Bringing Up Radio

With an introduction by President Hoover and an impressive list of speakers there began last week a great movement to bring U. S. Radio to cultural maturity. In Manhattan's New School for Social Research met the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education, which in April announced its program, to be financed for the next three years by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and the Carnegie Corporation (TIME, April 13). Sitting in the New School's oval auditorium, the council heard broadcast from the White House the voice of President Hoover, introducing to them the voice of their president, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, director of the California Institute of Technology. Said President Hoover: "Dr. Millikan is more than a physicist. He has given to America great contributions in the whole field of education and science. He is one of America's leaders in philosophic thought. Dr. Millikan will now speak to you from Los Angeles, California."

Radio's Pedigree. In a somewhat rambling discourse Dr. Millikan said: "The radio is obviously one of the great new unifying and educational forces. . . . If you do not believe in it because you fear its use by the demagogue and the propagandist, then you despair of the ultimate success of widespread ballot governments as such, and you can logically join one of the two world groups, the Soviets, and in somewhat lesser degree the Fascisti, which [attempt] to push the world back ... to the time when the Pharaoh under the strategy of his Prime Minister, Joseph, became an absolute despot. . . . Any talk of loss of liberty through the monopolistic control of the ether ... is too grotesque to need to be given more than a line in an address like this. . . ."

Of the relation between Science and Faith, he said: "In the old days men had made a wholly artificial and irrational distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Events which were sufficiently common and familiar were thought of as natural, and events which were uncommon and not understood were called supernatural. The idea of the uniformity and repeatability of events abolished completely all such childlike distinctions. All events without exception are worthy of study and of attempts at understanding, because Nature is assumed to be dependable, not capricious.

"All this is what we discover when we try to look up radio's pedigree."

Ballyhoo. A Scotsman, a onetime engineer who was in charge of Britain's munitions for two years during the War is Sir John Charles Walsham Reith. He was a featured guest at the meeting, for since 1927 he has been director-general of British Broadcasting Corp. He was knighted in 1927 for his able management of this government monopoly which permits no radio advertising and gives British radioauditors not what they want but "what they ought to have."* Sir John arrived at the New School just in time to tell the meeting that the U.S. system of competition among broadcasters "is preventing you from getting full value out of your key men." Recommending Britain's rigidly uncommercial programs, he added: "I submit that there is a risk of educational ballyhoo as well as of commercial ballyhoo. It is not so vulgar; it is less aggressive, different in form, quite different in motive; but is it not more or less the same fundamentally--an assertion that this labeled brand of soap is the only soap? It has been discovered that this is not the way to sell goods to a radio audience. . . . Ballyhoo . . . violates the first principles of showmanship and presentation."

Musical Toy Stage. Ray Lyman Wilbur, U. S. Secretary of the Interior who appointed a committee a year ago to investigate education by radio, disagreed with B. B. C.'s Director Reith. He said radio has "brought about ways in which the public can be entertained and also instructed which probably never would have evolved from the heads of the very best-intentioned government officials. . . . Time will de-jazz the radio and make it more literate and substantial. The musical toy stage of the radio has about passed."

Colossal Mismanagement. Said Joy Elmer Morgan, chairman of Secretary Wilbur's radio education committee and editor of the Journal of the National Education Association: "There has not been in the entire history of the United States an example of mismanagement and lack of vision so colossal and far-reaching in its consequences as our turning of the radio channels almost exclusively into commercial hands." Since, he said, both radio and cinema portray "the trivial, the sensual, the jazzy . . . we are in vastly greater danger as a people from New Yorkism than from Communism."/-

Advertising. General Charles McKinley Saltzman, chairman of the Federal Radio Commission, said that the Commission was helpless, under the Radio Act of 1927 which permits no governmental censorship of radio programs, to stem the tide of "excessive and nauseating advertising." Though British listeners hear no advertising, they must pay a government license tax. There is small doubt that the 15,000,000 U. S. owners much prefer a "sponsored program--a genteel, ladylike term for radio advertising," to a broadcasting tax.

*So dull are the Sunday night programs sponsored by B. B.C.'s director that most Continental stations step up their power to reach British listeners. /-At an earlier meeting of the radio council, Vice President Henry Adams Bellows of Columbia Broadcasting System Inc., onetime member of the Federal Radio Commission, said that a proposal made by Secretary Wilbur's committee to allocate 15% of all radio time for educational purposes would mean a "great disaster" to the cause of radio education, for the present audiences which have been built up by commercial stations would not tune in on a special, educational wavelength. Most educational discourses are "without qualification dull."

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