How Dense Is the Mass?

by GILBERT SELDES

BOTH the movies and radio are losing their audiences. The process has been going on for a long time in the movies; it has just begun in radio. The immediate causes are different, but the fundamental reason is the same; and the same simple, drastic step will save both these useful servants of the public. I am not predicting immediate bankruptcy for either, but if it comes, I would trace it to a kind of intellectual bankruptcy in the past.

For ten years, at least, nearly everyone in the field of popular entertainment has been hypnotized by two words: “mass media.” The producers have said in effect, “ We are mass media, we must produce for the mass”; and the critics, conceding the point, have complained, “What you produce isn’t much good, and haven’t minorities some rights, too?" The sponsor cynically giving the people what they like and the intellectual, unable to break the sponsor’s argument, have both been under the spell of an abstraction: for the mass doesn’t exist. And now, when the entertainments concocted for the mass have demonstrated their weaknesses, we can examine the concept of the mass medium and provide, I think, a new approach, with a sounder commercial basis, to the problem of the audience.

“ Mass medium ” is, of course, used as a shorthand symbol for “any form of communication and entertainment intended for a very large number of people.” It parallels mass production and consumption and has some of the same characteristics: repetitive gestures on the producing end and passive enjoyment for the consumer. A network executive once described the mass, negatively but graphically, when he said, “There’s a lunatic fringe that doesn’t listen to radio.” We see the great central mass, a sort of heartland of solid citizens bounded by a glacial fringe, a polar icecap, of non-listening highbrows.

In the mind of the sponsor, the audience is a large pie and all the programs on the air at a given moment are trying to get bigger and bigger slices — because there is only one pie, and success depends on “the share of the total audience.” If the slice is too small, the sponsor has to drop out of the contest; consequently, the only kind of program worth putting on is the kind that gets the big slice. On this commercial basis an entire philosophy has been erected, of which the first principle is: Radio ought never to serve any interest except that of the mass; every hour taken from this purpose deprives the majority of something to which they are entitled, in favor of an intellectual minority.

When women’s clubs, educators, or New Deal bureaucrats criticize radio programs, the answer of the industry is usually a table of the many kinds of entertainment provided, the many hours of cultural broadcasts, the varied and different interests served: quizzes and grand operas, news and drama; hot music and classics — sometimes they omit daytime serials and horror stories for children. Radio’s swi’ep of interest is, in fact, impressive when compared with the short tether of Hollywood, but the plea of “ variety of interests” is unacceptable because, with a few exceptions, all these varied programs and interests are subslantially of the same kind, a ppealing to the same people. Intellectually and emoionally, they lie within the same parallels of latitude, and tthe wide world of human interests outside this narrow zone is left untended. The major sponsored programs, the ones that give radio its essential character, all flourish in one climate.

Copyright 1948, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Boston 16. Mass. All rights reserved.

The exceptions are illuminating. Under a variety of pressures, the broadcasters have been compelled to create and “sustain” programs they believed to be lacking in popular appeal. The wide open spaces between sponsored hours dismayed them: and since “no one was listening anyhow.” this was a golden opportunity to show enthusiasm for “the public interest.” All sorts of worthy cultural programs came to the air and many of them became good commercial properties, permanent elements in radio programing: extensive news coverage, such forums as “America’s Town Meeting of the Air,” and symphony orchestras.

In all of these, radio departed from the lump-mass concept of the audience. The somber analytical commentaries of Raymond Swing required attention differing in kind from passive listening to familiar songs; hearing the Jupiter Symphony produced an effect unlike that of a melodrama. The listeners to Swing and Mozart probably followed other programs, too, perhaps comedy or sport; they brought different responses to different programs and got different satisfactions from them. They proved, in fact, that our society is not a monolithic mass; it is, and has been from the start, pluralistic.

