Newscasting: A Healthy Jaundice

In television newscasting nowadays, everybody's got his own private beat. but NBC's laconic Edwin Newman, 49. is a universalist, the one guy in the shop who is considered au courant on everything.

When George Romney resigned from the presidential race, Newman was hailed in to anchor a special report. He handled the same sort of job for twelve days during last year's Arab-Israeli crisis. When Lucy Jarvis produces a big documentary—Khrushchev, Picasso, Christiaan Barnard—she taps Newman for his narrative authority and scriptwriting dexterity. About twice a month, Meet the Press summons Newman to play moderator. Speaking Freely, Newman's urbane interview series with the likes of Harold Macmillan, Rudolf Bing and Physicist Hans Bethe, is so bright, lively and informative that 50 Public TV stations across the nation now carry it.

Box-Office Clout. Newman's official title at NBC is "critic at large." Over the network's New York City channel, he reviews opera and theater, and commands a respectable following. One recognition of Newman's box-office clout is that Producer David Merrick, who calls him "the undertaker," tried to bar him from the theater and demanded equal time to answer an embalming review. This was a characteristic Merrick publicity ploy, but then Merrick judged his adversary shrewdly.

Like the daily Broadway critics, Newman is given about an hour in which to prepare his reviews. When he goes on the air shortly after 11 p.m. on the night of an opening, he has 60 seconds in which to deal with his subject. That's "between 180 and 200 words, depending on how many are polysyllabic," he says. But despite the nerve-racking restrictions, he pours a remarkable amount of information, polish and tart viewpoint into his reviews. Of the flibbertigibbet comedy import, There's a Girl in My Soup, he observed: "Here we have the sort of English play that prevents the American theater from having a permanent inferiority com plex." Or recently, from off-Broadway If two foul-mouthed mental defectives shouting at each other is your idea of theater, there is The Beard." Of Here's Where I Belong: "As with so many recent musicals, none of the principals can really sing."

His criticism at large on radio has won Newman a Peabody Award and i television he has unburdened himself on everything from the declining grammar of the New York Times I he English is not always fit to print") to Charles de Gaulle's crude meddling in Canadian politics ("To put it kindly, he may be losing his grip") to the cliches of sportscasters (Roger Mans, according to a Newman parody, "swings a once potent mace but is still patrolling the outer garden with his ancient skill"). His architectural critique of the late New York World's Fair noted that most of the state pavilions "looked like the work of Governors' relatives."