Negro Comedian Bill Cosby wisecracking about the culinary problems of primitive man. David Brinkley speculating on how J.F.K. would have handled Viet Nam. Frank Sinatra "dooby-dooby-doing" through Strangers in the Night. That combination would be pretty good radio fare in St. Louis or Atlanta. But to foreign listeners from Asadabad to Zamboanga, accustomed for years to more somber programming, the Voice of America's swinging new broadcasting format sounds almost as far out as a piccolo solo by Lyndon Johnson.
The "new sound" of the Voice, inaugurated last month, and so far audible only on English-language broadcasts, is adapted from the highly successful "magazine formats" now popular in U.S. radio and TV—an amalgam of music, news, discussion, comedy and anecdotes, with hardly any item running for more than four minutes.
As a result, a discussion of how to save Venice from the sea might run next to a "Fatha" Hines jazz recital, which, in turn, might yield to a summary of domestic opposition to the war in Viet Nam. The propaganda "commercial" may be nothing more than a familiar American melody or a discussion between a Democrat and a Republican, to show without sermonizing that the U.S. does indeed have a two-party system. News, in accordance with listeners' habits, is still presented every 30 minutes, but a sprightly rendering of Yankee Doodle has replaced a pompous version of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean as the break tune.
First with the Latest. The Voice grew up in the days when thousands of people in Occupied Europe would risk death to hear news broadcasts from Britain or America—and never got over its early success. The format was never basically changed. Voice programs came to have, says one observer, the "sound of measured senility," or, in Voice Director John Chancellor's kindlier description, "an institutional sound."
Whatever the sound was, it was not keeping pace with the competition of Radio Moscow and Radio Peking—not to mention the BBC and a score of new national stations. Shortly after he became director in July 1965, Chancellor decided to find a new format, and with the help of Richard Krolik, an executive of TIME-LIFE Broadcasting, devised the "new sound." With the wholehearted approval of Leonard Marks, director of the parent United States Information Agency, the Voice has now set out, in Chancellor's words, to be "vigorous, amusing, avant-garde—the first with the latest."
Precursor of the new sound, and still its most prized ingredient, is the universally acclaimed jazz and pop-music program, Music USA, that Willis Conover has broadcast on VOA for nearly 13 years. Conover is mobbed whenever he makes personal appearances in Eastern Europe—almost, notes one newsman wryly, as if he were one of the Kennedy brothers. Voice officials rate Conover—and his music—their most powerful opinion molder. As Conover himself puts it: "Jazz tells more about America than any American can realize. It bespeaks vitality, strength, social mobility; it's a free music with its own discipline, but not an imposed, inhibiting discipline."