The Osgood Muse

Dawn is still some time away when newsmen in radio stations across the country begin to comb the wire-service bulletins and newspapers for the makings of their early programs. Their reach is enormous,* but the product is generally predictable. At its frequent worst, radio news consists of clatters and bleeps strung together by an announcer who has learned to rip and read wire-service copy. Even the morning shows of larger independent stations and network affiliates rarely rise above an intelligent presentation of the moment's headlines.

One measured voice in all this noise is that of Charles Osgood, whose five-minute-and-50-second Newsbreak programs have an audience of 2,253,000 each morning on the CBS radio network. While his colleagues concentrate on assembling verbal front pages, Osgood searches out items that newspapers are likely to bury. He interviews the teenage girl who got the idea of sending spiders into space via Skylab. He tells of the confession of a cat burglar in Miami who is only seven years old.

Depending on the topic, Osgood might get a fast telephone interview, catching subjects like the spider girl before breakfast. Or he might edit tapes from assorted places to make a point. The morning after the last election, Osgood assembled several victory speeches to demonstrate how similar such addresses are regardless of candidate and locale. When he does choose to cover a straight story, like an election, he applies a twist. Sometimes he does a show in doggerel, as when Speaker Carl Albert declined Spiro Agnew's request for a House investigation into the charges against him. Concluded Osgood: "You accuse me of just doing nothing/ It's not true, as a matter of fact/ I am far, far beyond doing nothing/ I am boldly refusing to act."

Silliest Goose. Made to order for the Osgood touch was a story about U.S. Ambassador to India Kenneth Keating, who liked to feed the waterfowl on an embassy pond. When he left the New Delhi post last summer, Keating's staff put up a bronze plaque commemorating his acts of "compassion and devotion" to the birds. Then one Foreign Service man told a subordinate that a proliferation of such plaques would clutter the clean lines of the Edward Durell Stone-designed embassy building. So the eager-to-please underling ordered the inscription sanded off the plaque, a bureaucratic half-measure that earned him and his boss ridicule. Osgood's moral: "There are many kinds of waterfowl, but the silliest goose of all does not live in the pond."

Osgood's sense of the incongruous has been heightened through a less than meteoric career. A radio buff since his Baltimore childhood, Osgood (full name: Charles Osgood Wood III) passed through Fordham University and the U.S. Army, spending as much time as possible inside announcing booths. A stint as general manager of the nation's first pay-TV station, WHCT in Hartford, Conn., kept him from a microphone for only a short time. The station lost money, and Osgood was out of a job. "I thought I was the world's greatest expert on pay TV," he says, "but since there was only one pay-TV station --mine--my services were not exactly in demand. I went from being the youngest manager of a TV station in the U.S. to being the oldest radio cub reporter."

That was ten years ago, and although he does an occasional TV story for CBS news programs, Osgood, 40, is not certain that video is his metier. He thinks that he lacks the "graphic eye" necessary for good TV news pieces. Words and music are something else. He enjoys playing Bach on his electronic organ (favorite piece: Invention No. 8 in F). His love of sound is reflected in the off-the-cuff poetry he began writing while in the Army (among his lyrical credits: 25 published songs, including Nancy Wilson's Black Is Beautiful).

Composed in the hectic minutes preceding a Newsbreak broadcast, Osgood's verse veers erratically between Ogden Nash and Edgar Guest ("Nothing could be finer/ Than a crisis that is minor/ In the morning" reads one typical effort). "If you're writing a four-minute poem," Osgood explains, "and you have about a half-hour in which to do it, you accept whatever the muse lays on you."

His muse works the early shift. Osgood leaves his apartment on Manhattan's West Side at 4 a.m., scours the papers and incoming stories at his CBS office for material that he can use that morning. When he shakes loose to do one of his rare TV pieces, it is in the same whimsical vein. Recently he went to Lansdale, Pa., to find out why pupils in one class had been told to collect 1,000,000 bottle caps. The idea, it turned out, was to give the children some tangible feel for huge numbers. Osgood's interviews with the kids showed that they still had not the slightest notion of what 1,000,000 of anything means. The collection, however, was lumbering on--a paradigm of futility. Not a major story, to be sure, but given the Osgood treatment, a model of its kind that is scarce in both print and electronic journalism.

* Recent surveys show that 52% of the public get their first news of the day from radio.

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