Whose Radio?
» After five years on the staff of the FCC, Edward M. Brecher asks: Who has the controlling voice in American broadcasting — the commercial sponsor or the mute but often rebellious listener?
by EDWARD M. BRECHER
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THIS spring the Federal Communications Commission, after seven years of wandering down a series of regulatory bypaths, returned to its major responsibility: the program service rendered by American radio stations. In the report entitled Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees (promptly nicknamed the “Blue Book”), the Commission said its say on excessive commercialization, the decline and fall of sustaining public-service programs, the glut of soap operas, the dearth of publicissue discussions, and various subspecies of the plug-ugly — the middle commercial, the constipation commercial, the singing commercial, the overlong commercial, the propaganda commercial, the patriotic or “wave the flag and take another pill” commercial, and the piling up of commercials in a series uninterrupted by program matter.
Reactions were instant and extreme. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the Blue Book “excellent advice” deserving “commendation from the millions of radio listeners.” The Hartford Courant startled a Commission long inured to brickbats with the unaccustomed phrases, “FCC to the Rescue!” and “Hats off to the FCC!” One Chicago station promptly altered its ways; in lieu of its traditional rhythm of one plug-ugly, one phonograph record, one plug-ugly, it pioneered a new radio pattern: three plug-uglies, three phonograph records, three plug-uglies. Judge Justin Miller, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents most but not all stations, inaugurated an anti-FCC campaign by calling the report “a reversion to that type of government control and regulation from which our forefathers struggled to escape.” Taking its cue from Miller, the Hearst press alleged that the FCC had “brushed off the Bill of Rights and the memory of the Minute Men of Concord.”
As a former member of the FCC staff concerned in the original drafting of the Blue Book, I can claim no objectivity with respect to the issues involved. I can, however, present the FCC report in historical perspective, and perhaps restate its intent, effect, and implications.
Historically, the American system of broadcasting evolved and flourished under a system of “perpetual jeopardy” which kept every radio station in imminent peril of losing its license. Congress had decreed that all radio channels should remain the property of the people, to be utilized by stations pledged to operate in the public interest. Under explicit provisions of the Radio Act of 1927, reenacted substantially without change in the Communications Act of 1934, no license to use this public property can be granted a broadcaster for a term of more than three years.
Before receiving his license, each broadcaster must sign a waiver of any claim to the use of the ether “as against the regulatory power of the United States.” On the expiration of his license, each broadcaster is required to prove de novo that a renewal will “serve the public interest, convenience, or necessity,” and in the event that there is a competing application, to prove that his renewal would better serve the public interest than a transfer of the facilities to a newcomer.
From 1927 to 1937, the Commission interpreted “public interest” to mean primarily “program service.” Applications for new stations were granted or denied according to whether the promised program service seemed to the FCC appropriate to the community concerned. On renewal, a station’s file was checked for complaints or other evidence of shortcomings. Most important of all, some stations were afforded special privileges (high power, cleared channels, full-time operation) while others were penalized with reduced power, frequency changes, and shorter hours, in considerable part on the basis of the program service which they rendered. As one Commissioner explained to a Congressional committee during the first year of radio regulation: — “ . . . each station occupying a desirable channel should be kept on its toes to produce and present the best programs possible and, if any station slips from that high standard, another station which is putting on programs of a better standard should have the right to contest the first station’s position and after hearing the full testimony, to replace it.”
It was under this policy of perpetual jeopardy that we developed what most Americans are convinced is the world’s most enterprising and resourceful broadcasting.
Such a regulatory scheme, of course, can be abused, and for twenty-three months, beginning in 1937, it was abused. The Legion of Decency, having achieved a remarkable measure of success in Hollywood, turned its attention to radio; and the FCC under a new chairman reacted not wisely but too well. For example, it rebuked (and threatened to do more than rebuke) a network which permitted Mae West to inflect her voice in a comic presentation of the Adam-Eve-apple scene; and it designated a station license for hearing on the lone complaint of one Minnesota minister that the words “hell” and “damn” had been used in the broadcast of a prize-winning play by Eugene O’Neill.
