IF RADIO CAN SELL ANYTHING . . .'

...He had to indulge each week in an advance study-course in order to chart the uncertain, broken, and zig-zagging line of "quality" through the wastelands of mediocrity...

...Broadcasters almost openly wink nowadays when they accept such "honors...

...ernment attention, and the profitable war ensued...

...Until it is tried, and fairly tried, it should not be discarded as hopeless...

...In this concept public opinion has to be practically a ground swell to be effective...

...foresight, not hindsight, is the thing...

...Radio's own boast has been that the genius of the medium was such that it could sell anything to anybody...

...A group of seven technically first-rate FM stations carefully spotted on hilly terrain in the rich upstate New York farm country spent most of their money in tooling up, then stumbled awkwardly in devising a program schedule...

...It is selective radio...

...It will simply give to "quality" broadcasts the advantages of organization, regularity, and ballyhoo which have been so painstakingly provided for the catch-as-catch-can schedule...

...But, it will be asked, why should 40 or 50 broadcasters go to the bother of planning and administering our hypothetical quality network...

...Consider the implications of encouraging millions of Americans to idle millions of hours every year listening to program fare intentionally bent-beamed down to the celebrated 12-year-old intelligence...

...One should perhaps add that "quality" broadcasting would necessitate more sheer fondness for writing, acting, and directing as artistic skills than is evident among some of the adult minds in radio management...

...After all, many do have faith in the people who make up this democracy—enough faith to feel that enough of them want more than soap opera and bang-bang as a daily diet of amusement and relaxation...

...First the radio networks and stations were showered with advertising contracts paid for with hundreds of millions of dollars which might otherwise have gone to the Government in war profit taxes...

...Mention should also be made of the unusually varied and high-type program schedules at the Universities of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa State, Ohio State, Texas, Drake, Syracuse, St...

...These were lectures, symposia, a famous one-man debate novelty, playlets, cantatas, even a sort of cultural "soap opera...

...Here is a limited appeal to limited segments...

...Some of these present excesses of commercialism may adjust themselves...

...Seipmann wrote a book, Radio's Second Chance, the impact of which was sufficient to draw upon him, in 1946, considerable vituperative attentions from the highly prosperous but still-sensitive (from before the war) broadcasters...

...Business practices outlawed just the other day by the "code" of the radio industry are back in open flagrancy as hundreds of stations degenerate into telephone order- takers, on straight percentage, for high pressure COD merchandise— pocket adding machines you cannot live without, hand-size toy sewing machines advertised in terms appropriate to full-sized Singer machines, self-doctoring books containing full details on cancer, tuberculosis and pregnancy, make-believe pistols you can't tell from real, tips on horses, and all through the dreary repertoire...

...The running debate between radio apologists and radio critics was tipping noticeably to the side of the critics in 1940 and 1941, and it looked as if radio might at last have to face up to a genera] examination in Congress of its policies and performance...

...there is insufficient fighting heart in the thinned ranks of the critics to amount to much...

...The over-anxious beginner has a deplorably retrograde tendency to revive discarded, disreputable practices...

...The industry rejects the possibility that if the public were presented with a wholly different array of program choices, it might manifest wholly different preferences to the discredit of many a huckster's tenet now enshrined as gospel...

...And so, in 1950, the venerable debate has come full circle and is about where it always was, stalemated on the issue of who should get what kind of program service from a radio system created under law to occupy immensely valuable segments of the public's domain...

...For over 10 years it has successfully fused the skills and charms of commercial broadcasters and college campus personages in Colorado and Wyoming...

...For the first time there would be a "package" with which to allure the alienated throngs of the educated and the discriminating who now confine their listening to the 11 p. m. news round-up...

...If Radio Can Sell Anything to Anybody By ROBERT J. LANDRY FOR A quarter of a century the choice of programs on American radio has been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of the cheap and the claptrap and away from the first-rate and the worthwhile...

...From a small studio and staff in Denver have appeared some 400 assorted programs a year...

...The Rocky Mountain Radio Council is a goldmine of practical experience in these very matters...

...Stress has been put upon the fact that radio was supposedly governed by scientific popularity research which proved people loved trash...

...Lawrence, and elsewhere...

...Also lots of idiot wives chit-chatting with imbecile husbands and neither ever saying anything worth hearing...

...Then they were showered with kudos as radio found itself intem-perately lauded by enterprising young press agents for Washington war agencies who were delighted that radio so obediently carried the war messages in advocacy of saving, salvaging, and scrimping...

...Today there are hundreds of stations with a very hazy notion of what to do with themselves...

