Broadcasting Telecasting (Jan-Mar 1963)

EDITORIALS Practical birth control THE NAB last week submitted a set of realistic recommendations that the FCC would do well to observe in the development of am radio. As reported elsewhere in this issue, the NAB emphasized the need for a general repair of engineering standards and a tightening of the criteria governing financial qualifications of applicants for new stations. The association is to be commended for resisting the urgings of some members and high officials that it ask the FCC to invoke some form of economic protection that would shelter the haves and disenfranchise the have-nots. Indeed there was a noticeable contrast between the presentation last week and the position taken earlier by NAB President LeRoy Collins. At the NAB convention last April Gov. Collins decried the "over-population" of radio stations and said the NAB had no more important objective than finding ways to curb station population growth. At the NAB-FCC conferences last week, George Hatch, chairman of the NAB delegation, said: "Radio does not need any transfusion, nor is it as sick as some would have us believe. With an expanding economy, with a growing America, with an increasing population, it is our belief that with greater reliance placed in am allocations upon sound engineering and adequate financial qualifications, the radio industry will reach new heights in prosperity and will continue to provide outstanding broadcasting service to the American people." We side with the latest statement of NAB policy on radio's condition, and we hope it will not change with the next wind. To be sure, some radio stations are in financial trouble, but the same can be said of businesses of every category, and it is unbecoming for broadcasters to wish for government protection against competition while also asserting their rights to operate under a First Amendment that guarantees freedom from government restraints. We have no doubt that natural economic attrition will force some stations to close, but the possibility of failure is the risk that must be run by anyone who decides to enter business in any free marketplace. We have no doubt there will be station mergers, if the conditions suggested last week by the NAB are adopted by the FCC. But these too will be the products of natural competition, and the survivors that emerge will be made the better for the mergers. The NAB took a forward step last week, largely because its more thoughtful members propelled it. Its forward progress will continue only as long as its more thoughtful members provide continuing propulsion. Double whammy FOR broadcasters the opening of the 88th Congress last Wednesday became official with the introduction of legislation to permit radio, tv and photographic coverage of House committee hearings. This has happened at each new session since 1954 and each session in turn adjourned with no action. This has been so because the late, revered Speaker Sam Rayburn was unalterably opposed to "live" reporting of proceedings before the House or any of its committees. In the Senate, each committee chairman decides whether to provide access to the microphone and camera — the most modern vehicles of reporting — and most of them have afforded the access when broadcast media felt the proceedings warranted live coverage. 100 A year has passed since the speakership was assumed by Rep. John W. McCormack (D-Mass.). Mr. McCormack has made no flat commitment but is represented as feeling that the Rayburn ukase was too severe and that perhaps individual committees should be allowed to decide for themselves. Thus, prospects for favorable action on one or another of the several measures already introduced would appear to be better than they have been for nearly a decade. The various bills submitted last week would provide relief ranging from permanent changes in the House rules that would permit live broadcasting to temporary modifications that would give broadcasting a trial. Certainly there is ample precedent. The Senate itself, for example. And the fact that presidential news conferences are available live. There are radio-tv galleries in Congress and provisions for pickups in most of the executive departments. In fact the microphone and camera have equal access everywhere except in the House and most of the federal courtrooms where an archaic Canon 35 is still embraced by old-school jurists. One of the ironies of the 88th Congress, in the light of the House lockout of radio-tv, is to be found in the preparations being made by a House subcommittee to investigate "news management" by the administration and more particularly the Defense Department. This involves the people's right to know what its government is doing. The broadcast media, where the House is concerned, have been getting the double whammy. Radio and television, along with other media, have been victimized by suppression and purported "management" of the news. But in the House they are denied equal access to boot. Curtain raisers THE use of the RCA-built Relay satellite last Wednesday to transmit parts of NBC-TV's Today to Europe was a reaffirmation of the rapid approach of the international television era. The technical ingenuity that induced life in Relay after two weeks of failure and revitalized the older Telstar after a longer silence suggests that scientists have all but perfected the means of linking continents by live tv. There may never be around-the-clock programming on international circuits, but even so the world's windows will be opened by occasional broadcasts of events of international significance. The Satellite Communications Corp. that is now in the process of formation could become a greater carrier of peace and understanding than all the doves that ever flew. Drawn for Broadcasting by Sid Hix "Just listening to Joyce Brothers isn't enough . . . lie has to have a couch." BROADCASTING, January 14, 1663