Don't See It Now

To Murrow and to Murrow and to Murrow crept in this petty pace many of the bell-clanging news stories of the past quarter-century. By 1941, after covering the blitz in Britain, Edward Roscoe Murrow was prestigious enough to be an intimate of F.D.R., and by 1946 (it took a bit more doing), important enough to be a vice president of CBS. But within two years he had abandoned his desk and paper-shuffling, and by 1951 was spending most of his energy on See It Now, the high-cost (up to $100,000 per show) documentary which, on subjects from Nasser to segregation, came as close as TV ever had to imaginative journalism.

But See It Now and its sometimes overdone passion for the controversial proved too controversial for many advertisers. Last year, despite violent protests by Murrow, the show went off the air. Soon afterward, Murrow delivered his celebrated Chicago speech charging TV with "decadence and escapism."Reporter-Entertainer Murrow was stripped down to the chitchat of TV's Person to Person and Small World, a daily radio news report and an occasional guest shot as a big-name narrator. Moreover, Ed Murrow got into deep water with his scarcely responsible The Business of Sex (TIME, Jan. 26 et seq.). Last week Ed Murrow indulged in a little escapism of his own, announced he would take a year's leave of absence from CBS for "traveling, listening, reading and trying to learn." Murrow, now 50, insists that he will report back for work on July 1, 1960. His replacement on Person to Person: Arthur Godfrey.

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