"Soundmirror" is the fourth half-hour segment in "New Sounds." "Sounds of Yesterday" presents stories, readings, and voices that make the past come alive. Materials used have included a debate over the struggle between government and business recorded in the thirties between Harold Ickes and General Hugh Johnson; auto-racer Barney Oldfield; singer Florence Foster Jenkins; the first Edison recording; famous sporting events; Elsie Janis, sweetheart of the AEF; vaudeville star Bert Williams; Jonas Salk on the polio victory; F. D. Roosevelt's prayer for G.I.'s on D-Day, 1944; and the Pearl Harbor announcement interrupting a pro football game.
"Sounds of Today," a ten-minute segment, has featured tapes from Unit 99, Sacramento police; a uranium prospector; a football team in the huddle and on the line; voodoo from Haiti; sounds of workmen building the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel. "Sounds of No Importance" is a showcase for aural humor: the sound of manhole covers, hanging up clothes, knocking on doors, eating breakfast, a moth in a gray flannel suit, ash cans, goat talk, an aspirin going to work, a city at night, cracking nuts, and similar esoterica. "Soundmirror" closes with "Soundings," short editorial-page features.
Phone calls and letters from listeners are solicited and featured. The producers are anxious to expand this feedback potential, making the entire series closer to the conscious desires of the audience. It is this consideration of the audience's actual interests that strikes a freshening note in radio's new sound. For radio can thereby deepen awareness rather than supply substitutes for it.
"Offbeat" is the fifth and final half hour. It begins with a five-minute comedy sketch "Humor." "Focus on the Future," a ten-minute segment, has featured Willy Ley on such topics as satellites, monorails, and rockets; James P. Mitchell on the Guaranteed Annual Wage; an expert on Nostradamus; a report on nuclear energy from Westinghouse laboratories; the future of mobile homes; Duke University's studies in extrasensory perception; Robert Moses on city planning. "Soloscope," also ten minutes, completes the program with readings from literature. Ogden Nash reading his verse and Basil Rathbone doing "The Raven" may be taken as examples.
A.B.C.'s format attempts to retain "Monitor" 's excitement and yet appeal to radio's established listening habits-based on regular features, regularly scheduled. The short "easy listening" segments appeal to a great variety of interests; the producers are attempting to broadcast a radio Readers Digest.
It is easy to criticize this show on the same grounds that literary people have criticized its digest-magazine prototype: canned thought or Pablumized ideas is not thought at all. Yet there may be a lack of realism to this kind of cultural snobbery. Factory and office workers and housewives submit to various deadening routines to make possible the advantages of a technological society. Their psychic energies are drained by their jobs.
A certain capitulation to their lower standards of self-awareness seems compatible with an expanding culture. And critics who object to an "entertainment culture" sometimes forget that such random amusements are probably a necessary corollary of the frustrating roles inherent in technological processes. "New Sounds for You" brings the listener into frequent if not exalted contact with reality. If his news is sensationalized, at least he is made aware of the human community. If he is exposed to inconsequential nonsense, he is also exposed to useful and inspiring messages on other parts of the program. "New Sounds" has all the limitations and advantages of the magazine it has set out to emulate.
The next entrant in the battle of the broadcast magazines is N.B.C.'s "Weekday." Starting early in November, 1955, it has tried to bring "everything that is essential and much of what is interesting to the American woman." Conceived of as companion and counselor to the American housewife, "Weekday" doles out information, news, service, and entertainment. A staff of thirty backs the host-hostess teams of Margaret Truman and Mike Wallace, and Martha Scott and Walter Kiernan. Although the title "Weekday" has been applied to N.B.C. programing between 10:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M., Mondays through Fridays, distinctively new material appears only from 10: 15 to 1 1:45 and from 1 2:oo to 3:00.
Staples include a "Star of the Day" whose records are frequently played and who answers generally intelligent questions about his personal life. Gordon MacRae, Peggy Lee, Vaughan Monroe, Walter Schuman, and Debbie Reynolds were one week's stars. Food consultant Charlotte Adams gives frequent reports. There are two man-and-wife comedy teams, Ted and Rhoda Brown and Jane and Goodman Ace. "Guests of the Day," during a typical week, have included Sol Hurok, Jean Pierre Aumont, Dr. James T. Shotwell, dress designer Ceil Chapman, and Gertrude Berg. Guest editors from affiliate stations discuss their specialties.