The FCC for a brief period adopted precisely the policy recently condemned by the courts in the Esquire case, except that the FCC did not actually invoke sanctions. Broadcasters, for business reasons inherently loath to wound the susceptibilities of even a fraction of the possible audience, were also now on the alert to avoid annoying even a single Minnesotan.
This FCC regime was necessarily short-lived; the inevitable new broom, trust-buster James Lawrence Fly, took office in September, 1939. While liberals and civil libertarians cheered, Fly put an instant stop to the Boston police court variety of censorship which had grown up under his predecessor. In the process, however, he inadvertently threw away the baby with the bath water.
Abandoning even the most rudimentary review of the program service actually being rendered by broadcast stations, the Commission devoted its limited resources instead to the battles against network monopoly, newspaper domination of radio, multiple ownership of stations, and the prolonged struggle for adequate appropriations to support essential wartime activities. Radio, throughout the national defense and war periods, so far as program service was concerned, was left in an essentially unregulated condition. The renewal of licenses became almost automatic. The wartime freeze on new construction relieved existing licensees of the fear of competing applicants. The promises of public service that had been the basis on which original licenses and subsequent renewals and privileges had been granted became dim memories. The legend arose, and was widely fostered, that the FCC had no jurisdiction with respect to program service — that its mandate from Congress was limited to questions of technical interference among the electromagnetic waves generated by broadcast transmitters.
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THE FCC Blue Book is, first of all, a report on the results of these years of program-service laissez faire. It tells of a single commercial sales talk five minutes in length, uninterrupted by program material. It tells of six plug-uglies broadcast in a row during the dinner hour Monday through Friday — except on Thursday, when one minute of music is permitted to intervene. It tells of outstanding network public-service programs (“Words at War,” “Transatlantic Call,” “University of Chicago Round Table,” “Inter-American University of the Air”) rejected by a majority of the stations to which they were made available and broadcast by some others only at hours when most listeners are asleep. It points to the station which carries the Philharmonic program, for which it is paid, but cuts Olin Downes’s five-minute sustaining introduction to the program to make way for a local commercial. And it cites the soap operas, which are listened to, on the average, by only 7 per cent of the available audience, but which occupy most of the daytime hours of the two biggest networks. In calling attention to these abuses, the Blue Book is a mea culpa; we have failed, says the FCC in effect, in our duty to keep American broadcasting an instrument of public service.
But what criteria should the Commission use in evaluating public service? Clearly not the personal tastes and predilections of seven men sitting in Washington. Some other source had to be found.
In the Blue Book, the FCC turns, remarkably enough, to the accumulated wisdom of the broadcasting industry itself for the four yardsticks with which it proposes to measure public interest. Quoting from network and station executives, radio writers, directors, commentators, and from the National Association of Broadcasters in presentations to the Commission, the Congress, and the courts, the Commission cites four components of a balanced program service: (1) the carrying of sustaining (non-commercial) programs; (2) the carrying of local live-talent programs; (3) the carrying of publicissue discussions; and (4) the avoidance of advertising excesses.
Of these four yardsticks, the sustaining program, selected and prepared by the network or the station itself without advertising sponsorship or advertising agency intervention, is both the most crucial and the most controversial. Did the Opera or the Philharmonic sing or play less well, critics are asking, when it became commercially sponsored? Was “Town Meeting of the Air” less of a public service during its year under commercial auspices? Do not Fibber McGee and Molly serve the Red Cross drive each year as selflessly and as effectively as non-commercial programs?
The answers are supplied by the broadcasting industry itself, in a series of quotations upon which the Blue Book relies. First, the sustaining program is the “balance wheel” by which networks and stations prevent their schedules from becoming lopsided as a result of commercial whims and fads. According to Dr. Frank M. Stanton, formerly director of research and now president of CBS:—
“One use Columbia makes of sustaining programs is to supplement commercial offerings in such ways as to achieve, so far as possible, a full and balanced network service. For example, if the commercial programs should be preponderantly musical, Columbia endeavors to restore program balance with drama or the like in sustaining service.”
