TV COVERS THE ACTION
By
On-the-spot coverage of the men who cover the news begins in chapter five, and you can dismiss the first four as fill-in (on photo essays, newsreels, documentaries; on the wire-service-starved growth of radio reporting; on the programs and occasions that made TV news). Then it's off to ABC's Washington Bureau for a briefing and to witness a typical frustration--two hours of setting up and standing around for seven minutes of non-news from the President that would eventually fill one minute, 45 seconds of running time; to NBC News in New York for the headaches of covering an unscheduled event; to the CBS Production Studios for scuttlebutt on problems of personnel, deployment and logistics overseas. Also on tap to present the larger view and the daily routine of his job is Charles Collingwood, Chief CBS Foreign Correspondent, and his remarks are expectably precise and revealing. Interviews with Mike Wallace and Walter Cronkite pinpoint the roles of peripatetic reporter and anchor man; the background of seven stories broadcast from around the world on a particular night pulls the farflung operations together. Finally there's the view from the top into the future via forecasting by the three heads of network news, one of whom, Salant of CBS, grapples with some gut issues that the authors elsewhere write off. It's no depth study but it is far more pertinent and readable than their earlier book on radio: the men on the spot give a good account of themselves.