Radio: Key to National Unity
I
OUR radio networks had taken the precaution of spotting reporter representatives throughout the Orient, and in the excited days that followed Pearl Harbor they were organized to jump about Asia with their characteristic snappiness. We will now take you, voices kept saying, to Chungking, to Batavia, to Sydney, to Singapore. Stand by, please, for an air raid on Manila, exclusive to this network. Our Mr. Cecil Brown has just jumped off the Repulse. He will now tell you the situation in Malaya. It was a good story.
Then, abruptly, censorship came down like a mist over everything. The event was over; the war was on. Radio soon understood that it was to suppress for the duration its congenital eagerness to convert all important public occasions into a blow-by-blow description. Showmanship in matters of life and death was unnecessary. To the military mind there is a right way and a wrong way to tell the populace that enemy aircraft are approaching and that tonight, kiddies, we have some bad news for you.
In decency to one’s nerves, listening to war news should be confined on ordinary days to stated periods, one or two at most. Emotional shocks are bad enough, but to repeat them needlessly every hour on the hour is neurotic. Many Americans fought the Battle of France and the Battle of London with their stomachs, endangering their digestion without helping either France or the RAF. Naturally, should air raids threaten or other crises arise, attention to radio is imperative.
In any country at war the radio system has a very special rôle when the awful moments come. We have problems of language and ignorance and dangers of fifth columnism that the British did not have. In days of tension the radio will incessantly instruct, order, explain, beguile. Its function then will be to bring out and adapt to war conditions the conspicuous talent for first aid which radio has often demonstrated, notably in the Ohio River floods of some years ago.
The radio commentator in the United States has by now become a national habit. We have venerated most of the merchants of supposed ‘inside stuff,’ even hailing some of them as soothsayers. Our awe created a lush market in which some commentators commanded from $1000 to $4000 a week and still do. After August 1939 these commentators began to take over our thinking, and we, as a people, were lazily agreeable. But there developed in the true crises a strange phenomenon. When the outlook was really bad, it was not always the masterminds who revealed unshakable confidence in the ultimate victory of democracy. It was, oddly enough, the ordinary simple folk. On these days they did not parrot the commentators. They ignored them.
We can still recall the panicky, headlong melancholia that seized some of the olympians during the painful weeks of May and June 1940: predictions were then broadcast that England’s survival was a matter of from three to seven weeks. We shall, after this war, have many kinds of reactions. One may well be against the $1000 a week tea-leaf readers.
A highly regarded and undoubtedly gifted man who writes and broadcasts consistently at big fees has indulged throughout the war in a rampant defeatism oddly at variance with his declared sentiments. In suppressing in himself all so-called wishful thinking, he has managed quite frequently to sound as a Nazi operative would wish a man of his influence to sound. With the fiasco at Pearl Harbor he was again awash in pessimism, again doing his pro-democracy best to convict democracy of hopeless inefficiency. Criticism of a war government is necessary and good. But the sincere, constructive critic is at one with the government in a common assumption that victory is possible. What can be said of the radio commentators who, after Pearl Harbor, lamented to each other, ‘Gus, old boy, this is our Dunkirk’? Or of the radio military experts who three weeks earlier told us the Japs were weak and wobbly?
A swift ebb and flow of public morale is not wanted by the authorities in this war or any war. Radio can do much to even out the emotional reactions of the populace: its major contribution to morale is simply to bring out and focus the talents and techniques which already exist. The indispensable know-how largely belongs to commercial broadcasting. For this reason, if for no other, it is possible to predict that our radio programs in wartime will not differ radically from our radio programs in peacetime. There will probably be marked self-restraint in the amount, nature, and proximity to war news of advertising. Public opinion should rid us of ‘Use Gillette blades, save steel, and help win the war’ or ‘This is a crucial year in which personal appearance counts — so use Kreml.’
II
The Government will systematically exploit radio. The Treasury Department is now doing so on a large scale through an extensive radio publicity division in Washington almost entirely manned by men and women from commercial radio and, significantly, not covered or cramped by civil service. The Treasury puts great stress upon radio advertising to sell its war stamps and bonds. Radio especially is a blessing in reaching the remote farms and areas that were a problem in the last war to the Liberty Loan salesmen.
