The Shortcomings of Radio

by LLEWELLYN WHITE

RADIO is the youngest of the lively arts. In its extraordinary growth during the past two decades, the radio industry has accomplished much to its credit, but there can be no doubt that if radio is fully to meet the growing requirements of the American people, much still needs to be done. How is such improvement to be achieved? On the one side stands the Federal Communications Commission, representing the views of the government. On the other stands the broadcasting industry, which has never lacked energy in expounding its own position. In between sit the American listeners, submissive but still hopeful. In 1944, under a grant of funds made by Time, Incorporated, and Encyclopædia Britannica, Incorporated, a Commission,¹ with Robert M. Hutchins as its Chairman, began its investigation of the freedom and responsibility of the press, radio, and motion pictures.

The article which follows summarizes some of the conclusions reported to the Commission by Llewellyn White, its assistant director in charge of the research on radio. Mr. White’s book, The American Radio, is one of six studies published by the University of Chicago Press for the Commission.

In its prefatory statement, the Commission envisions the extension of radio and television “to every village in the land”; it calls for the broadcasting of local news and the discussion of public issues. The Commission approves the government policy of maintaining diversity of ownership and makes the point that the “unusual controls exercised by advertising on behalf of immediate commercial interest and at the expense of station program direction have, so far, been much more significant than the controls established by the government on behalf of the public interest.”

1

WHAT needs to be done to make American radio not merely the best in the world but the best it would be possible to achieve? A good deal. Let us examine first some of the weak spots in our radio fare.

The total national product of news, organized and processed by radiomen for radio audiences, is not adequate. To be sure, the ether crackles with news. Having outdone itself, and now and then the press, during the war, radio at the start of 1947 was coasting along on the war’s momentum. Probably as much as 80 per cent of the country was getting press association bulletins at least once every hour.

But 80 per cent is not enough. Nor is the mere reading of news bulletins enough. The average radio listener is no more able to evaluate the news which is hurled at him from every direction than is the average newspaper headline scanner. Indeed, a diet of nothing but unrelated headlines may confuse more than enlighten him. It may even, on the radio, give him subconscious earhardening or ennui, if the newscasters do not soon stop approaching everything, from tomorrow s weather to today’s political climate in Moscow, with the same impartially breathless urgency.

News items need to be integrated with other news and with history. Newspapers employ large staffs of trained, well-paid (in relation to other newsmen, at least) editors to give this treatment to press association stories. Most big broadcasting stations also employ news staffs. But what some of these news staffs do has always been a mystery to working newspapermen. They do not appear to do much with or to the bulletins that come off the press association teleprinters, except to boil them down a bit and read them off. True, the press associations prepare special files for radio clients. These are presumably peculiarly adapted to the needs of radio, and International News Service, at least, has made an honest effort of late to overcome the suspicion that they are nothing more than dressed-up by-products. But the special radio reports do not relieve the radio news departments of a further refining and processing job.

News needs to be related to the significanceevaluations of qualified experts. That is where the commentator comes in. About 40 per cent of the people of America got, in 1946, what was described as commentary at the rate of about 2 hours a week, half of it outside the best listening periods, 90 per cent, of it supplied by commentators” who lacked even the minimal qualifications for such work — say, either a sound college education or its equivalent in experience as a highly trained writer-observer of, or practitioner in, the specialized fields of political science, economics, government, and so forth.

Statistically “good” individual performance in the news and commentary field too often is marred by wholly unnecessary flaws and inhibitions. Among examples may be listed the superficiality noted above; the broadcasters’ reluctance to assume vigorous editorial leadership; their corollary insistence on getting a sponsor to shoulder the responsibility (and the cost) of “opinionated” news—that is, anything that departs from the text of the by no means always unopinionated press association dispatches; and the failure, ever since the one brave gesture in the early 1930’s, to train or recruit enough good newsevaluators and to support them, against courts, Congressmen, and witch-hunters, in their honest convictions.

2

THE total national product of useful public discussion is inadequate. Not more than 15 per cent of the people of America were exposed to socalled forum programs in 1946 at the rate of About 1 hour a week, again with half of it outside the best listening periods. In terms of tangible results, the picture is even more disheartening, for, after nearly a quarter century of radio news, commentary, and discussion, during which time several billion words were aired under these headings and several thousand waterproof wrist watches and pencils were given to several thousand persons for answering several tens of thousands of presumably topical questions correctly, a Public Opinion Research poll revealed in 1945 that 75 per cent of the people did not know what a price subsidy was, 70 per cent did not know how a peace treaty was approved by the United States, 60 per cent had never heard of the Atlantic Charter, and 63 per cent did not know that this country had been receiving reverse Lend-Lease to the value of billions of dollars.

