Hear It Now

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Hear It Now, an American radio program on CBS, began in 1950 and was hosted by Edward R. Murrow and produced by Murrow and Fred W. Friendly. It ran for one hour on Fridays at 9 pm.

1 The show's beginnings
2 Format
3 Impact of Television
4 Streaming Audio and On-Demand Broadcasts
5 References

[edit] The show's beginnings

One of the most popular and best selling records of 1948 was I Can Hear It Now 1933-1945. The record was a collaboration between Murrow and Friendly. The record interwove historical events with speeches and Murrow's narration and marked the beginning of one of the most famous pairings in journalism history. The huge success of the record prompted the pair to parlay it into a weekly radio show for CBS, called Hear It Now.

[edit] Format

The show had a "magazine" format. It sought to include a variety of sounds from current events such as an atom smasher at work or artillery fire from Korea. It was the artillery fire that produced one of the show's more poignant moments as it backdropped the words of American soldiers fighting the Korean War. The entire premise of the show was to include the "actual sound of history in the making," according to Murrow. Some of the show's audio was what Time Magazine called "fairly routine" in 1950. Such soundbites as Communist China's General Wu and Russia's Andrei Vishinsky along with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Warren Austin were included among those routinely used. But Time also lauded the "vivid reality" created by the aforemention artillery clips, comments from wounded U.S. Marines or Carl Sandburg's recital of his The People, Yes.

The legwork involved in producing the program often exceeded the amount of programming culled from the reporting. For an hour and a half of interviews in Koto the duo was able to use 21 seconds of the material on the air. The program also shied away from the traditional use of string music common to many radio shows of the time period. Instead the show relied on composers such as David Diamond and Lehman Engel to produce its music.

Murrow anchored the show with news and editorial commentary but Hear It Now also featured regular oral columns and features.

Red Barber: covered sports
comic Abe Burrows: covered drama
Don Hollenbeck: covered the media
Bill Leonard: covered movies

The show wrapped up each week's broadcast with a four to ten minute "closeup." An example of the subject matter of the closeup was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur.

[edit] Impact of Television

The rising importance of television compelled a reluctant Murrow, in 1951, to introduce a TV version of the radio show, called See It Now. With the inception of See It Now, Hear It Now ended its on-air run.

[edit] Streaming Audio and On-Demand Broadcasts

Hear It Now is currently streamed over the Internet as part of "The Big Broadcast" old-time radio program, broadcast Sunday evenings on WAMU 88.5 FM in Washington DC. It normally forms the last hour of the four-hour program on the first Sunday of the month, from 10 pm - 11 pm Eastern time. The program is normally available for on-demand listening for a week following the over-the-air broadcast.