...Their prospective "quality" network will be adequately staffed and financed (and forget it, if not) and its purposes will be realistic and reasonable...

...Who may say that quality cannot be as successful a specialty for some radio stations as Holy Roller evangelism or hillbilly marathons—once quality has the new advantage of regularity of hours and dial-position and some publicity drive...

...Enough like-minded broadcasters and a sufficiency of operating capital might not be readily found...

...We may touch our caps to Crosby and Seipmann and radio critics George Rosen (Variety) and Jerry Franken (Billboard...

...This distribution of values has been defended by the broadcasting industry as proportionate to the run of taste in the total populace...

...So, too, with the "sports" station...

...All these programs are "popular...

...Suppose we speculate...

...Well-intentioned endeavors to stimulate "better' programs have seemed dilettante and awkward...

...The very over-population of stations we have alluded to might suggest a reason-why for "quality...

...And the war had this further happy result for radio: it silenced and dispersed the radio critics so that by war's end radio's earlier sins of omission and commission had been forgotten...

...Quality" scheduling would systematically omit the kind of programs about which the radio apologists apologize...

...For the first time in radio history "quality" would have "listening habit" (same time, same station dependability) strength...

...In contrast with radio's assigned role in Britain and many another country, the lowest rather than the highest strata in the U. S. A. has the choosing of what goes on the air...

...Tsui now an American citizen and professor at New York University...

...Only two new leaders of the dissident audience have emerged since war's end...

...They brave a medium now so vast that hardly anybody can keep track of its vagaries...

...They were definitely "popular" and they proved clearly that showmanship and intellectual content were not incompatible...

...At that period the smallest "coffee pot" station could grace its walls with at least one framed, press agent-arranged scroll of commendation from a high Cabinet dignitary...

...It would systematically discriminate in favor of the kind of programs of which the commercialises have themselves boasted (when they could...

...Plainly it is not more talk but a practical, constructive plan of action which is now urgently needed...

...Such disadvantages proved lethal, reducing from 175 to a scant 30 the number of surviving "educational" outlets...

...Frequency modulation engineering partly swelled the number of stations...

...Putting aside for the present the whole pro and con as to status quo, and conceding debaters' exaggerations on both sides, the challenge is still the same as it always has been...

...The programs were recorded and circulated by air express...

...On the contrary...

...Fine music, journalistic novelties, raconteurs, lively interviews and lectures, the excitement of science, contact with urbane and witty minds —all these would be part of the schedule...

...Broadcasting, in short, is a highly complex undertaking...

...Sponsors have already paid for symphonies, opera performances, especially the Saturday Meetings at the Metropolitan, book reviews, dramatized scripture, debates, talks, personalities of intellectual stature...

...Consistent, organized "quality" would line-up programs which are now scarce and scattered on a back-to-back plan...

...Newcomers do not assure new standards...

...III "Quality" for Americans could derive inspiration and suggestions from American sources...

...The industry's thesis is simply this: the people get what they want in the best of all radio systems, and public opinion is the only court radio respects...

...Perhaps they never will...

...IV Of course, none of the necessary steps would be easily taken...

...This is specialization...

...The great majority of broadcasters would go right on doing as they have been doing, but a group of them would decide to gamble that selective audiences can he sold to selective advertisers, if the rates are commensurate and the arrangements realistic...

...Everything has been said so often and with so little effect that an at' mosphere of cynicism and weariness prevails...

...The newer Lowell Radio Institute draws upon Harvard and other Boston universities for superior program material, mostly of a discussion nature...

...Everything which is now so fervently plotted to favor catch-as-catch-can would be mustered to aid "quality...

...Fortunately for radio the Japanese diverted public and GovROBERT J, LANDRY, editor of Space & Time, a weekly commentary on advertising, was Variety's original radio editor and served for six years as Director of Program Writing at the Columbia Broadcasting System...

...Already many radio stations have handed back their licenses and gone out of business...

...The "high brow" music stations of New York, WQXR and WNYC, have something to teach "quality" radio...

...And yet it is the audit mind which has asserted with a trace of mysticism that radio could sell anything to anybody, a boast that would have its ultimate verification when "quality" radio held its own in a world of catch-as-catch-can...

...Some "sports" stations actually focus down to neighborhood sandlot baseball...

...There is no magic in mere multiplication of licenses...

...When the Federal Communications Commission tried to stop the telephone quiz and similar shows on the ground they were lotteries or close to it, the industry organized a great clamor that "censorship" was involved...

...But perhaps their motive would lie in present-day conditions in the industry...

