Radio: Listeners, Arise!

In the current issue of the intellectual, small-circulation BBC Quarterly, British readers got an educator's low-down on a big, unmannerly U.S. industry. In an article called "The State of American Radio," Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago told the British, whose radio is noncommercial, how the U.S. system works: "The advertiser must sell goods to stay in business. The network and station manager must sell time to stay in business. The advertising agency must present programs that sell goods to stay in business. All these people have managed to stay in business, but American radio is a disgrace."

Television, which "has adversely affected conversation, reading and the public taste," will complete the ruin, thinks Hutchins. "The one good thing that radio has given America is a great deal of fine music. This seems fated to diminish as television spreads."

But what chiefly upset Educator Hutchins was a radioman's suggestion that the low U.S. cultural level, if it is low, is primarily the fault of educators. Wrote Hutchins: "Even a perfect educational system would have a hard time setting up an effective cultural opposition to the storm of trash and propaganda that now beats upon the American from birth . . . Comic books and Betty Grable, the Lone Ranger and Milton Berle are the diet of our children." The only hope, Hutchins thinks, is subscription radio or heavily endowed university networks—neither of which seems likely. His gloomy conclusion: "We can expect no improvement until the day the American people rise up and hurl their radio sets into the streets. But that day will probably never come; we have got so we need the noise."