The most important inventions for the 20th century may well turn out to be, not the automobile and the atom bomb, but the moving picture and the radio. Few would deny that the printing press affected mankind even more than the steam engine, and the cases are parallel. For the first time since Gutenberg we have new mechanical devices whose effect upon the intellectual and emotional lives of the entire population is direct rather than indirect. Four centuries have not been sufficient to make the printed page as popular as the screen and the loudspeaker became in one generation. At this moment books are as important to only an almost negligible proportion of the population as the movies and the radio are to the great majority.
Not everyone thought the printing press likely to be a blessing. No longer than a century and a half ago there were educated and responsible persons who believed that universal literacy inevitably spelled disaster. Moreover, there will certainly be those today who will say that, fundamentally, those to whom the movies and the radio appear as threats are motivated by the same “fear of the people” which inspired the opponents of popular literacy. If the cases of the radio and the printing press are parallel, why, they will ask, may not the supposed problems solve themselves in the same happy ways? Every attempt to regulate printing was ill advised; every complaint about the “trash” which got printed was, in the long run, unimportant even when not unjustified. The book trade and its public solved their problems in the best possible way. Why should not the broadcasters and their audience be expected to do the same?
It is well, I think, to raise these simple questions at the beginning of any discussion of the subject because to ask them is to be led immediately to ask two others. One is the question how closely, in actual fact, the cases of the printing press and the radio really are everywhere parallel. The other might be put bluntly thus: Does the fact that Western civilization was able to absorb and utilize the forces released by the printing press necessarily mean that it can survive the much more rapidly developed and much more widely effective forces liberated by an instrument for mass education, indoctrination, and corruption which can be brought immediately to bear upon persons who need not first go through even the minimum intellectual discipline required in order to learn how to read?
History does not usually repeat itself and the problems raised for society by the introduction of new techniques become difficult to solve for the very reason that they frequently tend to render inapplicable the general principles upon the basis of which we have become accustomed to deal with the less fundamental problems which arise when no revolutionary novelty is involved. Nothing could illustrate better what this means than the first of the questions which radio broadcasting involves, the question that is, “Shall or shall it not be “free’?”
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Our first tendency would be to answer that question on the analogy of the printing press. But it becomes immediately apparent, not that the answer is wrong, but that, because of one simple fact, it is not an answer at all. Radio transmitters interfere with one another. You cannot take the position that anyone who has anything to say should be allowed to put up a radio transmitter and say it, exactly as anyone who has something to say in print can buy a printing press. If the available channels were not assigned as a monopoly to certain broadcasters radio could not exist at all. But the concept of monopoly and the concept of unlimited free speech are simply incompatible.
It is true, of course, that the right of everyone to publish a newspaper is, for economic reasons, often a merely theoretical right. But what is an imperfection in the theory of the right of the free press becomes a simple self-contradiction when applied to any possible attitude of the government towards radio. You cannot solve the problem of freedom on the air by reference to the principles which served for the printed page.
Moreover, to the suggestion that if “the people” could be trusted to choose for themselves whatever was offered them to read then they can be trusted to choose also from among the programs offered them on the air, there are at least two objections. One is that since the radio is in the hands of a few powerful monopolies, the people’s choice is far more limited than it is in the case of books or magazines or newspapers. The other objection is less obvious. Reading involves at least a minimum of intellectual effort. On the whole, the people who read most are those of superior intellect Inevitably, the publisher, even to some extent the yellow journalist, appeals to what is relatively the keenest part of the population and on the whole (at least until the invention of yellow journalism) the more intelligent a person was the more likely he was to be affected by what he read. But the radio, like the movies, makes its greatest appeal to those least likely to read seriously or well. It opens up to the influence of deliberate propaganda or merely commercialized vulgarity that very section of the public least capable of intellectual criticism or even of knowing its own mind. It threatens to make this not merely the age of the common man but the age when the commonest man is the one most easily, most effectively, and most profitably appealed to.
Some realization of these facts disturbs every attempt to discuss the question what to do about radio, whether it be in terms of practical, detailed management and regulation or in terms of the largest general principles. Certain technical and economic problems are puzzling enough, but even if they did not exist there would still remain the fact that we have no really relevant historical experience to appeal to. The advocates of laissez faire cannot claim that their faith in the ability of things to work themselves out was ever put to a really parallel test. On the other hand, the advocates of government control cannot say that any government which planned from above what its citizens should be told and how their tastes and opinions should be molded ever had so effective an instrument for its purposes.