And just when the true concept of the pluralistic audience began to pay off in sponsorship, the networks abandoned it. They have themselves gone into the business of putting programs on the air for the declared purpose of sale to a sponsor. CBS CBS. for instance, which gained prestige by sustaining the Philharmonic for ten years, now prides itself on the number of programs it creates and sells each year for commercial sponsorship. There is, of course, nothing reprehensible in this; the programs range from harmless to excellent; but they lie within the established zone of interest, as do the programs prepared by other networks for the same purpose.

The broadcasters’ present nod toward the public interest is usually in the form of sporadic documentaries on thorny subjects like venereal disease and Communism. Produced in an awe-struck and portentous style, they make no bid for popularity, as if to say, “This is too good for the average man.” Partly this defeatism goes back to the days when Norman Corwin led radio up a rhapsodic byway which did honor to both, but left the documentary so romantic that no sponsor wants to make an honest woman of her. Until the documentary is produced at regular hours it will not gather many listeners; the other non-sponsored programs, except for educational and religious periods, are specifically intended for the mass audience.

At this moment “the mass” is beginning to drift away. Surveys made for the radio industry show that the top-ranking programs drop half of their pulling power if there is a television set in the home; a reasonably good dramatic transmission can take away the greater part of a top comedian’s audience; and nine out of ten set owners habitually choose whatever television brings them even if it is in conflict with their favorite radio program.

This is not radio losing its audience to itself; many television stations are not radio-owned and those run by newspapers will probably develop a kind of television which will have little to do with radio except for taking away sponsors. The television programs that attract audiences are hardly entertainment in radio’s sense; if the present ratio of listening is kept up, television may take up the major part of the radio audience without developing any first-class entertainment of its own. It is hard to think of radio withering on the vine — but that is precisely what broadcasters, especially those without television stations, must think about. For the television programs that today take listeners away from the most expensive radio entertainment are third-rate local wrestling matches, variety shows of small charm and less talent, old Western movies, news events, a play, and then sports and more sports far into the night.

This is happening while television has little money to spend for talent and radio has much. When sponsors have to divide their appropriations between television and radio, when the quality of radio goes down and that of television goes up, the flight from sound-witbout-sight will be headlong. Then radio may ruefully remember that it might have created audiences which wouldn’t have deserted so promptly to such an ignoble rival.

2

BEFORE we consider what radio can do, let us see what has happened to the movies. In Hollywood the mass concept is enshrined in the words “Everybody goes to the movies" and on this premise Hollywood continued to build long after its own researchers had fished up the contrary truth: “Nearly everybody stops going to the movies.” Even the great bankers who finance the movies were apparently as bemused by the concept of the mass audience as the producers were.

Every year more people went to the movies — or at least more money was taken in at the box office. No one bothered to ask whether the increased receipts represented higher prices or more tickets sold or in what proportion; no one asked whether any increase in attendance corresponded to the over-all increase in population or had any relation to the fatter take-home pay of the American worker. The age-level was rising: were the movies holding their share of the mature or were they living on the increment of about a million boys and girls of movie age per year? Eventually some of these questions were asked — and the answers were ignored because the answers totally annihilated the fixed illusion of the mass audience. The inescapable fact about the motion picture audience is that 65 per cent of it is under the age of 30. The merciless tale of the statistics continues: beginning at the age of 19, people begin to fall out of the habit of going to the movies; they still go, but less often; they pick and choose more carefully, acting in fact as adults, and this process of going less and less to the movies is never reversed. Audience Research, Inc., has estimated that if all the people between the ages of 31 and 60 should go to the movies only once a week, the box office receipts after taxes would rise by 800 million dollars a year, and this does not count those bet ween 19 and 30 who might be persuaded to go as frequently as they used to when thex were younger. It has cost Hollywood a lot of money to kill off its own audience.

