Fifty Golden Years of Broadcasting...

Radio and television broadcasting is cheap-jack today, it was yesterday, and so it will probably remain. Its history is pockmarked with compromise, indecision, and capitulation before the law of the fast buck. If Erik Barnouw's three-volume history proves anything, it is that when responsibility for "the public interest" is borne by privately-motivated individuals, the public only gets the product that promises the easy profit.

The days of early wireless and radio were murky ones, and romantic ones, filled with enthusiasts trying to send a message through the dark. But it was World War I which made broadcast radio possible and salable, by consolidating electronics companies and freezing patent feuds. After the war, RCA wrested American Marconi from its British parents, exercised patent controls, and became, in effect, a commercial monopoly. Closed out of the RCA lode, Westinghouse established the first regular broadcast station, Pittsburgh's KDKA, and marketed the single-unit radio receiver it had developed for the army. Thus was a consumer market opened for radio equipment, and a listening audience for broadcasting.

With KDKA setting an example, Secretary of Commerce Hoover was deluged by requests for broadcast licenses; what those licenses warranted was not yet considered. Hoover's responses effectively favored the companies able to afford powerful facilities. Stations owned by AT & T and RCA nudged smaller groups out of competition.

There was not any direct revenue to be gathered. Broadcasters operated on a shoestring--the medium was not expected to pay for itself, but to increase equipment sales. When the AT & T chain tried to institute a time-toll system of broadcasting (more out of laziness than greed), it was left with empty air-time: advertisers had neither the knowledge or studios to produce their own programs. In fact, the British broadcasting plan, by which a tax on radio equipment provided a broadcasting fund, was seriously debated for American broadcasting through the spring of 1923. Because of hostilities between radio corporations, such a co-operative plan proved impossible. Only the AT & T commercial toll offered a method by which radio stations could independently finance themselves, and, indeed, accrue profit. Two years later, advertising agencies paid performers high salaries, broadcasting was a national institution, and wavelength competition was cut-throat. Says Barnouw: "The crisis atmosphere...engulfed radio broadcasting in the mid-1920's. (It stemmed from) small v. powerful stations; patent allies v. competitors; patent allies v. antimonopolists; telephone v. manufacturing groups; copyright owners v. users; educational v. commercial interests; political ins v. outs."

Out of this cluster of contradictions came the 'final' solution: all stations paid AT & T a license fee for use of "telegraphic" wires. AT & T sold its stations, receiving the right to manufacture radio equipment on a limited basis, while RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse formed the NBC radio system, which operated two networks and dominated its field for years. By these actions, antitrust laws were circumvented; networks being new entities altogether, the danger of eventual broadcast monopoly was ignored.

Moneymen looked forward to a rosy future. In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress merely demanded that the United States would have ultimate control over all channels, and that licenses would be granted according to the standard of "public interest, convenience, or necessity." There would be no censorship, and no provision for guaranteed educational airtime or wavelengths. The Coolidge era was hitting its final swing, with advertising its new religion; Bruce Barton wrote of Jesus as the "founder of modern business." Gradually, "public service" ballyhoo was revealed as lip-service to informed opinion. Even sentimental traditions faltered; the "Silent Night" which allowed listeners to hear famous distant stations without local interference; uninterrupted nighttime broadcasting; flexible coverage of news events.

The Federal Radio Commission administered over this congealing mess, and took steps towards upgrading broadcast material and goals. In 1928 it requested 164 stations to present a case for their continued existence. Unfortunately, pending cases produced massive political pressure by those Congressmen who made agreements with the defendants and those who made money from station advertising. Barnouw quotes a 1935 Harvard Business Review summary of the FRC's career: "...while talking in terms of the public interest, convenience and necessity the commission actually chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters." Thus was the status quo preserved. Long commercial breaks between individual programs became commonplace. By 1932, prices were stated openly--the last bit of marketplace reticence was broken. When Senate protests resulted, the FRC stated that advertising could in no way be restricted without detriment to program service.

