Commentators' Week

One of the most important voices in radio--one first heard 20 years ago--stirred up so much excitement that it raised the whole question of the powers and responsibilities of radio's news handlers as quasi-public servants.

Congressmen noted that many of the letters that had deluged them on the labor question (TIME, March 30) advised them to listen to Kaltenborn. Listening, they found that Kaltenborn was being more than a commentator. In mid-March he took labor as an issue and, going beyond criticism, became virtually a stump speaker. Samples:

>"I say to the leaders of union labor, the people still rule. . . ."

>"Every single member of Congress . . . will respond to your demands if you put the heat on him. But you, the people, must act."

At about the same time that Kaltenborn rolled out these exhortations, he and some of his fellow commentators got together at Manhattan's Harvard Club to form the Association of Radio News Analysts. President: Kaltenborn. Vice Presidents: Elmer Davis, Raymond Gram Swing. One object: "To establish and maintain a code of ethics which shall govern their professional conduct."

Was it to be a feature of their code that the news analyst should urge people to put the heat on their Congressmen? If it was, there were no signs of it in the broadcasts of Vice Presidents Davis and Swing.

News analysis may and usually does lead to conclusions, which no good commentator hesitates to draw. But the analytical and the fulminating mood seldom go together. Kaltenborn's principal, pontifical broadcasts on the labor topic were tendentious, shallow in perspective. From his treatment of isolated cases of bumptiousness in labor, listeners might easily have become inflamed against labor in general.

Early last week dozens of Congressmen had become incensed over Kaltenborn's crusade. But by week's end the storm had blown over. Most people believed that Commentator Kaltenborn's intentions were all right. The misconceptions he had helped spread abroad were corrected, chiefly by Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Nelson but also by careful newscasters, including Davis and Swing.

And it was true, too, that the anti-labor storm in which Kaltenborn had chuffed & puffed did make the C.I.O. and A.F. of L. renounce double pay for work on Sundays and holidays when these days are included in the regular work week.

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