For when all allowances are made for new interests and altered economic status, the fact still remains that the movies have not provided the kind of entertainment that the average adult feels he must have. The people who stay away from the movies are not a lunatic fringe of intellectuals: they are the people who used to go regularly, thex are average grownups no longer sa satisfied by the infantile myths of the names. In their astounding miscalculation of the audience, studio executives not only recognized no difference between children and adults: they thought of maturity as a purely intellectual quality. Neither the movie-makers nor their bankers are peculiarly sensitive to the varieties of human experience; they keep thinking of the mass man and seem not to know that regardless of intellectual level the texture of a man’s life is more intricately woven in the years when he is finding his place in the world, starting a family, going to war, buying a house. The same is true of a woman s life in that period.

Someone, an intellectual perhaps, accused the movies of being an escape mechanism. The movies were enchanted, they had a mission in life. It was decided that there is only one universal desire, to escape, and that escape is always in one direction. Like radio, but with far less justification, the movies spoke glowingly of their “variety": the Westerns, the comedies, the musicals, the mysteries; but the moment they touched new material they turned it into old, keeping it always in the mass zone of interest. So their dabblings in psychology came out as mystery-melodrama, all the biographical films were the story of Jack the Giant Killer, and their historical films could only be distinguished from the Westerns by the fact that “the hero signs his name with a feather.”

The movie equivalent of radio’s sustaining time is the B picture, but movie practice was different. No new ground was broken in the B’s — no experiments to engage the interests of groups outside the regular movie audience or to give that audience greater variety. Variation came when a studio rewarded a big money-maker by letting him make a picture without too much interference from the front office. Pictures like The Informer, The Lost Weekend, Treasure of Sierra Madre, and in recent years half a dozen exceptional British films proved that pictures satisfying to the adult mind are not necessarily the highroad to bankruptcy.

But audiences are not created by exceptions; they are created by people getting, with some regularity, what they want. The studio managers, aware that something was going wrong, took a characteristic step; they pre-tested their pictures, asking sample audiences to decide, in advance of production, between a happy and a tragic ending. The vote was in favor of the happy ending and the producers sat back and said, “See!” because high-brow critics had always implied that the tragic ending, as a sign of maturity, would not be offensive to a large section of the audience. The happy endings were continued and the audiences continued to dwindle, steadily, by age brackets. When the 75-million-dollar income from Britain was suddenly cut off, the industry went into an unmanly fit of protestation and scolding and threats. No one mentioned the fact that by concentrating on their imaginary mass audience, the movies had lost a net income four times as great in the United States alone.

3

WHAT we imagine, we create. Our great entertainment industries are creating before our eyes a cultural proletariat: the intellectually disinherited, the emotionally homeless, whose function is only to answer the telephone and say what program they are listening to. Mass media are not the only forces working toward that end, but they are the most powerful. Every imitative sterile picture or program, however “harmless,” enlarges the passive audience, brushes more and more stragglers into the central robot mass, and so “justifies” the next series. Movies and radio entrench themselves by creating the kind of audience they want, the audience which does not grow, makes no demands, is dumbly grateful — the ideal audience in a totalitarian nightmare.

If this process is to be stopped in time, our entertainments will have to accept the natural alternative to their concept of the mass audience. I have already suggested what this alternative is: we are a pluralistic society. Our entire history has made us so. We are not only a nation of many nations: we have as many climates as all of continental Europe, we are an economic and intellectual composite; our laws refuse the minority no right except the right to rule the majority; our minorities are many and so vigorous that it takes a world war to give us even the appearance of unity; we pioneer and go off center as often as we dig in; we are unruly and act badly when we are regimented.

Opposed to the mass picture of an enormous central group with minority fringes of people who are totally unlike the mass, the pluralistic picture is this: many large groups, many small ones, and individuals belonging to several major and several minor groups at the same time, so that the people in any minority group are in many vital ways the same as the people in the majority groups. We all live simultaneously in a dozen worlds and the happy ones are those whose worlds are integrated and harmonious. The economist, the psychologist, the vocational guide, the intelligence-tester, and a dozen other people can find categories into which we fit, but we move in and out of large and small groups freely so long as we do not become part of a mass, so long as we live in a free society which recognizes our attributes as human beings.

