Fred Freed was a leading practitioner of prime-time documentary during the genre's heyday of the 1960s. Working on the network flagship series NBC White Paper, he produced close to 40 major documentaries, which earned him seven Emmy and three Peabody Awards. Describing himself as an "old-fashioned liberal," Freed believed that documentaries could stimulate change by providing audiences with detailed information about pressing social issues. Yet Freed was also a prominent member of a generation of documentary producers who courted mass audiences with narrative techniques that would later spread to network news reporting and television magazine programs.

     Freed began his media career after a stint in the navy during World War II. Starting out as a magazine editor, he moved to radio and ultimately, in 1956, to network television. One year later, he joined CBS as a documentary producer working under Irving Gitlin, the head of creative projects in the news and public-affairs division. During the late 1950s, CBS News was well endowed with talented personnel and the competition for network airtime was extremely fierce. The CBS evening schedule almost exclusively featured entertainment fare, with the exception of irregularly scheduled broadcasts of See It Now, produced by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly. The cancellation of this series in 1958 generated intense dissatisfaction among the news and public-affairs staff, many of them frustrated with the marginal time periods devoted to information fare. Partly in response to internal dissension, CBS management in 1959 announced the inauguration of a new prime-time documentary series, CBS Reports. Gitlin and his colleagues were disappointed to learn, however, that Friendly had been tapped for the slot of executive producer. Shortly thereafter, Gitlin, Freed, and producer Albert Wasserman were wooed away by NBC president Robert Kintner, who promised them a prestigious prime-time series of their own.

     Beginning in 1960, NBC White Paper was a central component of the "peacock" network's efforts to dislodge CBS from its top billing in broadcast news. A former journalist, Kintner was a vigorous supporter of the news division, believing it essential to both good citizenship and good business. Over the next several years, NBC News grew rapidly and its documentary efforts earned widespread acclaim from critics and opinion leaders. Under Gitlin's leadership, Freed and Wasserman produced numerous programs focusing on significant foreign policy issues, then a key concern of the Kennedy administration and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Newton Minow. Programs on the U-2 debacle, the Berlin crisis, and political unrest in Latin America received prominent attention. Yet all three documentarians were also determined to use narrative techniques in an effort to make such issues accessible to a broad audience. At the time Freed commented, "In a world so interesting we always manage to find ways of making things dull. This business of blaming audiences for not watching our documentaries is ridiculous."

     With this credo in mind, Freed produced documentaries about "The Death of Stalin" and "The Rise of Khrushchev," which featured tightly structured storylines with well-developed characters. Similarly, his analyses of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis were built around dramatic moments in which historical figures struggled against Promethean odds. Freed's increasingly creative use of audio and visual elements is conveyed in a tightly edited opening sequence of the latter documentary in which a nuclear missile ominously emerges from its silo accompanied by the piercing sound of a military alarm klaxon. Much like a feature film, the editing of the visual imagery dramatically sets the terms for the story that follows.

     Freed and his documentary colleagues also experimented during the early 1960s with camera framing techniques that would later become standard conventions of television news. For example, Freed would have his camera operator zoom in for tight close-ups during particularly emotional moments of an interview. This was a significant break from the standard head­-and-shoulders portrait shots then used on nightly news and Sunday talk shows. It was intended to engage viewers on both an affective and intellectual level.

     Despite these dramatic techniques, network documentaries only occasionally generated ratings that were comparable with entertainment fare. By the middle of the decade, all three networks trimmed back their commitment to the genre for a variety of reasons, and producers Wasserman and Gitlin moved on to other opportunities. Yet Freed remained with White Paper and continued to play a leading role with the series into the 1970s. He made major documentaries about the urban crisis, gun control, and environmental issues. He also produced numerous instant specials on breaking news events as well as three superdocumen­taries, which featured an entire evening of prime time devoted to a single issue. This concept, which was distinctive to NBC, originated in 1963 with a program on civil rights. It was followed in 1965 by Freed's 20-year survey of U.S. foreign policy, and in 1966 by his program on organized crime. In 1973 he produced NBC's last superdocumentary, an evening devoted to "The Energy Crisis." One year later, in the midst of a busy schedule of documentary production, Freed succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 53. His passing also marked the demise of NBC White Paper, for the network mounted only three more installments before the end of the decade. Although White Paper has very occasionally returned to prime time since then, it lacks the autonomy, prestige, and resources that were characteristic of the series during the Freed era.