Newscasting: A Healthy Jaundice

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Christmas "Doggerel." When Manhattan reporters complained last year about difficulties in getting access to Hubert Humphrey, Newman observed: "He is not exactly a man from whom words have to be torn against his will " When Lyndon Johnson transferred Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to the State Department, Newman noted: "Mr. Johnson does not merely announce his appointments; he congratulates himself on having made them." And about the only joy of Christmas on the tube is Newman's annual "doggerel" reading on the Today show. A stanza from last year's:

The final tallyluyeva

On the book by Alliluyeva

Who is a lively galiluyeva

Despite much ballyluyeva

Did not cause booksellers to shout

halliluyeva.

Prose, obviously, is Newman's bag and he is one of the few TV newscasters who can write anything that stands jp. He has contributed over the years to the Atlantic, Harper's and Punch Newman started writing at George Washington High School in his native Manhattan, took a journalism degree at University of Wisconsin ('40) and did graduate work in government at Louisiana State University. Later he studied in France, covered the State Department for the United Press, then became a writer for CBS's Eric Sevareid. From 1952 to 1961, he worked mainly out of Paris and London for NBC.

Then it was back to New York to begin his $60,000-$75,000 annual prac tice of what he calls "a more personal type of journalism." His basic reportonal posture he describes as "healthily jaundiced." "If someone wants something done on the scenic wonders of the United States," Newman says wryly 'he wouldn't call on me. I am not very good at expressing awe." That goes for television itself. When he isn't first-nightmg or anchoring an NBC show Newman catches up with his reading' I m not entertained," he says, "by television entertainment."