Broadcasting (Apr - June 1960)

EDITORIALS The vital media THE critics of broadcasting will have to rise to new heights of distortion and bias if they try to find fault with television’s and radio’s approach to the monumental task of covering the hypertensive international developments of the past two weeks. The magnitude of the events was matched, in its way, by the magnificence of the job done by both broadcast media in reporting them to the American people. From the shambles of the Summit in Paris through the critical, if somewhat less hysterical, debate in the United Nations Security Council, the radio and tv networks almost literally stopped at nothing in their efforts to keep the public quickly and fully informed. Direct and taped reports from Paris were inserted as they arrived, great chunks of the UN debate were carried live, special background and interpretive programs were hurriedly put together and scheduled, regular programming was interrupted and commercial time pre-empted as necessary to keep pace with the march of events. The worst that the critics can say is that this is no more than broadcasting should have done. Perhaps so. Certainly this is the sort of job that television and radio can do best. When news is breaking, no other media can come close to them in reporting it directly and instantly. IT IS NOT alone a technological phenomenon that radio and television excel other media in the presentation of news. The gadgetry of broadcasting would be of no advantage if it were not put to use by air journalists of skill and ingenuity. As a special survey of the NAB has found, the professional quality of broadcast news and broadcast newsmen has substantially improved in recent years. The survey, which is reported in detail elsewhere in this issue, showed that since 1953 there has been an emphatic trend toward more and better news broadcasting at stations of all sizes in all kinds of communities. This is a trend that must be encouraged by the ownership and management of radio and tv. News is a vital ingredient in a democracy that can work only if its people are informed. The media that provide the most assistance in the process of informing the people are the media that must deserve the most gratitude and the most support from the public — and its elected government. FCC’s own Gestapo THE time has come for Congress to blow the whistle on the FCC. Without regard to the Constitution or the Communications Act, the FCC is heading straight down the road to program censorship. While the FCC loudly disclaims any such intention, events prove otherwise. Chairman Fred W. Ford, who has been leading a charmed life since he assumed the helm March 15, lowered the boom last week. He asked the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee handling independent offices for $300,000 in new money to underwrite the FCC’s own private police force. This is the boldest attempt in 33 years of regulation to control program content. Mr. Ford said so, perhaps unwittingly, in seeking to justify an innovation that out-deals the New Deal in its wildest flights. Congress can snuff out this overt effort to censor by simply denying the FCC the money it requests. As radio and television have grown in importance, the FCC and even some of the crusading members of Congress have gradually lost sight of the original intent of regulation 92 in broadcasting. The FCC was created, as was its predecessor Federal Radio Commission, to devise orderly allocations in radio, lest there be intolerable electrical interference. That was the “traffic cop” function. A field force has been maintained to monitor technical operations, and to make certain that technical regulations were observed. But the Communications Act, and indeed the Constitution itself, forbids the FCC to tamper with program content. The police power can operate only against broadcasts that are explicitly prohibited by law — the broadcast of obscenities, for example, or of lotteries, or false and misleading advertising. For the FCC to try to exert influence beyond the limits already defined by law is to put the agency in the business of censorship. Broadcasters themselves have left the censorship door ajar. They yielded on the “promise versus performance” thesis of the FCC at the recent hearings on programming. The FCC now has moved a 10-ton Black Maria through that crack, in the form of its new Gestapo. The FCC says it is receiving 120 to 150 complaints weekly on “broadcast matters,” but it does not describe the nature or believability of the complaints. Weighed against the total population, the ratio of complainers to total audience is roughly one to a million. The incidence of nuts in our society is higher than that. Only two members of the Senate subcommittee sat last Tuesday when Chairman Ford made his $300,000 pitch. Neither was misled. Chairman Magnuson (D-Wash.) expressed misgivings about a “police” organization. Sen. Allott (R-Colo.) said broadcasting was entitled “to the same freedom as newspapers.” Several weeks will elapse before the Senate subcommittee acts on the FCC appropriation. Broadcasters owe it to themselves and their audiences to get their story to the committee and to their senators and congressmen. Broadcasters for months have been operating under a difficult way of regulatory life. They live in fear of what will next emanate from Washington. Advertisers and agencies are in a daze over the Federal Trade Commission onslaughts. Both the FCC and the FTC have been goaded by fast-talking legislators and they have all but panicked, presumably to save their own skins. Congress should tell the FCC, through swift denial of its sneak $300,000 fund, that it won’t condone a programming Gestapo which, any way you look at it, spells censorship. Drawn for BROADCASTING by Sid Hix “That’s their salesman. . . , They’re 100% automated!” BROADCASTING, May 30, 1960