It is not ironic that radio should have prospered so wildly in Depression years. The big companies which bought network advertising had much to gain by announcing that they'd weathered the storm; the advertising industry itself boomed resultingly; and there was little that seemed more necessary to the psyche of a broken nation than the lowest-common-denominator lulling of clowning, crooning hucksters, and the calming assurances of presidents.

Radio's strength as commodity and service was left unfettered. It was looked on as a defender of private business interests, and only extreme New Dealers dared attack it. An early FDA bill calling for identification of product contents during commercial breaks was killed because of the fear of lost advertising revenue. Radio-style advertising became recognized as a determinant of public opinion; when Upton Sinclair threatened to ride into the California governorship with his wealth-sharing EPIC plan, Albert Lasker, first NBC advertising counsel, was called to Hollywood to aid in his defeat. It was no surprise, then, that the Wagner-Hatfield proposal, which called for guaranteed educational control of 25 per cent of the radio spectrum, received little support when it came up before the Roosevelt-formed Federal Communications Commission (which expanded the old FRC's power so that it regulated all broadcasting communications systems).

More practical aids to good broadcasting were instituted under Roosevelt's administrations, however, than at any other point in history. The first FCC board boasted an old Bullmooser, George Henry Payne, and did insist on reviewing past station performance when renewing station licenses, even if the task was (and is) too difficult for a single committee. Such quacks as Dr. Brinkley, the animal glands peddler who could have been the governor of Kansas, received justified revocations.

Otherwise, the power of the network grew as the Depression lengthened and private stations died. CBS president William Paley hit on the idea of offering his network's participant stations free unsponsored programs in exchange for the right to broadcast sponsored network series at any time he wished. Paley could sell national advertising spots without clearance fears; although this led to the domination of a large part of the broadcasting schedule by powerful commercial interests, it also afforded a great opportunity for original programming in the unsponsored time zones--allowing the off-beat a coast-to-coast audience. It is then that the network news departments were established (curtailing previous agreements with press services), along with the "distinguished" tradition of radio poetry readings, kitchen sink dramas, vaudevillian "special events," and Meet-the-Press-type panel shows.

The World War II era became the "Golden Age" of radio. Radio news units were given free range. Advertisers with nothing to sell to the public provided programs merely to keep their name in good standing. And James Laurence Fly became the FCC's first fighting chairman. He initiated reform of horizontally expanding networks; he established a precedent by which station owners at license renewal time would have to face a hearing and competitive bidding; and he compared the National Association of Broadcasters to "dead mackerel in the moonlight...it both shines and stinks." Not intimidated by politicians, Fly also resisted pressure from the Dies HUAC, which claimed that two FCC underlings had been associated with Communist front organizations.

When Fly left the Commission, the period of reform ended. The FCC produced a Report on Chain Broadcasting, acknowledged by most critics to be an effective guide to broadcasting, but its final effect was nil. Its definitions of "public interest" programming were read by each station according to its own proclivities; so were its commercial vs. "sustaining" program regulations. Barnouw finds this ritual the classic cycle of attempts to alter programming. The FCC "power move" caused counteracting Congressional "power moves": "speeches of protest: demand for investigations; resolutions; proposed amendments to the Communications Act." Little came of FCC action, except when a commissioner's interests were the same as a manufacturer's. When RCA developed a color set it claimed compatible with its black-and-white TV sets, it was quickly accepted over a CBS color method which was purportedly superior. In October of 1947, Charles Denny, who had presided over the pro-RCA hearings, became NBC vice-president and general counsel.

FCC Chairman Fly compared the NAB To "dead mackerel in the moonlight...it both shines and stinks."

Television did not even have radio's early period of individual adventure. It was born full-grown from the head of NBC chief David Sarnoff, with commercial radio's soiled silver spoon firmly embedded in its mouth. It didn't take long to develop I Love Lucy, My Little Margie, and Ed Sullivan's Talk of the Town, In various facsimilies, they're still being aired.