The mass-and-minority concept whittles the individual down to size, so that he can be fitted into one of half a dozen compartments. In practice this leads to the principle of “the ruling passion” and ends, in radio, with the abstraction of the Laughing Man. Networks cancel news broadcasts and juggle their programs around to get “three solid hours of laughs,” convinced that the Laughing Man will instantly turn to another station if you try to touch any other of his interests or concerns. It is known that he will laugh at the same thing at the same hour every week, that he will laugh at anything if he is told to laugh, and there is some proof, not yet conclusive, that he will laugh just as loudly at nothing at all. Corresponding to him is the Weeping Woman of the daytime serials. In between the day and night hours, a little time is found for the Shrieking Child. Television is developing its own abstraction (“Hiya, Sportlover!”) and in the movies, of course, everything is lumped into the one universal abstraction of People Escaping.

A special appreciative word should be said for the program type which in 1948 demonstrated the workings of the mass concept so perfectly that even the National Association of Broadcasters, usually so indulgent to success on the air, got frightened — the big “giveaway,” the program that asks nothing of you except that you answer the phone for a chance at a fortune. For the long pull it didn’t seem good to the NAB that Fred Allen should lose his audience to Stop the Music! As entertainment this program was a void; its music was mangled, there was nr) comedy, the handling of the contestants was awkward. People listened for a chance at the money and to enjoy the pains and pleasures of other people’s chances. The audience was not only paid for listening, it was paid to surrender all its individual qualities, all its interests, even its radio-induced habit of laughter; it was paid to stop asking for entertainment on the air. The giveaway has shown us how far in the creation of mass man radio can go.

The purpose of entertainment is to make people listen to the commercial; when entertainment has reduced the listener to a passive, noncritical state, the announcer moves in with his clubs or machine guns or soothing syrup and finishes the job. No matter what is said about program content, the commercial is sacred — it’s the sponsor’s private property. (I recall a network executive on the verge of hysterics because there was no way to stop the maddening reiteration of “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war.”)

So it is peculiarly appropriate that a commercial announcement should demonstrate, beyond all question, the fallacy of the mass concept. Man-in-themass must be hammered and howled at; the name of the produel must be repeated ten times, and spelled out, and surrounded by adjectives in triplicate; there is no room for candor or simple communication when you come to sell the product to mass man.

For the past two years a program has been on the air which carries the following identification: “The Goodyear Lire and Rubber Company presents . . .” The people who hear this program remember it, they connect the program with the product, they say they are influenced by the program to buy the product, not by the commercial, because there is none; and the audience response is from 20 to 50 per cent better than it is for programs using the technique of repetition. The program is The Greatest Story Ever Told, a scrupulous presentation of Christ’s teachings; it impresses people by its contenl and method and its difference from other programs. It sells tires without ever praising a tire or asking the listener to buy one.

Reason totters at the suspicion that the sponsor may be wrong about the audience. That is sheer heresy.

4

WITHIN the range of their dominant ideas, both the movies and radio have made money and produced admirable entertainments. Obviously I am not preparing a balance sheet of the good and the bad and I am omitting the profoundly important question of the communications function of these media. I am concerned here only with one major explanation of the weakness and inadequacy which critical people too hastily ascribe to “commercialism.” To make my own position perfectly clear, I would add that I think the standard product of radio and the movies is generally underrated by intellectual critics; and, on the other hand, no roster of exceptions can excuse what is socially deplorable in the average product. I believe that the error of thinking which produces an enormous quantity of insipid works can be corrected within the framework of ordinary profit-making, and that when this correction has been made, audiences can be created to take the place of those that are deserting; I believe that with a proper concept of the audience new areas will be open to inventiveness and enterprise; and finally that we dare not wait too long for the machinery which is creating mass men to reverse itself.