What the Treasury does, other departments will emulate. The entire purpose is to borrow and exploit the facilities and know-how of the broadcasting industry, not to attempt any spectacular production or policy innovations. The gala broadcasts for the Red Cross and other drives are simply elaborations of the familiar advertising revues.
There is some tendency in the United States to feel that because British radio went all-out immediately for the war effort in 1939, forgetting all else in the process, this is the right way and our American policy of remaining near normal is somehow slack. This is a perversion of the fact. BBC’s total war record will undoubtedly be very commendable, but its early start was marked by confusion, by a sudden acceleration of mediocrity on the air, and by an unmistakable hint of shakiness in officialdom.
I was in England in September 1939 and was able to watch various phases of the switchover. A wartime system of rather involved engineering, employing unexpected shifts of the points of broadcast origin, was immediately instituted — all part of a strategy of deception for a small country located close to the enemy. There was the danger that broadcast signals might provide geographic information for flyers. Part of the BBC staff was scattered in units; groups of actors, musicians, announcers, engineers were billeted in obscure English and Scotch villages. The whole British system was converted into an underground network, in part literally so, with broadcasts from subterranean studios.
The British public had, of course, avidly followed the BBC news periods, notably at 6 P.M. and at 11 P.M., all through that nervous month of August. I sat in the garden foyer of a Midlands hotel on the evening when news of the sinking of the Athenia came through. I recall the toneless voice of the announcer as he delivered his message of horror, and I recall even more vividly the well-mannered hotel guests listening at the proprietor’s wireless with hardly a mark, save of deepened reserve, to testify of any reaction to the news. A lady who was a teetotaler thought she might like some whiskey and soda, small, please. Otherwise nothing.
But of course they were all of them twitching and feeling it inside. The ritual of tuning in for the Government’s communiqués had created, all through the various English counties I visited, a curious though not immediately apparent type of anxiety neurosis, all the more tense because British decorum then allowed few vents for emotion. Britain was almost literally living for, and counting the minutes until, the wireless news.
The Government imposed an absolute censorship on news. This revealed itself most glaringly in the identical wording of war stories in the afternoon newspapers with BBC bulletins of the night before. Naturally, inside a week the press lords were yelling with genuine anguish at the denial of the privilege of rewrite and at the general blackout of information except for the carefully measured official daily allotment.
Hypnosis by radio receiver could not last. It was unhealthy to hang on words over the air that had been repeated an hour before and would be repeated nearly every hour the rest of the day and part of the next besides reappearing, dressed up with captions, in the press. Soon letters began appearing in the Times complaining that this would become the Bore War. Margot Asquith recalled that dullness had been one of the greatest burdens of the last war. Englishmen hoped that the BBC would enliven its programs and that the Government would liberalize its news handouts.
In due time the British restored gayety to the air. Morale demanded it. The BBC’s congenital conservatism, especially on the Sabbath was short-cut by eventually creating a special separate radio program service for the troops. A good deal of frivolity and music hall indigo could be excused the soldiers. This was especially persuasive as an excuse in the period in which there was a BEF in France.
In England as in the United States the people demand that the rights of debate and criticism shall not be extinguished in wartime. We wish only as much censorship as winning the victory demands. In the nature of wartime confusion and of military distaste for civilian ‘interference,’ we are likely to get more censorship on occasion than is really necessary. We can argue about it after we win the war.
III
There are 915 radio stations in the United States, ranging from small-town 100-watters to big-town 50,000-watters. Perhaps two thirds of the stations of all sizes are affiliated with national or regional networks. The hookup is the key to national unity, and one new wartime morale program is looping four national networks and 550 stations together once a week. To tune in America’s stations the owners of some 50,000,000 radio receivers consume an estimated $200,000,000 annually in electrical energy. National advertising is only one source of support to the radio industry, but its $100,000,000 a year does constitute the cantilever arch from which swing all the better radio programs which in turn determine the tone and character of privately licensed and financed broadcasting.
