Moment of Candor

In the search for a temporary paycheck during Manhattan's tedious, two-month-old newspaper strike, many a journalist has settled for an unpleasant and unfamiliar job. But of all the compromises forced by the shutdown of nine dailies, none seems more awkward than the gravitation of typewriter-style newsmen to that rival and all-consuming medium, TV.

Minimum Pay. "To me," said former New York Post Columnist Murray Kempton writing in the British weekly Spectator, "the saddest spectacle of the newspaper strike has been the sight of so many of my old friends on television, head up, eyes front, body sagging, attempting spontaneity in the pronouncement of words they composed two days ago and have read over seven times since." One of Columnist Kempton's old friends was Kempton himself, and he did not like either the sight or the experience:

"Once, for $25, I was called in on an emergency to discuss a book I have not read for 20 years. I have also twice appeared on a program where journalists sit and answer questions telephoned in by a public that feels deprived of the wisdom newspapers dispense. That is informal television and quite depressing enough. Formal television is inexpressibly worse.

"I was invited one Sunday morning to render some reflections on a petty instance of civic corruption for the Columbia Broadcasting System, in a great cavern where nine of my fellow unemployed sat, each behind an office desk.'' Lacquered up with makeup that "would seem a little too much to Sadie Thompson," Kempton found the studio trying to put him at ease with a TelePrompTer, but "only private detectives conduct private conversations while looking fixedly at the person addressed and private detectives do not set their eyes on the subject's forehead." So he sat, "an actor who was not an actor, behind a desk that was not a desk, and pretended to improvise words already soggy in the mind from being rained on by repetition."

Manhattan's TV tubes are bulging these days with messages from strike-idled typewriter newsmen abruptly recruited, powdered, and thrust into blue shirts for the inscrutable electronic eye. CBS has added 26 hands to its news staff--many of them from the city's muted press. As soon as the strike began, the National Broadcasting Company programmed The New York Times of the Air, featuring such familiar bylines as Washington Bureau Chief James Reston. Capital Columnist Arthur Krock and Broadway Critic Howard Taubman. At first NBC paid the visitors nothing, on the premise that they were really appearing on behalf of the Times. Now each recruit gets a performer's minimum of $50 per show.

Constant Colloquy. Viewers, too, have found the new apparitions a little unsettling. Faithful readers of the Herald Tribune's Drama Critic Walter Kerr, whose printed words can fall with such confident scorn on a meretricious Broadway production, discovered that on the air Kerr dissolves into a pool of throat-clearing nervousness. "It's like being called up in the draft," wrote Times TV Critic Jack Gould after being nominated for TV duty. "The peculiar joy of hemorrhaging without bleeding starts when the evil little red light glows on the monstrous camera directly overhead. On the assumption that the well-being of the electronic cameras is much more important than the survival of any of the guests, the studios are kept at a chilling temperature." Remembering all that has been written about uncomfortable TV lighting, Gould set the record straight. "All that nonsense about hot lights is so much jazz."

The one merit of seeing reporters and critics on TV is that their stories, however stumblingly read, are plainly their own, and this honesty contrasts with some of the smoother TV spielers so confidently delivering thoughts fed to them by others.

Trying to fill in for the missing newspapers has taught TV that only the newspapers themselves can do that job. "It has been demonstrated anew," wrote NBC's newscaster Chet Huntley, in a moment of candor, for The Reporter, "that television and radio journalism cannot and should not attempt to deal with the day's complete budget of information. The journalists of radio and television, those of the newspapers, those of the trade press, and those of the periodicals are all engaged in a constant and unceasing colloquy. We in electronic journalism are indeed affected when one important participant in the conversation falls silent. We can no more take the places of our newspaper colleagues than we can converse effectively with ourselves."

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