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130 The Big Audience
not observed that when CBS bought out the stable of NBC stars it virtually confessed its failure to raise winners itself. Psychologically this was a fatal blow to creative enterprise, although CBS announced that it would continue to build its own shows and NBC assured its affiliated owners (many of whom might switch to CBS as soon as their contracts permitted) that it had saved millions by not competing for the comedians and could spend freely for new programs. Actually CBS had been tailoring programs to the needs of sponsors for several years, with only occasional pioneer work; and NBC did not have the tradition of experiment. Although it produced an imposing educational series, in the year after the comedians went to CBS most of its new programs were in the old ruts of commercial radio, and its major effort "opposite Jack Benny" was a "giveaway," an attempt "to buy the audience."
Both networks, as well as ABC and eventually the key Mutual stations, were sinking large sums of money and much of their creative energies into television, which, in a sense, was all experimental; naturally the barometer of radio hovered around dead calm. It was perhaps superfluous for CBS to announce, on a note of triumph, that there would be no change in the Benny program itself when it moved to the new network. Until a new concept of the audience, and the broadcasters' relation to the audience, was developed, there could be no change in any essential of radio.
If change must come, the broadcasting business is more happily situated than the movies; before the movies can develop, and profit hugely, from the entire audience, a change in the highly organized system of distributing pictures is essential; but network radio can continue to exist profitably, in spite of the inroads of television, without altering its structural relation with either the sponsors or the affiliated stations. Both are complicated, and I note only the elements that directly influence the kind of programs the public gets to hear.
I have mentioned the skepticism about radio as an advertising