It is possible that the manner in which most of the forum programs were staged had something to do with the disappointing results. Why do the broadcasters insist on bringing to the microphone unrehearsed amateurs who usually turn out to be deadly serious bores? Good newspapers, more concerned for the reader’s right to be informed than for the right of a few readers to get their names in print, do not confine their attention to antagonistic and minority views to the letters columns. One of radio’s most serious mistakes has been the avoidance of a responsibility which the press long ago assumed: to mirror the views of conflicting groups by hiring trained men and women to canvass these groups and translate their views into terse, professional, attentionrousing language rather than by throwing their columns open to the untrained “spokesmen” of the groups themselves.

The broadcasters’ failure to adopt this method leaves room for the suspicion that some of them may have hoped that the very dullness and clumsiness of the forum type of program would soon eliminate it. The technique has become alarmingly common in radio: one does the sort of thing he does not understand but feels compelled to do in order to mollify the FCC or his more literate critics; he does it as badly as possible, and the Hooper ratings are low. So he turns to his critics with a triumphant “You see, the people just don’t want it.”

This comment would not, of course, apply to those broadcasters who honestly felt that they were choosing the least of several possible evils when they wrote the ban on selling time for the discussion of controversial public issues into the 1929 National Association of Broadcasters Code. But even they ignored the significant question of whether the broadcasters have any moral right either to give or to sell time for the discharge of a function which they themselves ought to discharge.

Broadcasters tend to stage forums at times when few can listen conveniently. In general they prefer to stick to one-sided issues like juvenile delinquency and to avoid vital problems confronting democracy. “Good” performance tends to be concentrated in a few urban areas served by independent — there the word is used in its literal, as well as its broadcasting sense — stations.

Taking the country as a whole, one finds that minorities do not have sufficient opportunity to be heard on controversial issues. Individual stations that honestly try to solve the problem are more often than not frustrated by the advertising men and their inexorable time schedules. Too often the answer does not reach as large an audience as heard the charge, either because an equally good day and hour cannot be found or because fewer network affiliates carry the answer.

I am persuaded that both the industry and the FCC worry unduly about the fairness of selling time for the presentation of minority views. The observation that those with the most money would get all the best of it applies equally to the other media, including handbills, posters, directmail matter, sound trucks, propaganda books, propaganda documentary films, and newspaper and magazine advertising. The sums involved are not of an order calculated to exclude any important minority, since the local unit can usually draw on others throughout the country for financial assistance. Yet they are large enough — particularly in the instance of political parties, which pay a premium rate — to give the broadcaster a certain amount of financial independence in dealing with sponsors and advertising men.

One also finds that minority listener tastes are not adequately served. Here, again, the reasons are not elusive. The advertising man whose only test of a gag or a song or a show is how it went over on the rival station or network week before last will never permit those broadcasters who live in mortal terror of him to experiment.

It is a truism in all the media (and especially in the theater) that new techniques rarely pay off immediately and sometimes never do. Yet the more imaginative play and movie producers, book publishers, and newspaper and magazine editors are constantly gambling. Why should the broadcaster play it safe? The fact that he does is all the more ironical because he alone is dependent on something that the people own. There may be, numerically, more bobby-soxers than lovers of good drama, good music, sprightly conversation, and stimulating discussion. However, the latter pay the larger share of taxes, and it is just possible that they have a larger voice in shaping the future of our society.

Toward the end of 1946, CBS, stung by what it apparently regarded as an unfair critical evaluation of its over-all effort, based on ignorance of what it included, began a series of advertisements which reproached the critics for “not knowing how to listen.” What CBS ignored or overlooked, in the advertisements as in its general practice, was the fact that the critics knew well enough where to find CBS’s “good” things for minority tastes but were not always able to adjust their working, sleeping, and recreation schedules so as to hear them conveniently. To say to these critical minorities that you intend to take care of them at times which are not “required for serving the larger mass audience” (a broadcasting euphemism for taking care of the advertising man first) is as if a restaurateur told discriminating diners that he could serve them only out of regidar hours.

Besides, the broadcaster who sincerely wishes to serve minority tastes is likely to find (as many of them have fouxid) that this requires more than a look-around at the other media for talent. Taking broadcasting at its own estimate as an entertainment medium, one would probably be fair in saying that no other entertainment medium ever leaned so heavily on its fellows or developed so little talent peculiarly its own. The networks have amply demonstrated that not every successful playwright can write for the radio, and that not every Broadway or Hollywood actor can bring his talent undiminished to the microphone.