The hope of profit is most important because the sponsors can take prompt and effective steps to vary the program structure of radio and no one but the managers can do anything about the movies. There isn’t actually time for experiments from the outside; and outsiders might try to turn radio and the movies into high-brow art which they should never be. What needs to be done in the movies is relatively simple: make pictures for grownups. This does not mean, as Hollywood pretends, grim, slowpaced European films. The mature mind takes satisfaction in comedy, too, and in farce. The one thing adults require is as easy to recognize and as hard to define as the smile of a friend. It is the sense that something real is happening— as real as Alice in Wonderland or Show Boat or Hamlet; it is also the sense that something real is being said about human beings — as the Marx brothers say it in A Night at the Opera or Robinson Jeffers in Medea.

In radio, the brief experience with television while alarming is not decisive; its lesson is, however, reinforced by radio’s earlier figures: there has always been a large non-listening group. About half of the women who listen to radio do not care for daytime serials; there are vast numbers of both men and women who listen for brief periods, selectively, without the radio habit; there are even off nights, when the total listening audience is known to be small. Everything indicates the existence of potential audiences, not yet touched; and the early experience of radio, with its sustaining programs, suggests that these non-listeners are waiting only to be interested. They are, moreover, not the people who will be seduced away from radio by the meager fare television is now providing.

For nearly a generation sponsors have been in competition for the mass audience, badgering the same people with the same kind of commercials, selling the same goods. Now they see that audience drifting away and can stop to think that 20 per cent of an audience that doesn’t listen habitually might be far more profitable than a dwindling 10 per cent of the audience that does.

As for material, every program director in the business has a dozen projects he cannot get on the air so long as he has to aim for a section of the mass audience. Many of these are variations in the documentary style and some are imitations of the Third Program of the BBC, which is intentionally highbrow. There is little place in American commercial radio for programs which deliberately invite the audience not to listen, nor would they be particularly useful in solving the present problem, which is to create multiple, overlapping audiences of considerable dimensions. For this sponsors and broadcasters must coöperate.

We can ask the sponsors to end the constant iteration of one joke per comedian per year; to vary the range and improve the technique of dramatic programs; to restore the candor and simplicity of audience participation; to revamp the entire racket of guest appearance; to begin the slow process of salvaging what’s good in the daytime serial; and, most important, to bring the accent of truth into the speech of radio. The networks which have recently threatened to throw out certain sponsored programs if their ratings failed to improve should surely demand a little improvement in quality also. There is no proof that this would reduce the appeal of a program.

For the networks, the problem is complex. If they want to improve the structure of the audience, they can do it by creating programs for sponsors which will attract new audiences, and programs for new audiences which, after a longer interval, will attract sponsors. There is little point in the networks looking for new ways to attract the audience the sponsor already has. That audience should have a chance to hear programs intellectually and emotionally more varied than those now offered; and such programs cannot be tried out if the objective is immediate sale to a sponsor. Nor can they make their way if they are presented only on special occasions, for prestige; they have to be offered regularly, at attractive hours, over a fairly long period of time, to find their audience.

It is inevitable that the documentary will be incorporated into the commercial program structure, and here the duty of the network is plain: to develop and set standards for this form, broadening the audience that cares for it, so that it will not be debauched when a sponsor takes it over. Another job for pioneers is to develop new ways of handling fiction, since radio drama has sunk into formulas and sound-effects. Still another is to bring confidently to the listener the materials now hidden in edudcational programs.

In these and dozens of other ways portions of the mass will be attracted to new things; the mass will break up and reassemble into many shifting groups; it will no longer be a mass. And this is of course the most important result of all. The fragmentation of the mass can only be accomplished by radio and the movies; if they do it, they will not only save themselves but all of us as well. For where there is no mass, there is no danger of a master.