Swing (Jan-Dec 1953)

206 S* The Customer Isn't Always Right COMPLETELY apart from the principle, the affair George Kaufman ought to act as some sort of useful guide to sponsors' conduct in future occurrences of this sort which are bound to take place. It ought to but it probably won't. The principle involved in the original ousting of Mr. Kaufman, who has sensibly been reinstated by the Columbia Broadcasting System, is a very simple one. But it is, I think, dangerously wrong not only on moral grounds but also on practical ones. It is that a sponsor is trying to sell his product to all the people and cannot afford to offend any of them. Therefore any program or personality which offends any minority must go. Now that, from a businessman's point of view, is very sound doctrine — if it works. But in radio or television broadcasting it very conspicuously hasn't worked. There's hardly a radio or television program that doesn't offend somebody. But the reactions vary. Some people just turn the darn thing off. The more militant ones write or phone. This is usually a fairly small group of malcontents but a highly aggressive and sometimes highly organized group. While it is as entitled to its opinion and to the right to protest as anyone, this group is hardly qualified to act as arbiter of taste for all of us. Their private discontents are not necessarily the discontents of those quieter members of the community who don't rush to the telephone or to the writing desk the moment their sensibilities are ruffled. However, purely as a practical matter, there is another graver objection to this way of doing business. Every time one of those cause celcbres has arisen, whether it be Jean Muir or Philip Loeb or George Kaufman, there has been an uproar in the press. Two or three hundred people get upset about something — and let's not, for the moment, worry about what upsets them — and so the sponsor either cancels a program or fires an entertainer. Then the uproar begins. The original handful of protestors is now joined by hundreds of thousands of others, most of whom will take sides one way or another. I didn't hear Mr. Kaufman make his now inf i celebrated remark about "Silent Night." . I read about it. So did thousands of others who would never have heard about [ it if Kaufman hadn't been fired. A very ,\ tiny tempest suddenly blew up into a great big one. If the idea is to keep out jc of trouble with the customers, this is one « hell of a way to do it. Messes of this sort spring up, it seems < 6 to me, because of that old precept that the customer is always right. This phil ^ osophy works very well in a department store where each man's problems are dealt „ with separately. It doesn't work at all on ^ radio or television where millions of ^ people, with conflicting opinions and ;f tastes, are in the front row. You can't j just fire the saleslady in this case. If you ^ do, you mollify one customer and outrage ; j a hundred others. jj In other words, the idea of yielding to ti every small bleat of anguish from the g listeners is not only morally indefensible t but practically unworkable. No one was jj appeased by the Kaufman ousting and his subsequent rehiring. Far from solving the 1 £ problem, the timidity simply created one. 1 j, I bring it all up at this date because this I c sort of thing has cropped up time after j i time and, sure as God made little apples, | . it'll happen again. The most hardheaded way to settle the , next batch of letters that comes in is to , throw them in the wastebasket and settle the issue on its merits. Sooner or later, s popular opinion will force the sponsor to do this, anyhow. Let's Repeat the Good Ones I WAS having lunch one day with Groucho Marx at the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills and Marx was raving about one of the Martha Raye shows. Everyone at the table — there were ten of us — had heard what a great show it was. j But when Groucho counted noses, we found that only two of the ten at the > table had seen it. "That's television for you," remarked Groucho. "They pour eighty to a hundred thousand dollars into a show. Martha beats her brains out giving a great per ll formance. And then the show is dead. . Why don't they repeat the great ones?" It's a very sound idea. No matter how I