3

TAKING the country as a whole, one finds that the over-all quality of the “entertainment” fare in radio leaves something to be desired. The coincidence that radio came along just as vaudeville was perishing was perhaps happier for the vaudovillians than for the rest of us. Broadway (and even Hollywood, which is hardly celebrated for star turnover) has run through four “generations” of comedians during the radio lifetimes of “ Amos ‘n’ Andy,” “Fibber McGee and Molly,” “Burns and Allen,” “Lum 'n’ Abner,” Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergen, and Eddie Cantor, all of whom are still going strong. In radio, a Red Skelton or a Bob Hope is still “new” after half a dozen years of precisely the same routines.

The effect on these veterans has been rather marked, for even the most loyal Hope or Allen or Bergen fan can tire — say, after the second or third year —of Crosby’s horses, Senator Claghorn’s loathing for Damyankees, and Charlie McCarthy’s allowance difficulties. (To the credit of Allen and Bergen be it said that they know when enough is too much and would like to get off the merry-go-round.)

Except for the work of three or four pioneers like Corwin, Welles, Oboler, and MacLeish, there has been literally no radio drama worthy of the name that has not been lifted bodily from the theater. The sum of it has been piddling. Time, money, facilities, and encouragement have been begrudged these pioneers to a point where only Corwin remains hopefully in the wings, so to speak.

I am no psychologist and therefore approach the mine-sown battlegrounds of women’s and children’s shows with some trepidation. It seems fairly obvious to me, however, that, if the majority of American women really are “helped” by vicarious excursions into divorce, adultery, and incurable disease, the psychologists who are engaged from time to time to swear to this “fact” might find better employment looking into what may be happening to the human race. And it seems equally obvious that children’s shows in which unpleasant brats go unpunished by doltish parents, or in which the one mistake in an otherwise perfect crime is explained with such painstaking care as to encourage the most cautious nascent delinquent to try it with improvements, do not clarify the goals and values of society. It is just possible that the true impact of the broadcasters on these goals and values eludes the Hooper telephone girls and that it cannot even be accurately measured in box-tops or soap-chip sales.

Audience-participation shows, the newest craze in radio (the formula is only five or six years old), deserve a paragraph. So far as I know, the first audience-participation show ever submitted to a broadcaster was a 1927 effort approved by a superintendent of schools and a college president as a “positive contribution to adult education.” The broadcaster to whom it was first shown thought it was sufficiently entertaining to try on the public; but, as he did not feel able to finance it on a sustaining basis and could find no advertising agency that did not think him utterly mad to suggest such a thing, nothing came of it. A decade and more later, the idea bobbed up again, but with the now familiar new wrinkles: the questions and answers must under no circumstances add to the sum total of useful knowledge; they must be asked and answered in a setting reminiscent of the old-time vaudeville stage on amateurs’ night; and the whole proceeding must be managed in such a way as to screen out the more intelligent citizens with their silly inhibitions about vulgar exhibitionism. Once again, the advertising man had turned a remarkable opportunity into a cheap sideshow.

4

THE argument that the people get what they want in radio entertainment is open to challenge. Women’s magazines which stress thoughtful articles and stories in which competent, recognized writers probe deeply into typical human problems outsell the lurid pulp “love” variety, magazine for magazine. Wholesome children’s books outsell the news-butcher’s product, and Parents’ Magazine has even demonstrated that constructive comic books can hold their own with the trashier brand. Motion pictures like National Velvet, Boy’s Town, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Pinocchio, and Journey for Margaret have outbox-officed gangster and wayward-youth fare with the young. Perhaps as many Americans pay good money every year to college bursars for the privilege of amassing useful information as troop weekly into studios in the hope of being rewarded with a pair of nylons (and a lusty cheer from the studio audience if they’re from Brooklyn) for their ability to identify a few strains of popular music.

It is possible that the fact that the broadcasters do not build their own entertainment shows has something to do with all this. The advertising agencies have turned the writing of women’s and children’s shows in particular into a sweatshop assembly-line operation reminiscent of pulp magazine production, in an understandable effort to pare to the minimum the running costs of formulas which they feel no longer need to be sold to the public. The advertising agencies likewise have resisted every effort to replace shopworn comedians, singers, and bands with new talent, so long as the old-timers could keep their Hooper ratings above 15. The agencies know that mere lack of competition will tend to keep the ratings up, just as a man who runs a 100-yard dash against himself invariably wins. But, as long as the public keeps on buying tea bags, tooth paste, and coffee, the agencies do not care.

