Education: Bringing Up Radio

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Ballyhoo. A Scotsman, a onetime engineer who was in charge of Britain's munitions for two years during the War is Sir John Charles Walsham Reith. He was a featured guest at the meeting, for since 1927 he has been director-general of British Broadcasting Corp. He was knighted in 1927 for his able management of this government monopoly which permits no radio advertising and gives British radioauditors not what they want but "what they ought to have."* Sir John arrived at the New School just in time to tell the meeting that the U.S. system of competition among broadcasters "is preventing you from getting full value out of your key men." Recommending Britain's rigidly uncommercial programs, he added: "I submit that there is a risk of educational ballyhoo as well as of commercial ballyhoo. It is not so vulgar; it is less aggressive, different in form, quite different in motive; but is it not more or less the same fundamentally—an assertion that this labeled brand of soap is the only soap? It has been discovered that this is not the way to sell goods to a radio audience. . . . Ballyhoo . . . violates the first principles of showmanship and presentation."

Musical Toy Stage. Ray Lyman Wilbur, U. S. Secretary of the Interior who appointed a committee a year ago to investigate education by radio, disagreed with B. B. C.'s Director Reith. He said radio has "brought about ways in which the public can be entertained and also instructed which probably never would have evolved from the heads of the very best-intentioned government officials. . . . Time will de-jazz the radio and make it more literate and substantial. The musical toy stage of the radio has about passed."

Colossal Mismanagement. Said Joy Elmer Morgan, chairman of Secretary Wilbur's radio education committee and editor of the Journal of the National Education Association: "There has not been in the entire history of the United States an example of mismanagement and lack of vision so colossal and far-reaching in its consequences as our turning of the radio channels almost exclusively into commercial hands." Since, he said, both radio and cinema portray "the trivial, the sensual, the jazzy . . . we are in vastly greater danger as a people from New Yorkism than from Communism."†

Advertising. General Charles McKinley Saltzman, chairman of the Federal Radio Commission, said that the Commission was helpless, under the Radio Act of 1927 which permits no governmental censorship of radio programs, to stem the tide of "excessive and nauseating advertising." Though British listeners hear no advertising, they must pay a government license tax. There is small doubt that the 15,000,000 U. S. owners much prefer a "sponsored program—a genteel, ladylike term for radio advertising," to a broadcasting tax.