On the Soft Spot

Soap operas, the soft underbelly of daytime radio, are easy targets for criticism. They are constantly being labeled "time wasting" or "mentally insulting." But radio, like Hollywood, knows what people want, determinedly goes on dishing it out.

Last week, a critic armed with explosive moral indignation took dead aim on the underbelly's softest spot. Wrote Editor and Publisher Andrew Kemper Ryan in Philadelphia's weekly Catholic Standard & Times:

"With a view to being up to date, these radio dramas . . . have recently been giving a lot of attention to stories, which are built around the lives of our servicemen and their wives. . . . The people who write these radio plays, invariably women . . . go out of their way to popularize the pagan way. . . . Divorce is glamorized, infidelity made desirable. . . .

"If returning servicemen in any way resemble the characters of these daytime serials, they are nothing more than psychopathic, psychoneurotic misfits . . . irritable, unsympathetic, unappreciative, uncooperative and impossible. . . These . . . dramas are spreading a philosophy of life that is anything but Christian. . . ."

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