Shirley Thomas conducts a sensitive interview from a Hollywood set each day. "College at Home" presents lectures by university authorities-Dr. Ashley Montagu was the first-on topics like "The Nature of Human Nature," an anthropological approach to child rearing. Meredith Willson explains long-haired music, with perhaps more condescension than is necessary in "Music Room."
Two days a week, Margaret Truman discusses opera and other serious music that she personally likes. Each day, there is a short story (Steinbeck and Hawthorne have vied with slick-magazine fiction), a serialized dramatization of a best seller, and dramatic readings-Cornelia Otis Skinner reading from Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea was the first. There are numerous lectures by experts on topics of interest and importance to homemakers.
"Weekday" is the most literate and promising of the broadcast magazines. Look at the people it has brought to the attention of the housewife within its first month of operation: Chester Bowles, Louis Bromfield, Orson Welles, Patrice Munsel, Harry Belafonte, Morris Ernst, Ilka Chase, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Anderson, T. H. Robsjohn Gibbings, Bruce Catton, Carl Sandburg, Norman Cousins, Eleanor Roosevelt, Julie Harris, George Ballanchine, Benjamin Fine, and Cameron Hawley.
This is a mere sampling of the imaginative package that N.B.C. presents daily for the enlightening entertainment of the American woman. This picture window on pertinent reality provided by "Weekday" is one of the most hopeful signs that mass culture is approaching maturity. In a very substantial way, "Weekday" provides a format for mass enlightenment that may be able to make up for many of the weaknesses of formal education in the last thirty years. To fully understand the long-range implications of radio's new programing, it is helpful to examine its ideological background-the imaginative philosophy of industrial statesmanship of Sylvester L. Weaver, now Chairman of the Board at N.B.C.
A general analysis of radio's new sound should begin with a consideration of the "magazine" concept as elaborated by Weaver. Clearly, the new forms are audio translations of N.B.C.'s television programs "Today," "Home," and "Tonight." First of all, in a magazine-type broadcast, it is possible to mix levels of taste in the material presented-something for everyone, in the Life tradition of photojournalism. And just as in one issue of that magazine, one may see "horror" photos as well as a brilliant color essay on a phase of American art history, so on "Today" one may hear a literate discussion with drama critic Walter Kerr followed by J. Fred Mugg's simian antics. On "Home," Theodore Rousseau of the Metropolitan Museum has given a ten-day course in the great masterpieces to a TV audience assembled by appeals generally less Olympian than art history.
It may be that in the multilevel magazine we have one of the most distinctive instruments of enlightenment in a cultural democracy. The difference between this conscious mixing of degrees of complexity in programing on N.B.C.'s "Home," "Today," and "Tonight" and the stratified strategy of the N.B.C.'s "Home" and "Tonight" and the B.B.C.'s "Third Programme" is clear. On the former, less sophisticated people are constantly sampling excellence of a level within upward reach; on the latter, graded audiences are hermetically sealed off from each other. There seems little doubt which system has a greater potential for bringing self-awareness to the masses.
Continuing the magazine analogy, just as one leafs through Life, looking closely at some things, cursorily at others, scarcely at all at still others, so a listener dialed to "Monitor" psychologically tunes out, by degrees, program material not compelling to him. This psychological tuning out probably works in different ways for all segments of the audience. A highbrow might conceivably hear only jazz, hard news, and Bob and Ray. A middle-brow might tune in only movie profiles and Broadway stage inter-views. A lowbrow could choose to attend to only the Saturday afternoon football games and Hit Parade tunes. There is flexibility of appeal, therefore, and-important at least to educators-the likelihood of relaxed exposure to cultural patterns of a level higher than those presently accepted.
Because advertisers do not sponsor a whole show but merely "participate" (for large or small amounts, for a long or a short time), editorial control remains with the networks in the magazine programs. When a network operates within an imaginative frame of reference, there is then the possibility of establishing several electronic magazines which appeal to the actual needs and desires of general or special audiences. "Monitor," for example, is a kind of entertainment magazine, like Cue; "Weekday," a combination of Ladies Home Journal and a supermarket slick; "Today," a cross between Time and Life; "Home," the video archetype for "Weekday" and thus analogous to similar magazines; "Tonight," an Esquire wired for jazz.