The most frightening segment of Barnouw's entire history, however, comes not in the "muddling through" decades of industrial machination and government ignorance, but in the instances where broadcasting is used as an aid to empire. In the final volume of his history, Barnouw states that most of these instances were accidental. But the history of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty shows the conscious U.S. reliance on radio to further counter-revolutionary ends.

The Voice of America was an outgrowth of the international broadcasting systems built during World War II. Transferred after the war to the new United States Information Agency, the VOA was used to help fight Cold War ideological battles. Since Russian transmitters jammed the VOA broadcasts, the VOA transmitted on the 'enemy' country's own domestic bands, and in Russian. The VOA programming was increasingly inflammatory, causing the Soviet Union to cite a 1936 Geneva resolution against broadcasts which "incite the population of any territory to acts incompatible with internal order." In addition, the USIA transgressed against the Copenhagen Convention of 1948 by transmitting on a frequency assigned to Moscow at twice the wattage of the Russian transmitter.

More elusive to consideration are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Although ostensibly private organizations, they have received considerable financial and editorial aid from the CIA (which is, of course, "empowered to undertake unspecified activities abroad," and does). Radio Free Europe is manned by embittered anticommunist intellectuals from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and broadcasts from Munich, but its handbook states that it "cannot take a line contrary to United States Government policy or to the beliefs of the United States and American institutions." Radio Liberty (formerly Radio Liberation) is designed to foment anti-Soviet aggression wherever socialist take-over beckons. Both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty played notable parts in convincing the people of Hungary that a United States invasion in 1956 was imminent. On November 4, the following quotation from The Observer was broadcast: "If the Soviet troops attack Hungary...and Hungarians hold out for three or four days, then the pressure upon the government of the United States to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistible...." But four days later, all that Hungary heard was a feeble: "Do not give up your arms."

The VOA, Radio Free Europe and radio Liberty are not the only flagrant U.S. broadcasting propagandist networks. They are only the most successful ones. Radio Free Asia failed because there were not enough anti-Maoists, and no one in Southeast Asia could conceive that a network of that title could possibly support the French against the Viet Minh. Radio Swan aided in the launching of such Latin American escapades as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The two threads of domestic commercialism and foreign domination are evaluated in Barnouw's "Reckoning." For the former, he quotes Leo Rosten "it seems self-evident that to strain the milk of life through the cheesecloth of advertising must curdle creativity and--more ominously--contaminate truth." For the latter, he states: "The notion that America needs an assortment of...false faces for different purposes is a cold-war heritage that could be usefully abandoned...(also) it has involved large investments of public funds in broadcasting ventures...It is significant that countries which have become important bases for American propaganda transmitters include Portugal, for Radio Free Europe; Spain and Taiwan, for Radio Liberty. In each case, the right to erect our transmitters has been part of a complex relationship involving military aid..."

There are flaws in Barnouw's massive work. The author is clearly not as comfortable in dealing with the literary value of entertainment broadcasts, or with aesthetic endeavor in general; his eulogies of Norman Corwin, Archibald MacLeish and Paddy Chayefsky are embarassing, though they might not have been so if he'd have honed cleanly to a sociological viewpoint. His large chunks of political history often show an unsubstantiated leftist bias, particularly in his coverage of World War II political tensions.

But these are minor points beside the great chain of events Barnouw has for the first time bound together for us. A Tower in Babel. The Golden Web, and The Image Empire should be read by anyone interested in the people's right to information in a democratic society. If the work is lengthy, detailed and at times unevenly, written, it never falls into the traps of dreary academicism. And if Barnouw is sometimes seduced by mere sentiment, the fervor he expresses and the anger he provokes are preferable to most intellectuals' disdain of broadcasting's industrial workings, programming sins and occasional newsworthy virtues