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PREFA CE
it was necessary to eat so much stale popcorn before finding a prize. But the findings compensated for the search, and if the following pages bring to the reader the conviction that I hold myself — that there is much in radio that deserves to be perpetuated in print— that in itself will be sufficient reward for anything this collection may have cost in lost week ends and lonely nights.
The scarcity of the good radio script is something that is known and understood by most professional broadcasters, but laymen so frequently ask why radio plays aren’t better than they are that the question may as well be answered here quickly and simply. Radio scripts aren’t written by the best writers. That is why they aren’t better than they are. There is a great deal of bad writing in American radio (as there is in radio all over the world), but this fact reflects neither shame upon nor lack of interest in the industry, for radio is in the business of pleasing multitudes a great part of the time, and multitudes prefer the banal and the inferior to the beautiful and the superior. The great mass of mankind is not congenitally appreciative; the average person is not discriminating. Good things bore him or embarass him because he cannot comprehend them. He cannot grow into a preferred acceptance of excellence without a corresponding growth in himself, and this kind of growth happens usually through application and study. Few are sufficiently searching and critical to discover for themselves those things of enduring value.
This argument is not offered in defense of broadcast policies. I do not believe that the existing policies in network broadcasting require much defense, and I say this because radio policy derives from the will of the listener and never from the caprice of executives. Executives merely put into operation the code of prohibitions and preferences created by public interest.
I have stated, however, that in radio much time is spent in transmitting banal entertainment, and no group would be quicker to acknowledge this fact than the broadcasters themselves. Now — if radio felt that its public responsibility had been discharged with the satisfying of all the poor taste in America, then it would be and should be subject to
VI