The broadcasters have assumed many curious and untenable positions during their quarter century in business, but probably none is more insecure (and insincere) than the bland contention, so often reiterated, that the listener does not want anything he is not now getting and that any time he does he has only to ask for it. The public cannot ask for something it does not know exists or could exist. It did not ask for the novel (Fielding gave it to us). It did not ask for the printing press. It did not ask for Shakespeare or Walt Disney or news magazines. It did not ask for football or movies or the 25-cent pocket book. It did not even ask for radio.

The first task of the purveyors of entertainment and intelligence is to anticipate, gamble on, whet, stimulate, elevate, and broaden the public taste. There has always been an element of risk in it. If the advertising men are not willing to share the risk in radio, perhaps the broadcasters had better place themselves in a position to assume the whole of it. The best of them will find, as the best of the publishers, producers, and creators in the other media have found, that giving the people more than they demand is sometimes profitable.

The broadcasters have not yet provided a means for listeners to hear at a more convenient later time programs which circumstances have caused them to miss when first broadcast, or to hear over and over programs that are good enough to be heard over and over. A combination of the adoption of country-wide radio time, the wider employment of transcriptions, and the development of one or more of the several methods for multiple program broadcasting should go far toward solving this defect, which places radio at a distinct and quite unnecessary disadvantage compared with the other media.

Even the broadcasters at the 1946 National Association of Broadcasters convention agreed that there is far too much “commercialism” in radio. The statement usually is made in terms of the ratio of commercial to sustaining programs on the air. I have never felt that the distinction is very real. If the advertising men had demonstrated, over a period of more than twenty years, that they could produce the best radio fare, I should be willing to let them produce all radio fare, provided that the Communications Act were amended to bring them under FCC license. Since they have demonstrated what I regard as quite the opposite, I should like to see them produce none at all. It is not a question of there being certain types of programs that the advertiser is peculiarly well fitted to prepare and certain other types that the broadcasters are peculiarly well fitted to prepare. The advertisers do not even display much knowledge of psychology or public taste or public need in their commercial plugs.

All these shortcomings of the radio fare suggest many possible remedies, or fruitful lines of exploration. I recommend to the broadcasters that they: —

Assume a position of vigorous editorial leadership in public affairs.

Reject the role of parasite feeding on the older media and set about training their own producers, directors, actors, writers, editors, commentators, and entertainers.

Develop more plausible discussion techniques.

Assume the responsibility for adequately treating all important controversial public issues, substituting the criterion of public need for the criterion of acceptability to sponsors, advertising men, or oversensitive public officials.

Improve their machinery for letting important minorities be heard and, with this in view, abandon their preoccupation with the theoretically admirable but practically unreal and unworkable distinction between bought time and free time for the discussion of controversial public issues.

Develop more memorable radio drama.

Make it a rule that only those who arc professionally qualified will be allowed to use the radio to help people with their problems.

Create an adequate clearing house for praiseworthy and especially successful new program ventures, so that those broadcasters who are honestly seeking to improve their service will have the benefit of all the brains and imagination in the industry.

Explore the possibilities for multiple programing from a single station, with a view to serving neglected areas and minority tastes more adequately.

With the same aim in view, juggle their programs so as to place more of those designed for general public education and for minority tastes in the better listening periods.

Experiment, experiment, experiment. The public is expected to gamble two or three billion dollars on new receiving sets within the next five years; surely, the broadcasters should do some gambling on better, fresher, more varied fare.

5

I DO not believe that the broadcasters can make much progress in program improvement unless and until they first radically change their relationship with the advertising men, with one another, with the government, with the other media of mass communication, and with the public. This, in turn, suggests improved relationships with the broadcasters on the part of the government, of the other media, and of the public.

The broadcasters need to achieve, immediately, that arm’s-length relationship with the advertisers which fairly characterizes all but a submarginal handful of newspapers and magazines. The broadcasters have given me a dozen reasons why they believe that such a step should not or cannot be taken.

They say that advertisers dictate policy in the print media, also. The studies of the Commission on Freedom of the Press indicate that the Commission does not believe this to be the fact in the vast majority of instances. The advertisers do not actually prepare the reading matter in the print media or weave their sales messages into the reading matter. And the bulk of newspaper and magazine publishers do not regard the sale of goods and services as their only, or even their primary, reason for being. The broadcasters say that it makes no difference whether A, who writes radio shows, B, who produces them, C, who directs them, and D, E, and F, who act them, are on the payroll of a broadcasting station or on the payroll of an advertising agency. They would be the same people, and so they would be bound to write, produce, direct, and act in precisely the same way.

