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PREFA CE
great many more I can’t remember. I hope that this list will indicate to some extent the exploratory enterprise of the industry as well as the conscientiousness with which the pursuit of good material is being prosecuted. This pursuit will continue as long as radio enterprise endures.
There are other aspects and other values to be mentioned. The service rendered by American broadcasters is so regular and so varied that most listeners are spoiled by its excellence. In America, radio actually amounts to the most hopeful symbol of democracy on earth today. It is human, newsy, informative, and disciplined; it is codified but not regimented; it is robust but not stiff. It is, in short, the great parabolic reflector of the needs and emotions of a great people, and it will change exactly and immediately with changes in these needs and emotions. Vague people in lofty offices don’t run American radio. It is run by its listening public. That is its guarantee of service; that is its promise of improvement; that is its degree of permanence.
As I write these few pages of introduction, something of the pandemic power of the industry is carried to my ears by a portable set that sits under a striped umbrella thirty yards down the beach on a lonely scree of scrub and sand dune somewhere south of Cape Cod. Yesterday morning for many hours the stretched voice of Hitler bruised the atmosphere with another broadside of his inane insanities and insane inanities. This morning the voice is an English voice, composed, tired, almost perfunctory. Is it war we hear declared or the momentary postponement of war? Whatever the news may be, it is shooting into every state in this nation simultaneously with its reception here, and it is revealing honestly and continuosly the truth of what is happening. The technique in news coverage of the Czechoslovakian crisis over a year ago will not only be duplicated but improved upon with the coming of a new international upheaval, and the American public will receive, hour by hour, more accurate reports of world affairs than any people in the world.
The arrangement of the programs reprinted in this anthology has sought to departmentalize material, sui
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