Again, the reservation of sustaining time makes room for types of programs inherently inappropriate for sponsorship. In the words of Niles Trammell, president of NBC: —
“Another reason for the use of sustaining programs was the voluntary recognition on the part of broadcasters that programs of certain types, such as religious programs, informative programs furnished by various governmental agencies and certain programs involving discussions of political principles and other controversial issues, were not suited to advertising sponsorship.”
Dr. Stanton made a further point: —
“There is another feature of sustaining service which differentiates it from commercial programs. While the CBS sustaining service recognizes the broad popular tastes, it also gives attention to smaller groups. It is known that the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society, the Columbia Workshop, Invitation to Learning, Columbia Broadcasting Symphony, and many other ambitious classical programs never reach the largest audience, but Columbia, nonetheless, puts them on year after year for minorities which are growing steadily.”
Sustaining programs similarly are the primary vehicle for service to non-profit organizations — farm, labor, educational, religious, and civic. And the sustaining program is the means of program experimentation, in which new techniques may be explored, new talent tested, old formulas and taboos and rules of thumb impugned. Many of the successful commercial programs today — the Philharmonic, “Information Please,” “Let’s Pretend” — were accepted by commercial sponsors only after prolonged testing in the sustaining laboratory. To quote Dr. Stanton again: —
“On its own time and at its own expense, Columbia has pioneered in such experimental fields as that of original radio drama through the Columbia Workshop Series. Further, it was the first to originate news broadcasts involving on-the-spot reports from correspondents located over all the world. The Columbia School of the Air, now in its thirteenth year, is another example of the use to which Columbia puts its sustaining time by providing a balanced curriculum of broadcasts, five days a week throughout the school year, suitable for use in the classrooms. Columbia has also taken the leadership in the matter of new program content in adult education, music and public debate.”
Finally, the sustaining program is the means of avoiding concentration of control in the hands of a few large advertisers and advertising agencies. Concludes the FCC: —
One advertiser, Procter & Gamble, is reputed to have spent $22,000,000 on radio advertising in 1944.
It purchased approximately 2,000 hours a week of station time — equivalent to the entire weekly time, from sign-on to sign-off, of more than 18 broadcast stations. Procter & Gamble, of course, produces many of its own shows through its own advertising agencies and has control over all its shows. This control is exercised, naturally enough, for the purpose of selling soap. It may incidentally have profound effects on the manners, mores, and opinions of the millions who listen. That is an inevitable feature of the American system of broadcasting; but it is not inevitable that only programs so produced and so controlled shall reach the ear of American listeners. The sustaining program is the necessary makeweight.
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THE second yardstick, the carrying of locally originated programs as distinguished from syndicated features piped in by networks, transcription agencies, and the wire news services, requires that an adequate amount of time shall be reserved for community self-expression, for service to community needs and interests, for the fostering of local talent, for the perpetuation of local tastes and differences. Otherwise the remainder of the nation becomes merely a passive recipient for New York and Hollywood programs, and radio itself is cut off from its regional and local roots.
As for the third yardstick, the carrying of programs devoted to the discussion of public issues, that is a duty which the industry has always recognized in the abstract, but which some stations evade in practice, while others limit their performance to the carrying of one half-hour network forum a week, plus offering a daily series of commentators whose merits and shortcomings have already been surveyed by Dixon Wecter in the Atlantic (June, July, and August, 1945).
Finally, the Commission announces that it will consider, in assessing public service, the extent of advertising excesses. With obvious relish it quotes the doughtiest champion of anti-commercialization in radio, Herbert Hoover: —
“It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.”
