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PREFACE
the telephone, rung doorbells, and Q.S.T.’d entire networks to see what listeners were listening to and why, and to see what they were not listening to and why. It has spent millions of dollars and millions of man-hours in finding out as much about its own business as its public would let it know. Terrific energy has been put into this search by radio people. Little energy has been put into it by radio listeners. Broadcasters want to know where they are, and the public is not helping them as much as it should.
Few discerning men within the industry itself would claim that broadcasting as a whole is an art or even that broadcasting as a whole has artistic form. Most of them know pretty exactly what radio is. Most of them know that it is the most fluid medium that we have for bringing some of the arts (and only some) to their largest audiences. That much is a good deal, but it can never reach its peak of self-realization without the assistance of intelligent and sympathetic public review.
To lump radio with the Atlantic Ocean and say that one might as well criticize the one as the other is a very dan¬ gerous thing to do. The risk and the fallacy in this rugged analogy are at once apparent; several people have criti¬ cized the Atlantic Ocean with very good results. They have navigated her, fished her, flown her, scraped her bottom for oil, sucked her middle for gold, skimmed off her top for perfume and pipe bowls, backed up her tides for power, and browbeaten her generally into a docile and producing accessory for sixty-three separate nations. Critics did all this — Schoutens, Drakes, Magellans, Fitzroys, Darwins, Melvilles, Sarmientos, Columbuses, Dampiers, Shackletons, Ladrilleros, and Lindberghs — with fleets and astrolabes and microscopes, with whatever they had and whatever they knew. All these men were critics of the Atlantic Ocean. They all thought that they could improve it, and they all were right. It is a much better ocean than it was.
Sooner or later adventuresome spirits will begin to per¬ ceive the challenge that the very immensity and hetero¬ geneity of radio offer to the restive and exploring mind. People will begin to dissect its social implications; to dis¬ cover ^why, when Stokowsky plays for it all the time,
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