Weaver's "Wide, Wide World" also partakes of the magazine format, but might also be compared to Steichen's photo exhibition "Family of Man," particularly in its paperback form. It mixes levels of taste in a remarkable way: for example, in "American Rhapsody" there were live shots of folk music in North Carolina; of a lonely mine inspector singing; New Orleans stevedores, a jazz night club, and a marching funeral band; popular idol Frank Sinatra from The Sands, Las Vegas; a touching sequence of deaf children learning to sing in Baltimore, Maryland.
In this perfectly natural context, there appeared a profile on the National Ballet of Canada, rehearsing their production of the Nutcracker Suite. It would be interesting to know for how many people this sequence was a natural introduction to ballet, enticing them, perhaps, to become one of the 30,000,000 viewers of a full-length television production of Sleeping Beauty by Sadler's Wells Company, seen shortly thereafter on N.B.C. "Wide, Wide World" is really Walt Whitman with coaxial cables. The program is occasionally overdone; frequently, moving; in rare (and more frequent) moments, superb-just as is Whitman.
Yet the proponents of book culture are seldom impressed by the magazine (printed or broadcast) as an instrument of self-awareness and upward cultural mobility. The number of book stores in a country is still their index of vitality. Ephemeral media are suspect as sources of enlightenment. This aesthetic snobbery helps explain the polarity of opinion about Weaver. Intellectuals and critics generally regard him as a mountebank. They tend to take his pronouncements as seriously as they took his wartime campaign to send Lucky Strike's green to war.
They find him pretentious, as when novelist John O'Hara twitted Weaver in Collier's for using the polysyllabic "communicator" to refer to a plain, old radio announcer. His prose style has sustained more jibes than the late John Dewey's; and it is a rather incomprehensible jargon for a Dartmouth Phi Beta Kappa. As for his Olympian communiques, critics usually sigh and point to the fact that there are still many mediocre programs on his network, and he's been president for several years, hasn't he? He is, they insist, the humanist huckster, the Madison Avenue boy with a cerebral ulcer, a fast talker who has joined the Book Find Club.
On the other hand, people who work under him have quite another opinion. They refer fondly to his willingness to go personally to hesitant advertisers to help settle contracts for major cultural programs. They say that since he took over at N.B.C. the mediocre man is at the same disadvantage that a creative person heretofore was. The odds have been reversed. The question of censorship has ascended from a mechanical scrutiny aimed at keeping pressure groups at bay to a calculated willingness to take chances on mature situations-if they are justified aesthetically.
It is this changed climate of belief about the possibilities of broad-casting that makes Weaver such an important cultural phenomenon. For a century and a half, American culture has steered gingerly between the Scylla of gentility and the Charybdis of "I know what I like" lowbrowism. Now, an executive says and seems to show that culture and commerce are not incompatible. It is this break through the barrier of American self-consciousness about the "finer things" that makes Weaver's career of more than individual significance.
Indeed, Weaver's first principles as they apply to radio, television, and the general society demand scholarly examination and amplification. Is his responsibility report the sort of thing Lyman Bryson asks for when he says that when engineers break stable cultural patterns with technology they have the moral responsibility of reestablishing significant patterns? Do we not witness the effects of avoided responsibility in industrial design, urban planning, and architecture?
Is not Weaver implying with his responsibility report that industries must develop a mature consumer-one whose needs are satisfied and considered as on "Weekday" and on "Home"? And does this not lead to the belief that technology must justify itself not by keeping factories moving and studios broadcasting but by fulfilling human potentials and gearing its operations to know needs as Frances Horwich consciously does for children in "Ding Dong School"? We witness, perhaps, in Weaver a coming of age in American industrial leadership, in which our goal becomes a humane rather than a merely healthy economy.
This sociological dimension of radio-TV criticism is important and, unfortunately, almost nonexistent; but it does not exhaust opportunities for the creative critic. On the aesthetic level, many questions arise. Can radio's new direction-substituting the ex-citement and interest of reality for the soporific of soap opera and witless chatter-be encouraged by formal educational institutions? How can the book publishers' councils and library organizations use the dramatized best sellers and dramatic readings on "Weekday" to stimulate mere reading among housewives?
Weaver claims that "light" viewers attracted to a quality spectacular on TV are better buys for advertisers and should count more than "heavy" viewers. Could radio become a haven for such light viewers, attracted because of the continuous appearance of elite material? In this way, radio might actually become a catalyst in network broadcasting, establishing a tension with TV that would take the average programing of both to ever higher levels. Exposure to excellence on radio might swell audiences for TV's cultural events, as in an interview with Sol Hurok on "Weekday," the afternoon before he presented Sadler's Wells on TV.
