We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
BEST BROADCASTS OF 1938-39
The program has developed a technique that, under most conditions, challenges and sustains the interest of the listener throughout its duration and, most important of all, leaves him in a state of mind that urges him to do something about what he has just heard.
The program is based on three principles; conflict, suspense, and fair play. Conflict is achieved by placing two basic affirmative contentions in direct opposition to each other. This deliberate avoidance of the old-fashioned debate technique (affirmative and negative) makes possible the most constructive sort of presentation for both sides, and it is precisely here that the great intellectual value of the broadcast lies. Because the emphasis is a constructive one (two opposed affirmatives) the listener is himself encouraged to think constructively about the problem at issue rather than to dismiss those views inhospitable to his prejudices or to applaud those that are naturally congenial to him. It is not the purpose of America’s Town Meeting to influence public opinion in one direction or another but to stimulate the nation to think for itself.
The second principle, although of less intellectual respectability than the conflict factor just noted, is a dramatic indispensability to all programs of this type. It is the item of suspense. Anything at all is likely to happen, and at one time or another almost everything has.
The audiences are keyed up and partisan, and because they know they are to have the privilege of questioning the guest speakers at the conclusion of their formal statements, they have a feeling of direct personal participation in the program. Often they don’t like what they hear, and their tussles with the speakers frequently burst into the microphones in condemnatory challenge and spontaneous rebuttal. The Town Hall series has always had the cycloramic advantage of a lively audience, and the scattered but recurrent percentage of irresponsibles, drunks, and crackpots. Most of the questions are, of course, sincerely and seriously put, and they are answered in kind, to the applause or hisses of the visible house. The sober extemporaneous questions have a definite dramatic contribution of their own, but the chance for the unexpected and the
190