The llegit

Radio's most untrammeled critic last week put out a little book that was, like himself, benignant but free from bunk.* As an introduction to broadcasting, and as a try at a sound point of view on the subject, it had few predecessors and no up-to-date rivals. Everything defensible in radio it defended; )'et its strictures and warnings came opportunely at a time when U.S. radio faced the responsibilities of its first war.

Variety's Editor Bob Landry has been a spectator of broadcasting and its people for nine years. Moonfaced, high-voiced, crinkle-grinning and articulate, he began by sticking his neck out and has affably continued to do so. His only bias lay in the fact that his readers are show people.

He observed that, while radio depended on showmanship, it was not show business but advertising business (as early as 1934, 80% of network advertising programs were produced by advertising agencies).

Landry decided to apply a showman's standards to the great U.S. indoor amusement. His first "Showmanship Survey" in 1933, in which he gave U.S. stations strict ratings on local enterprise, resulted in gey sers of protest, including a four-page lament from NBC's then President Merlin Hall Aylesworth charging "commercial libel." Landry responded with two more surveys at six -month intervals, after which the survey became an annual event (TIME, Dec. 29). Landry's conclusion about U.S.

radio, as of 1942: "It represents perhaps a sort of democratic splendor, a trifle clouded." The splendor, to Landry, is in radio's multiplicity, fertility, and progress in educating advertisers "not to abuse the privilege of addressing the masses in their parlor."* In this splendor he also finds considerable mystery, as in the apparent passivity of the clergy toward a daytime serial called Light of the World-a breezy job on Holy Writ. ("Don't tell me again what the serpent said," shouts Adam at the dinner table, "I'm tired of hearing about him.")

"In the beginning, according to Genesis, there was nothing," Landry remarks. "But in the beginning, according to the radio version, there was a two-minute commercial for General Mills. But is anybody offended? . . ."

Of radio's problems, Landry thinks one -Government regulation-has been beclouded on the one hand by New Dealers who itched to penalize a success, on the other by broadcasters who, under the impression that they were primarily businessmen, forgot that a broadcasting license is a privilege, not a right.

For radio critics, a "corps of watchmen" he hopes to see arise, he points out a few things to watch for. One is anything like a repetition of the smear campaign that used radio-advertising technique to defeat Upton Sinclair eight years ago in California. Another is the "tendency of some radio programs to spoon-feed the nation on intellectual mush almost entirely deficient in every vitamin necessary to a healthy populace capable of sustaining democracy."

*Who, What, Why is Radio, by Robert J. Landry; George W. Stewart ($1.50). *CBS last week cut by 20% the time to be allowed for commercials in news broadcasts.

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