Perhaps the greatest responsibilities fall on the secondary school where tomorrow's subscribers to electronic magazines are finishing their formal education. Here, a literate criticism of the media is most needed. And one is struck at this point by a major paradox. Gilbert Seldes has argued that the masses are often ahead of the media; here, certainly, the media are ahead of the educators and intellectuals. The program material on "Weekday" and "Home" makes infinitely more sense in the areas covered than many secondary school curricula. Seriously, what we fail to do in school, these programs are doing brilliantly.
Respect for contemporary art? What school gives students the respect for the complexity of the film form that Shirley Thomas does in her Hollywood interviews on "Weekday"? Who hears in the public schools of Frank Lloyd Wright or Robert Moses or Harry Belafonte or Henry Dreyfuss? "Weekday" and "Home" show more concern for contemporary creativity than do the schools. What is involved here is a major strategy for the humanities and social sciences in mass education. Marshall McLuhan has urged the creation of the "classroom without walls" that would prepare media patrons to handle modern instruments of communication with sophistication.
It seems that the magazine concept in broadcasting has anticipated this responsibility of the school by instituting the "kitchen without walls" or, to use the actual name of a "Weekday" segment, a "College at Home." Should not the school develop curricula that allow children to scrutinize and discuss systematically the best that is being said and done on the media and in the general culture? A viable criticism of mass communication ought to begin in mass education, the only mass medium relatively free from commercial and deadline pressures.
The colleges have two great opportunities in the educational broadcasting inaugurated by the magazine concept. First, there is the need for creating a sense of professional pride, a tradition of responsibility in broadcasting; such a tradition is our best guarantee of excellence. This is what Weaver is trying to do with terms like "communicator" and his theories of a common man elite. That he should be lampooned for his attempts is pathetic. The new college-level programs in communication arts ought to have as a major responsibility the creation of a tradition of responsibility in commercial broadcasting. In this way, the colleges will continuously send groups of fresh recruits to secure the beachheads of maturity established in commercial broadcasting by the magazine concept and other enlightened programs of mass entertainment.
The second great opportunity is for the scholars themselves. The appearance of people of the stature of Reinhold Niebuhr and Margaret Mead on A.B.C.'s "New Sounds for You" and Ashley Montagu on "Home" and "Weekday" promises an entirely unforeseen context for educational broadcasting. This precedent could be extended to establish the larger showcase for the nation's most creative lecturers proposed by Max Wylie in Clear Channels. One hopes that our creative people will seek out the new dimensions that the magazine concept brings to mass education.
What, finally, are the opportunities that the magazine concept-broadcasting's new contact point with reality-provides the professional critic? Will the more spectacular and thus more anecdotal programs monopolize the columns of the critics? Will glamorous TV force her dowdier older sister right out of serious discussion? How carefully will the critics examine the possibilities of TV and radio's vast new classrooms-the various electronic magazines? There has been a great deal of discussion recently of the adequacy of present criticism of the media. Perhaps a foundation will underwrite a conference at which educators, broadcasters, and critics can discuss the possibilities of critical collaboration in encouraging excellence on the networks.
For the emergence of the magazine concept on both TV and radio is a sign of a new maturity at the networks that could be lost if audiences do not materialize for this kind of programing.* Radio's new sound particularly affords educators and critics a chance to make up for the mistakes and sins of omission that have characterized the last generation's approach to commercial broadcasting. If the radio networks languish, it will be a serious loss for American culture. Remarkable new programs like "Biography in Sound" attest to the undiminished creative potential of network producers.
Somehow, the energies of mass education, from secondary school through professional courses in graduate training, should rally to salvage the benefits of network radio. That commercial broadcasters have turned to the best as a last resort is not important; at least, they have partially committed themselves, in desperation it is true, to the real needs of the radio audience. In that, they have given us a basis for cooperation. The future of network radio may well be determined by the kind of criticism educators and journalists provide it in the next few years.
* Since this article was written, A.B.C.'s "New Sounds for You" died in April, 1956, of chronic lack of sponsorship. "Mysterytime" and popular music shows are replacing the series that impressed critics but not advertisers.
Source: The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Summer, 1956), pp. 416- 432 Published by: University of California Press
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