Once upon a time, the Blue Book reminds us, radio itself viewed commercial excesses with alarm. The National Association of Broadcasters, which in 1929 represented chiefly the public-service broadcasters eager to improve their position at the expense of fly-by-night competitors, had formally resolved: —
“Commercial announcements, as the term is generally understood, shall not be broadcast between 7 and 11 p.m.”
Reputable sponsors in those bygone days limited their commercials to a statement of their names and the nature of their products. In 1930 the president of the National Association of Broadcasters testified that his station limited advertising to one minute in thirty, and the president of CBS boasted that “of all the time used on the air during a particular week, the actual time taken for advertising mention was seven-tenths of 1 per cent of all our time.”
In contrast, the Blue Book sets forth the present NAB standards: as much as 35 per cent of a 5-minute period devoted to advertising, plus spot announcements fore and aft. It notes that one network announced new limits on spot announcements on the very eve of the Blue Book’s publication; the effect of these limits is to permit 12 3/4 minutes of spot announcements per hour. And it adds that even the lax NAB standards are “as honored in the breach as in the observance”: in a single day’s monitoring of Washington programs, violations were noted on all four networks and all six stations.
The Commission’s remedy for such abuses is as simple as it is mild. In effect, each station is to propose its own standards. In each original or renewal application for a broadcast license, the applicant must set forth the amount of time in each segment of. the broadcast day which he proposes to devote to sustaining programs, local programs, and the public-issue discussions, the maximum amount of time in any hour which he will devote to commercial advertising, and the number of commercial spot announcements he proposes to carry. The Commission, in passing upon applications, can then take into consideration these concrete proposals. On the next renewal, the station’s actual performance can be compared with its promises, and if they conform, the renewal can be granted. If there are serious discrepancies, the renewal application will be designated for hearing, and a public hearing will be held at which the licensee must justify his claim to continued broadcasting privileges. Under this policy, nearly one third of the country’s thousand stations have been placed on temporary licenses pending further study.
The elimination of commercial excesses, as the Blue Book makes clear, will not impair the financial ability of broadcasters to present excellent (or expensive) programs. In 1944, the industry as a whole earned a profit of 222.6 per cent (before Federal income taxes) on the depreciated cost of its tangible property; the comparable profit ratio of the major network companies was 315.3 per cent. The proportion of each revenue dollar retained as profit rose from 17 cents in 1937 to 33 cents in 1944; some stations now keep more than half their revenues and spend less than half on broadcast operations. Meanwhile, despite the tremendous increase in the amount spent by advertisers on radio during the war years, the total cost to advertisers of supporting American broadcasting is still only 2 cents per receiver per day, as compared with 3 cents per receiver per day spent by listeners for radio sets, tubes, repairs, and electric power.
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OBJECTIONS to the Blue Book from the industry have been built around a few basic themes. First, the revived FCC concern with programing is said to be censorship, in violation of the constitutional guarantees of the First Amendment and the statutory limitations on FCC power. This argument has had little appeal to the public and is unlikely to convince the courts.
Second, the report is said to substitute the views of seven men in Washington for the moment-tomoment voting, for and against programs, of a hundred million listeners free to turn their dials.
Third, it is said that the broadcasting industry itself, experienced in public tastes and preferences, is far more competent to determine program policy than a few Commissioners and a Commission staff composed of lawyers, engineers, and accountants with little or no practical radio experience.
Fourth, the Blue Book procedure is said to be an entering wedge which will make it easy for some future American Goebbels to institute real control of program content, to force the broadcasting of points of view which he approves and to limit all criticism of the party in power.
Legally, the FCC rests its case for jurisdiction primarily on the fact that from 1927 to 1934 its predecessor, the old Federal Radio Commission, exercised precisely the power now involved, and was upheld by the courts. The Congress was kept fully informed of the Radio Commission’s policies, and was even assured in 1934 by the National Association of Broadcasters that “it is the manifest duty of the licensing authority, in passing upon applications for licenses or the renewal thereof,” to consider program service. Thereupon the Congress, with a full understanding of the issue, reenacted in 1934, without amendment, the original statutory provisions upon which program review is based.