...would-be critics chafe under the patient, amused contempt of the broadcasters for the "highbrows...

...And yet—in common sense—there could be no emulation of the starkly highbrow selections of the British Broadcasting Corporation's postwar "Third Programme" which presents uncut Ibsen, obscure and unintelligible abstract poetry, and a mixed bag of heavily classical or private enthusiasms...

...There would be regular provision for gay and adventuresome stuff, of which the old "Columbia Workshop" provided a tan-talyzing taste...

...Beyond lies the unlovely scramble of some 2,300 local radio stations (war-mushroomed from 950) who behave today with a disregard of public interest and an unabashed devotion to sell—and nothing but sell—that has not been seen since "Doc" Brinkley wholesaled goatgland operations in early radio...

...We have seen that while too little competition promotes undesirable monopoly, too much competition promotes dog-eat-dog...

...This mental reservation might well be cancelled out and the industry given new feathers for its bonnet if "quality" were once thought through and put through...

...As a result, great numbers of cultivated Americans are alienated from radio...

...Why then the mental reservation as to quality programs on consistent schedule...

...It is in the name of sound democracy, as radio defines democracy, that the present unbalanced diet gives us a plethora of hillbilly music and whining nasalisms...

...Clubwomen and school teachers have too often squandered their fire or have been trapped in debaters' exaggerations...

...Quality radio has never been tried...

...Hence you hear today of "farm" and "labor" stations...

...FM was widely represented before the war as the cure-all for what then ailed radio...

...Does this not suggest that American radio has, either altogether or in substantial measure, rejected the responsibility for setting new and better standards of taste and culture in favor of discovering, exploiting, and perpetuating old strains of mass vulgarity...

...There is experience enough to yield useful realistic warnings as well...

...Again there are "foreign language" specialists among the broadcasters, not to mention "evangelical" and "jazz" services...

...Quality" radio would include fine drama and dramatic readings, as different from the slapdash, shoddy writing which predominates in radio today as Katherine Anne Porter is different from Elinor Glyn...

...So-called, and odiously-called "educational" radio stations of earlier years were often hampered by lack of funds, lack of sympathetic superiors, and lack of dynamic program management...

...why can't American radio be broadened to include adequate service to the educated, the education-hungry, and discriminating elements of our society...

...II Today the old quarrel is being creakingly revived, with fresh questions now added regarding television and the public interest, for TV is proceeding, largely unchallenged, under the control of radio men and on the latter-day model of radio itself...

...If the lovers of husband-and-wife yatata-yatata can be serviced ad nauseum, and if devotees of monotonous murder fiction can have their fill hours on end, why is it impossible to have an organized schedule of "quality...

...Until now unfair penance has been forced upon the discriminating listener...

...Stations without present network affiliation are especially groping for some appeal to a selective audience which will give them a more meaningful raison d'etre...

...There is more to operation in the public interest than so-called public taste...

...This is true as far as it goes but it obscures the further fact that radio is also governed in considerable measure by the private prejudices, fixed assumptions, and snap-judgments of dominant broadcasters and advertisers...

...Crosby turns out perceptive and witty copy, holds aloof from industry hokum and cocktail parties, and is generally respected...

...Let us suppose that 40 or 50 big city, college town, and residential community local radio stations have gotten together to formulate a plan of action...

...Quality" will have no arty or esoteric connotation, will propose nothing or little in the way of programs which has not been tried before now...

...The slate was clean...

...His like number among the academicians, now that Carl Friedrich of Harvard is preoccupied with international affairs, is Charles Seipmann, once an official of the British Broadcasting corp...

...They see themselves excluded and neglected and they react with a drumfire of criticism which no doubt exaggerates given offenses and refuses praise to much in radio which deserves praise...

...The revival of the controversy is not robust, by any means...

...Silly parlor games and stunts are played hour after hour on a nation-wide scale, including the fabulous telephone quiz game under which 13,000,000 telephone-owning families are asked to stand by their instruments on the gambling odds of their particular number being called...

...One is John Crosby, an astute reporter converted by the New York Herald-Tribune into its first radio critic, and now syndicated to some 35 newspapers...

...This kind of amateurism is the particular curse nf all radio innovations and would confront, and perhaps confound, those interested in developing quality broadcasting...

...Television's onset intensifies the pertinence of all the old critical questions...

...fay annual flush of radio prizes, awards, medals, and plaques has changed nothing fundamentally...

...The logic should be obvious...

...Scores of low-grade murder, gangster, private eye and superstition-glorifying dramatics pierce the night with gunfire, shrieks, and body-thuds...

...Today we know better...