Our system is a going concern of high average efficiency. The industry is conspicuous in war activities of all kinds, among them recruiting for the armed forces — Air Cadets, Coast Guard, Army, Navy — and for radio technicians. Radio directly participates in civilian defense, in the training of victory speakers, this war’s equivalent of the Minute Men of the last war. Yet paradoxically NBC and CBS, the two leading broadcast organizations, turn aside from their multiple collaborations with the White House and other sources of authority to damn, and be damned in return by, the Federal Communications Commission. Within a fortnight of Pearl Harbor NBC and CBS were in a New York court seeking to enjoin the FCC from enforcement of certain ‘arbitrary orders’ originally dated May 2, 1941. Later still, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the FCC, filed an action in a Chicago court designed to compel NBC and CBS to accept these orders through the legal device of a consent decree.
Neither side in this businessman-bureaucrat feud was prepared to accept a truce on the private fight in order to concentrate on the war. The FCC continued to insist that its orders were necessary to break up ‘monopoly,’ and pointed to the endorsement of the orders by the younger Mutual network.
NBC and CBS have accepted as ‘hints’ some of the FCC’s points. For example, the Radio Corporation of America, chief pioneer of the industry, has already separated the NBC Red and NBC Blue networks, thereby preparing the legal and organizational groundwork for eventual disposal, if required, of one of them. The FCC demand which is most obnoxious to network management strikes at the right of the networks to make contracts on an exclusive basis for all, or nearly all, of the radio time of member stations. The network management feels that the abolition of this legal right and the insistence that local stations be free to accept or reject programs will shatter the whole structure of contractual guarantees which make networks, as such, possible. The FCC shrugs off this claim.
The Mutual network, whose leadership comes largely from the Chicago Tribune (WGN) and Macy’s department store (WOR), has survived and fought as an ‘independent’ and sided with the FCC against NBC and CBS much in the same spirit that it broke with NBC and CBS and signed with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers during another bitter trade war of 1941. Most of the radio industry had united to ‘lock out’ ASCAP. Mutual joined the movement but negotiated a separate peace months before the others.
At the St. Louis convention of the National Association of Broadcasters in May 1941, Chairman James L. Fly of the FCC, a guest of the convention, was given less than a generously fair hearing. Storming out of the convention, he declared to the press that the radio trade association ‘shined and smelled like a mackerel in the moonlight.’ The lingering echoes of such clashes of personality and points of view were still too strong to be submerged in the first Japanese visit. However, time and proddings to unity are already getting in their sedative effects, and despite the New York and Chicago court actions it may be predicted that during 1942 some sort of compromise will be patched up.
IV
A healthy respect for the ingenuity of spies and saboteurs prompted immediate precautions in America against certain types of participation programs lest the innocent-seeming question or answer be a code. Some 55,000 amateur shortwave operators were ordered off the air to prevent enemy agents creeping in among them. The Army and the Navy are especially alert against faked official instructions, manufactured panic, false alarms that generate confusion. The vivid recent example of Belgium and France with their clogged roads and headlong panic is a constant nightmare to the military mind. Soldiers know something, moreover, of the hysterical temperament of our polyglot populations in the big cities and of the deplorable, but human, tendency to halflisten and to half-understand what is heard on the radio, and to fill out the story with unfounded speculation.
It was at once made mandatory that all announcers on duty with or near the forces be fingerprinted, mugged, investigated for patriotism, and ‘accredited’ in the manner adopted for reporters covering the White House. Only badgewearing, credential-bearing, uniformed announcers and radio engineers will be allowed in or near theatres of military and naval operations, and they will always be under Intelligence Officer chaperonage.
Men of imagination and responsibility in the American radio trade knew from experience the dangers of improper and thoughtless use of their informationgiving, mood-creating apparatus. Such radio men did not fear, but rather quickly urged, stringency in censorship. They have gladly agreed that wartime censorship must be harder upon radio because of its boundary-leaping character than upon the press. Wise radio men realize that, as a matter of conscience alone, wartime censorship is a workaday need of the broadcaster as it is an indispensable protection to the nation. The mature radio viewpoint was well expressed only a few days before Pearl Harbor by CBS’s homecoming London representative, Edward R. Murrow, who told a banquet audience at the Waldorf-Astoria that he, for one, would flatly refuse to newscast from a belligerent country that lacked an adequate system of censorship, since in the absence of such a system he might innocently jeopardize lives. The enemy is always a devoted fan of one’s program.