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Arecent book, Radio, Television, and Society, by Charles A. Siepmann (Oxford), undertakes to summarize the history of radio and to outline the problems which it raises. The author, now chairman of the department of communications in education at New York University, has had excellent opportunities in government service and elsewhere to learn his subject at first hand. His book is concerned principally with facts and with an exposition, as impartial as possible, of the attitudes and the arguments of various groups, both inside and outside the industry. He proposes no answer to the questions raised and though he is not unaware of even the largest implications he tends to subordinate them to the factual and expository material. His book could hardly be either clearer or fairer. Anyone who wants to know where radio stands today, and how it got where it is, could not do better than to read it. And anyone who wishes to go on from there to take a position or advocate a course of action would be well advised to prepare himself by assimilating the information this book has to give.
Mr. Siepmann begins with a historical sketch from which the most important fact to emerge is simply that the two most significant features of American radio as an institution are not the result of either the government’s farsighted intentions or of any long-range conspiracy on the part of the industry. They are simply the result of fumbling attempts on the part of both to discover some modus vivendi. Our radio is under mild and tentative government control because the early broadcasters soon realized that unless they asked the government to assume authority over the broadcast channels the airways would soon be carrying nothing except an unintelligible babble of interfering voices; and because the government, having agreed, set up a commission whose powers were intentionally ill defined and whose probable operations no one could see clearly. Our radio is dominated by the advertiser, not because the first of even the commercial broadcasters saw its possibilities as an advertising medium, but simply because those possibilities developed. The first commercial stations were operated by the manufacturers of receiving sets and they assumed that the cost of the operations would be paid for out of the profits of the receivers for which the transmitters created a demand. When advertising was first introduced it was supposed that the public would at best (or worst) stand for only a very little of it, and only after experience revealed how much they would take did the broadcaster find himself a mere adjunct to the advertising agency.
After describing the situation in the United States, Mr. Siepmann compares it with that in other countries. Nowhere else is it exactly the same. Two extremes are represented, on the one hand by our country where broadcasting comes nearest to being a free commercial enterprise in the classic laissez faire sense of the term and, on the other hand, by the Iron Curtain countries where it is a tight government monopoly designed in every detail to serve government purposes. Not unexpectedly, British broadcasting stands almost exactly in the middle between these two extremes and, no less expectedly, the relation of the British Broadcasting Company to the British government is as difficult to describe as that of the unwritten constitution to the powers of the House of Commons. The BBC is ultimately responsible to Parliament, but Parliament does not tell it what to do. In practice the company attempts to compromise between the principle that the people should have what they want and the principle that the government should give them what they ought to have. The compromise consists in the presentation of three separate programs on three different cultural and intellectual levels, all offered in the pious hope that a part at least of the great public will climb the steps of the ladder thus provided.
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With relentless impartiality Mr. Siepmann summarizes the arguments of the advocates of both the American and the British systems. To the British, ours seems merely a method for catering to the lowest common denominator and for seeing to it at the same time that the masses shall be so miseducated that the lowest common denominator will drop lower and lower. To the official spokesmen for the American industry this same method seems unassailably sound. Its triumphant success—against which only a few malcontents grumble—is proof that it provides the public with what the public wants; and, as one of them said recently in a statement made too late for Mr. Siepmann to quote, to call American radio cheap or vulgar or stupid is to call the average American cheap and vulgar and stupid—which obviously, so he implied, is not far from treason.
To the spokesmen for the American industry the British system is based upon an aristocratic conception of society since it distrusts the tastes and the intelligence of the people. Against it there has also been raised a somewhat subtler objection. Its operation is largely in the hands of a single director who has chosen to use his power non-politically, perhaps, but nevertheless in the interests of a certain definable conception of education and the public good. His ideal is the traditional ideal of “culture” and, so it has been said, we simply cannot afford in our present desperate state to have our most powerful instrument of mass education devoted largely to traditional cultural rather than to political enlightenment.
Even without raising the question in how nearly absolute a sense it is true that the people should be given what they prefer, one naturally asks whether they are satisfied with what they are getting. So far as Americans are concerned, the answer supplied by the public opinion polls seems to be “Yes.” A very large part of the population is passionately devoted to the radio and has no major complaint to make against it. But, surprisingly enough, the English public and the Swedish public are both about equally well satisfied with what they get—despite the fact that it is something very different. Does that mean that our tastes are equally unlike, or simply that in every case the great mass of the people is so uncritical, so unenterprising, so avid of anything which it can get without cost and without effort, that it is all but incapable of preferring one thing to another? If so, and it seems at least partly so, the possibilities of what a totalitarian government or a conscienceless industry could do to it and with it are even more terrifying than is generally supposed.
