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128 The Big Audience
songs, and the best thing to be said of radio in this connection is that it kills off the bad ones pretty rapidly. Radio's mortality rate is almost as high for popular songs as it is for human beings.
It is estimated that some fifteen hundred murders take place each week on the air. This does not include murders meditated or suspected in daytime serials, but does take in manslaughter specially arranged for children's programs. (In Los Angeles ninetyseven deaths by violence were reported on one week's television programs.) Regularly the National Association of Broadcasters announces a code of ethics in which violence is deplored as bedtime fare for the young, but the God-given right to broadcast horror and mayhem is little disturbed. Some of the programs of violence make the police or the G-men their heroes and all of them, without exception, accept as gospel the dictum that crime doesn't pay, carefully noting it for the benefit of the young at the end of each program.
Neither the crime programs nor the adaptations of plays, books, and movies have shown much ingenuity in recent years. A number of conventional techniques have come into existence, such as the handling of audio-perspective (to help the listener "see" where people are placed) and the use of musical bridges and sound effects. There is a high level of competence and a dead level of sameness. In each type of program the same intonations are used to identify the characters; each type has its prescribed tempo. A considerable amount of experimental work was done ten years ago, and the results have been absorbed, but radio now needs the invigorating effect of a new production style, which would do for it what George Abbott did for the musical show or Jed Harris for melodrama some years ago; it needs also to break from its stereotyped characters and to discover a new and psychologically more realistic approach.
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The economics of experiment in radio was dramatized for the outsider by the famous CBS raid in which the major comedians