It was not strict censorship, but loose and, what is worse, multiple censorship and bureaucratic red tape, that American radio men feared. From the first hour, they yearned to be told what to do and what not to do. But they wanted uncontradictable authority. They weren’t sure who came first, the Office of Censorship, the Defense Communications Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the White House secretariat, or the Army Interceptor Commands.
V
Radio leaders have an overwhelming interest in the official attitude on morale, but they cannot assume to exercise or delineate the grand strategy. The probable job of radio will be the restatement, or showmanlike projection, of the official propaganda line, using radio’s own inspiration more or less. Radio may also form partnerships with private morale experts delegated by the Government to stand by and improvise both short-term and long-term expedients.
Such morale planning groups, of whatever nature they may be, will have certain basic decisions to make. Among them will be the question of how much we need to hate our enemies in order to persevere until their downfall. Even now the typical American idealist is often more distressed by the failure of our allies, the British, to promise contingent freedom to backward India than by the possible German destruction of that very country. In the view of some people radio should come out for, say, the submerged third, the sharecroppers, the unhappy Negroes, slum clearance, planned economy, a world worth having for the cost this war will exact. Now, say these excited minds, is the great opportunity for radio. It has the voice. Let it speak. It has the miles of telephone lines, the organized audience. Let it prove itself the new leader of democracy.
All these expectations of progress at a gallop are nonsense. Radio is not like that, and could never be, except by a delegation of absolute authority to a tight little group of ultraliberals, a contingency as unlikely as it would be undesirable. Democracy must protect and guard radio, not vice versa. This is true in war as in peace. Our radio will not remain democratic twenty-four hours if we ever go fascist. Let’s get the simple facts straight. We have a democratic kind of radio because we are a democratic kind of society.
Generally speaking, radio is our most consistently conservative medium. It is obliged to be. Programs cannot blurt out emotional discharges which might seriously injure morale. NBC and CBS have adhered to their policies of not permitting spy-and-sabotage melodrama in fiction form. A CBS executive vetoed a radio version of the stage play, The Wookey, because of the extremely realistic sound effects of air raids which were an integral part of the drama. In short, what was permissible in a theatre had to be regarded as dynamite for radio.
The war did release radio commentators from many of their previous restraints so that they are now frankly editorializing against our enemies; but, unless there is a drastic and now unforeseeable shift of viewpoint upon the importance of avoiding violence to racial groups and to civil liberties, there will be no Injun whoops around the campfires.
Radio management is not without its idiosyncrasies. The industry is now free, but perhaps not yet accustomed to being free, of the long farce of pretended neutrality during which it developed an elaborate etiquette of denying that radio itself took any concern in the problems of democracy beyond the concern of an umpire. Network and station executives have long been saying ‘ We cannot allow that — it’s emotional’ or ‘You cannot say that unless the opposite point of view is allowed an immediate rebuttal.’ Radio industry policy looked to (1) dispassionate reporting of the news by the radio organizations themselves, and (2) balanced discussion of controversies implicit in this news. In the scheduling of ‘talks’ the networks were slightly obsessed with fears of senatorial attacks.
Today radio must do a more creative job. Yet thoughtful persons fear, with cause, an emotional bender creating a hysteria hangover as in 1919 when a disillusioned and apathetic public opinion, overdosed on atrocity exaggerations, reacted by creating a cynical climate and the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson.
We also need to consider that laughter, a specialty of entertainers, not morale experts, must not be sacrificed in the effort to create a high spiritual tone. It is imperative that people shall be able to laugh at the little everyday bumps and annoyances that war brings. And we need to remember that there is a natural saturation point for programs reminding us of the eternal verities imbedded in our Constitution. The human mind wanders rather soon in the presence of abstractions.
The great power for progress implicit in radio was summed up on December 2, 1941, by the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, when he pointed out that radio had annihilated time and distance and ‘the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here.’ But another equally challenging side of the radio problem was illustrated five days later during the play-by-play description of a Sunday afternoon professional football game over WOR, New York. An excited announcer broke in several times in rapid succession with news flashes that violence and lies and murder had struck at our own Pearl Harbor. Whereupon quite a large number of annoyed listeners telephoned WOR to demand that it stop interrupting the football game.