To say this is, it seems to me, to miss the point completely. It is like saying that Frederick Lewis Allen, Ben Hibbs, and Virginias Dabney would be just as satisfactory editors for Harper’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Richmond, Virginia, Times-Dispatch, respectively, if they were employed by a national advertising agency. It discounts, perhaps through ignorance, the classic war between editorial people and the front office. Indeed, it skims over the constant struggle between the creative people in radio, both those who work for the broadcasters and those who work for the advertisers, payroll-wise, and their masters — the advertiser and the advertiser-cowed broadcaster.

The truth is, as hundreds who have done it can testify, that a newspaperman does express himself differently when he becomes an advertising man. He even thinks differently. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that, if he finds he cannot think differently, he goes back to newspaper work, breathing imprecations and maledictions against the whole advertising fraternity.

It has been said that if any attempt were made to exclude advertising men from the preparation of radio’s “reading matter,” the advertising men (including the sponsors) would simply abandon radio to economic starvation. Here we are asked to believe either that radio is not really so effective an advertising medium as the broadcasters have been telling us and that the sponsors who have been using it were prompted solely by charitable motives; or that their advertising messages could not stand on their own merits, as they are obliged to do in the other media, but must be slipped over on a public which otherwise would reject them; or that people do not listen to the commercials at the beginning and end of programs but only to middle commercials.

It is difficult for me to reconcile these things with the broadcasters’ repeated claims that radio is far and away the most effective medium for the advertisement of certain types of goods and services, that listeners actually like the commercials, and that the majority of them do not turn their sets off or down during the commercials between programs, even when these commercials are what are known as “local station-break spots” and are therefore wholly unrelated to the programs preceding or following them.

6

I SUGGEST to the broadcasters that they: —

Stop trying to rationalize an accidental and unnatural relationship, steel themselves against the reflex cries of anguish from those who habitually cry before they are hurt, and take the first long step toward that freedom of the press for which they clamor: adoption of the practice of offering time for the advertising of commercial goods and services only on the basis of time-periods limited to 120 consecutive seconds between programs, the programs to be developed entirely by the broadcasters and to have no topical or other connection, except for the coincidence of time sequence, with any advertising matter.

Take the initiative in cooperating with the FCC to bring about an early court test of the constitutionality of the Mayflower Decision and the Blue Book. (The Mayflower Decision effectively discourages broadcasters from participating in controversy themselves. The Blue Book announces an FCC policy of weighing program adequacy aud balance as one of several factors in considering applications for license renewal.)

Stop dreaming of a day when there will be no government regulation of radio.

Stop cheapening the First Amendment by invoking it every time the FCC issues a routine ruling.

Follow the lead of FCC Chairman Denny and NAB President Miller toward harmonious cooperation between the industry and the FCC.

To the FCC, I suggest that it: —

Either amend the Mayflower Decision to permit broadcasters to air their partisan views, on condition that they provide equal time for an answer, or enforce it in an instance which will ensure its speedy review by the courts as to constitutionality.

Enforce the procedures outlined in the Blue Book in an instance which will ensure its speedy review by the courts as to constitutionality.

To the NAB, I suggest that it: —

Draft a “Code of Standards” calling for the immediate establishment of an arm’s-length relationship between broadcasters and advertisers, endorsing such portions and basic principles of the FCC Blue Book as appear to the better broadcasters to be reasonable and workable, and pointing the way toward improving techniques in the handling of discussion of controversial public issues and in the presentation of useful information generally.

Prepare to publicize, thoroughly and impartially, flagrant individual departures from the Code.

To the Department of Justice, the FCC, and the Congress, I suggest that they: —

Take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that the NAB have the proper legal sanction, under the antitrust and other laws, for carrying out the above recommendations.

To the Congress, I suggest that it: —

Re-examine the Communications Act of 1934 as amended, with a view to giving the FCC a more explicit charter, particularly in the field of over-all program evaluation, and to providing authority and funds for the effective operation of such a charter.

To the newspaper and magazine press, I suggest that it: —

Support the broadcasters in their quest for equal constitutional freedom, provided that the broadcasters meanwhile qualify themselves for such guaranties by securing their freedom from advertisers.

Devote at least as much emphasis to honest, constructive criticism of radio as a medium for entertainment and public information as it now devotes to honest, constructive criticism of the theater, books, and motion pictures.

And to all who may be interested in the improvement of radio, I suggest that they explore the possibilities of greater listener participation in the evaluation of radio fare.