intelligence. They are just a prostitution of radio. One in Omaha would frequently play a few bars from a Beethoven symphony, then break it off with 'We're not interested in Beethoven's greatest, but only in Como's latest.' "

But Sunday Sam Young-Harry was nonetheless impressed: "We have seen this whole country in its absolute nakedness. We were free to see good and bad alike. We were not on any guided tours such as those that are given behind the Iron Curtain. In addition to the very great deal we have learned professionally, we have developed a. tremendous respect for this country."

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