Nor can it properly be said that the Blue Book rests upon the tastes and preferences of seven commissioners. Rather, as has been noted, it is a codification of the accumulated wisdom of the industry itself, coupled with an insistence that broadcasters shall not merely enunciate the agreed-upon principles of public service in hearings and briefs, but shall also abide by them in day-to-day operating schedules.
The argument concerning the expertness of the FCC and its staff in program matters is more serious. At present, not a single FCC employee is engaged full time on matters of broadcast program policy, and not a single member of the staff has been employed by reason of his familiarity with or competence in program matters. It may well be that the success of the Blue Book in improving the daily fare of listeners will depend upon the FCC’s recruiting a staff specially competent in the program field to administer its program procedures, just as it now employs engineers, accountants, and lawyers specially competent in their respective fields.
It is not likely that effective administration of Blue Book policy will make it any easier for some future Goebbels to seize control of the American radio. A Goebbels has no need to rely on precedent to achieve his ends. If the American radio loses its freedom, it will not be because it is forced to broadcast more public-issue discussions or fewer spot announcements.
The real danger, it seems to me, is that the FCC may fail to administer with competence and with vigor the policies it has now announced. The Blue Book is not a self-enforcing document; its full effect will not be felt by listeners until its general principles are applied in particular cases. The American system of broadcasting will return to the main channel of its greatest development, and the current abuses will be eliminated, only when stations are once more “kept on their toes” by realistic enforcement of the Congressional intent that licenses and privileges shall be granted or renewed in terms of the public service rendered by each licensee.
During the next few months, the Commission will have ample opportunity to re-establish this principle in a host of particular decisions. By refusing to renew the licenses of the half-dozen worst offenders, by reallocating the clear-channel assignments and other special privileges in terms of program service actually rendered to the public, and — perhaps most important — by starting the hundreds of new FM and television stations off on the right foot, the FCC can achieve once more the beneficent effects which such regulation produced during the 1927-1937 decade. Such measures will take courage, though the editorial and listener acclaim which greeted publication of the Blue Book should supply the necessary encouragement.
Whether or not the Commission will in fact implement its report is still in doubt. The Blue Book, for example, singled out William Randolph Hearst’s Station WBAL in Baltimore for devoting, during a sample week, less than 2.5 per cent of its time to live sustaining programs. WBAL broadcast no sustaining programs whatever from 2.00 to 11.00 P.M., Monday through Friday; crammed as many as 16 spot announcements into a 45-minute program — or one every 2.8 minutes; and failed to carry 14 of the 19 outstanding public-service programs made available to it by NBC, substituting instead local commercial programs or phonograph records and spot announcements. It was WBAL which broadcast the longest commercial clocked to date — an uninterrupted 5-minute sales talk. Following publication of the Blue Book, WBAL was the first station whose renewal application was designated for hearing. But the hearing, originally scheduled for April 15, was postponed to July 1, and then to October 1. Meanwhile, with the charges against it still pending, WBAL’s application for a new television station was granted without a hearing, Commissioner C. J. Durr alone dissenting.
If the Blue Book policies are not applied in particular cases, listeners may well be worse off than before. The singing commercial may give way to the screaming commercial. Outstanding sustaining public-service programs may be shifted from 11.30 P.M., when most listeners are asleep, to 3.30 A.M., when everybody is asleep. The horror thriller may usurp the evening hours as universally as the soap opera already occupies the daytime hours. The 3 1/2-minute television commercial already broadcast over a number of television stations, showing how much better a dog feels after eating Red Heart dog food, may be superseded by the 7-minute television commercial, showing you how much better a Hollywood starlet looks after chewing Ex-Lax. No constitutional questions will thereby be raised, no charges of censorship will fill the air, no vested interests (listeners aside) will attack the FCC — but American civilization will be the poorer.