American broadcasters can argue that since their only aim is to give the public what it wants and since the public obviously wants what it does give them, then any radio controlled by the government would have either to give them what they get now or cease to follow democratic principles. But even if we assume that the public actually does know in some positive fashion what it wants, the problem of majority rule versus minority rights is raised in a peculiarly acute form. Does every desire of the public have equal weight with every other desire, and to what extent should the members of a minority be thought to have no claim to consideration merely because it is a minority of which they are members?
Suppose that ten men want jazz for every one who wants Mozart. What would be the truly democratic procedure? To give no Mozart at all; to give exactly one-tenth as much Mozart as jazz; or to give, say, half as much of one as of the other? The British system comes pretty close to accepting the last suggestion. The American—except in communities large enough to support almost unique stations like WABF and WQXR in New York or, at least, large enough to make it worthwhile for some local outlet to carry the best of the network sustaining programs—comes pretty close to accepting the conclusion that if few want any music except jazz then no one should ever get anything else.
That solution becomes doubly unsatisfactory if one suspects that what might be called the balance of power is held by a group which does not, in any meaningful sense, know what it wants, and is subject to both the shrewdly calculated suggestion of those interested in exploiting certain forms of entertainment and to the effects of a mass auto-hypnosis as the result of which it likes what it has been convinced other people like. That the majority is amused by Bob Hope and thrilled by Frank Sinatra is obvious. But it is doubtful that it likes them quite as much as it thinks it does or, more especially, that it likes them as much more than similar rival performers as it seems to. Hero worship has taken strange forms in our time, but it is doubtful if it was ever more prevalent. To convince a certain large segment of the public that any man is popular is to make him so. What it actually gets from a performance by a celebrity is less important than the fact that it knows him to be one. “Names” and “personalities,” no matter how synthetically created, have an appeal in and for themselves.
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That democratic thinkers before our time were aware of the dangers which radio has made more acute is sufficiently illustrated by a quotation from John Stuart Mill which Mr. Siepmann has put at the head of one of his chapters. “Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant.—Men lose their higher aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.” If those sentences were inscribed over the desks of the officials in the broadcasting companies, those officials might suspect something which at present they at least refuse to admit, namely that the audience whose tastes they boast of satisfying is not something which they found but something which they created.
Even more discouraging than Mill’s pronouncement is an unfortunate truth which Mr. Siepmann puts into his own words. “The drabness and poverty of most people’s lives (or, if you will, their inability to amuse themselves) are such that even a mediocre service of broadcasting is to them an enrichment of their experience. We might say that listening to anything is for the average citizen anywhere better than not listening at all. Most people’s inner resources of interest and amusement are meager and rapidly exhausted.” He might have added that the less even the average person is thrown back upon such resources as he does have, the more meager they become, and that radio, along with other omnipresent sources of mediocre amusement, is probably producing a generation less capable of anything except passive absorption than any which ever existed before. It used to be objected that baseball and football were mere spectator sports. Today, any. man who actually proceeds to a stadium to cheer at a game instead of taking it by radio or television may be classified as an athlete.
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Toward the end of his book Mr. Siepmann devotes a chapter to the difficulties which have stood in the way of attempts either to use radio in the classroom or to broadcast educational programs over the public airways. I wish (and this is almost the only unfavorable criticism I have to make) that he had also raised clearly the fundamental question whether attempts to use radio and television within the framework of the educational system itself is not a mistake. The fact that students take to it proves no more than is proved by the fact that the general public takes to commercial broadcasting. Whatever advantages radio may have in the presentation of certain limited aspects of certain fields of knowledge these advantages may be more than counterbalanced by the further encouragement which its use gives to the growing refusal ever to do more than passively absorb what is offered in the easiest possible way. More things can be got from the printed page than can be got from the loudspeaker or the video tube, and unless the ability and the willingness to use the printed page are to be lost entirely, then it should remain, somewhere, the principle instrument of communication. The chief result of employing what educators call the audiovisual techniques might ultimately be the destruction of the ability to read.
I have already said that Mr. Siepmann obviously considers it no part of his purpose to suggest solutions or even to advocate one attitude rather than another. Perhaps that is just as well since it may very well be that ultimately and in any conclusive sense no solution is possible. A development is now under way of which the final consequences are not predictable and of which the causes are probably too powerful to be subject to more than a minor degree of control.
To say this is not to advocate simple laissez faire or to oppose thought and planning. It is merely to recognize that in the course of history forces sometimes emerge which are more powerful than any of the attempts to deal with them can very well be. Some of the unfortunate results of the Industrial Revolution might have been mitigated before they were, but the Industrial Revolution would, nevertheless, have had certain effects no matter what attempts had been made to direct it. We cannot, no matter how much we try, control all the consequences, good or bad, of the fact that there has appeared in our society an instrument of communication which can reach more people than were ever reached before and to which they will attend more readily than they were ever willing to attend to anything else.
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