PROFITS AND PRINCIPLE ON TELEVISION
Morgan, Edward P.
PROFITS AND PRINCIPLE ON TELEVISION by Edward P. Morgan Surely one of the most bizarre bits of oratory ever to be dropped on the political scene was die phrase in candidate John Kennedy's...
...But, though broadcasting occasionally lives up to its trust—as in the elaborate, expensive coverage of the political conventions— the drive for the mass market has been its major impulse...
...Item: Because of some unfavorable publicity, one of his sponsors, the Chrysler Corporation, became alarmed after he signed a petition for clemency for Caryl Chessman due to his opposition to capital punishment and after he joined the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy...
...The required corrections and improvements cannot be made so long as a sales graph is more important than public responsibility and common sense in determining the program content of broadcasting, or of any other medium serving the public...
...If so, then we must downgrade the utter commercialization which has come to dominate the American philosophy...
...Radio and television are dedicated to the often healthful exercise of selling products and making money...
...No matter whom we choose to lead us, the borders of the new frontier will be closed to us unless we accept these truths and act upon them...
...Morgan's nightly broadcasts over the ABC network...
...He was first asked to withdraw, then obliged to agree, he said, not to join any more controversial organizations in the future...
...The spongy comfort of our furniture is not nearly so debilitating as a softness of the national mind...
...What this country needs right now is the blade of intelligent controversy and the cutting edge of constructive self-criticism...
...Prize - winning TV dramatist Rod Serling reported in the study that fear of a product boycott in the South impelled the Theater Guild and the sponsor, U.S...
...In return for being licensed to use a precious public commodity, the air, they are supposed to perform, among other things, a responsible public service for the balanced propagation of ideas and the honest dissemination of fact via the greatest device of communication yet invented...
...In a recently released study, the Fund for the Republic reports that the creative writer is being driven away from television because of commercial pressures restricting his free expression...
...Can any politician, Republican or Democrat, deliver on such a promise which is so materially unpromising...
...Result: a kind of spastic mediocrity, a sort of pablum of programming, with now and then an olive pit in it, a world in which a soap salesman becomes the arbiter of public taste, an account executive becomes the custodian of public morals, and a network censor sees to it that expression is free only when it doesn't offend anybody, especially a sponsor...
...it is rather a rebirth of principles which is required—principles that manage to rise, occasionally, even above the accepted nobility of the profit motive...
...That won't be easy to do, and proof of the difficulty lies right here at my elbow, in the broadcasting business...
...Item: On a Christmas program Allen was forced by an ad agency representative to cut a reference to the "commercialization of Christmas" in a letter written to him by a high school boy in Toledo...
...PROFITS AND PRINCIPLE ON TELEVISION by Edward P. Morgan Surely one of the most bizarre bits of oratory ever to be dropped on the political scene was die phrase in candidate John Kennedy's acceptance speech in which he described a "new frontier" as a set of challenges summing up "not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them . . . [appealing] to their pride, not their pocketbook . . . [holding] out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security...
...This article is adapted from one of Mr...
...The agency men objected to "all this stuff here about the business world getting the better of our spiritual lives...
...the power of the sponsor over the word," as critic Marya Mannes puts it...
...Not treated in the Fund study but revealed in some disturbing detail in his autobiography are the broadcasting experiences of entertainer Steve Allen...
...Will the public accept what Kennedy says it needs: leadership instead of salesmanship...
...His program is sponsored by the AFL • CIO...
...Steel, to demand that he disguise beyond recognition a plot based on the Mississippi murder of a Negro youth named Emmett Till...
...It isn't the death of the salesman that is called for, however...
...And the vitality of the American society does not completely depend on its volume of sales...
...the domination of the medium and of the networks by commercial interests...
...The Editors...
...Profits are an important ingredient of our system, but they belong down in the queue, a little below principle...
Vol. 24 • September 1960 • No. 9
