Free Air

...that the board which adjudicates on new licenses is representative of only one shade of public opinion, and that the most conservative...

...Great inventions have a way of stealing upon the general public so insinuatingly that, almost before their possibilities are realized, exploitation for naked profit has set its seal irrevocably upon them...

...A suggestion, made by Mr...

...There seemed to be a general feeling that the new medium is being exploited for purposes of pure entertainment at the expense of possibilities for instruction and enlightenment, and one definite charge was made that a station which has specialized in attacks on the Catholic and Jewish communions, while discouraged, has not suffered the drastic discipline handed out to those which make themselves the mouthpiece for extreme liberal views...

...If those who believe that justice is being denied, that mawkish and colorless matter is being broadcast through timidity or prejudice, or that the ether is being overloaded with rhythms of the tomtom and ukulele, would make their opinion manifest through the mail, a suspicion might dawn upon the minds of those who control the sending end of radio that a public exists which is not satisfied to shrug its shoulders and see one more conquest of time and space swell the growing list of aborted and meanly exploited opportunities...

...A public that is being thrilled and entertained to death on the screen has the remedy in its own hands if it feels it is facing the same thing through the air...

...Aylesworth himself, in speaking of the flood of correspondence that reaches his office, points out at least one way...

...This is a comprehensive budget of grievances, and those whose function it is to defend the new radio amalgamation from each and every one are not to be envied their task...

...Roughly, they may be said to include a charge that discrimination, of a kind hard to justify, is being used when any attempt is made to broadcast opinions likely to be distasteful to the administration or in the slightest degree savoring of radicalism...

...and that the bill now in course of preparation at Washington has been shorn in Congress of saving clauses inserted by the Senate that would have prevented abuses...

...Merlin Hall Aylesworth, president of the National Broadcasting Company, a corporation under which several major air activities are now consolidated, was very much upon his defense, in spite of a temperate and optimistic exposition of the activities of his concern at the start...

...The example of the movies should never be forgotten...

...Censorship, however administered, is only a protection against the grosser forms of offense...

...It has shown its powerlessness to arrest the fatal trend away from intelligence, away from the "thoughts that lift the souls of men," toward stultification of the mind and overstimulus of the grosser emotions...

...that traffic in licenses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars is being carried on (and this In face of the claim that no single radio corporation is more than paying its way...

...Many of these difficulties and disagreements became vocal in a radio symposium, recently offered by the Civil Liberties League at the Aldine Club, at which Mr...

...Epoch-making discoveries often contain within themselves the germs of what may be called, without disrespect, a joker...

...Widely advertised during their first years as an agency for instruction and edification almost incalculable, we have seen them fall into the hands of men with whom such considerations count for less than nothing, with the result that no congress devoted to the religious or moral betterment of youth meets today without listing the moving-picture as one of the main difficulties in its path...

...I ^HAT radio would one day force the question of -•- freedom of the air on our attention was as inevitable as that the invention of movable type would one day raise the question of freedom of the printed word...

...But because they are to a large degree technical, there is no sense in isolating them from the general tendency, everywhere evident, to curtail public liberties for some corporate good of which the public is never more than indirectly the judge...

...The duty confronting the public, or that part of the public which cares for the higher interests in life, would seem to be a watchfulness evidenced in such a form as shall convince the controlling powers that its views are to be taken into consideration...

...The world has hardly got used to the benefits they confer before it finds itself confronted with the problems they raise...

...All the signs are present that those connected with air-transmission are of a rather bitter and contentious nature...