We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
132 The Big Audience
heard and felt; the demand for entertainment passed beyond the capacity of the broadcasters to provide. The sponsor took over, through his advertising agency, which up to that time had been a buyer of time alone, getting a percentage of whatever the sponsor paid; obviously the next step was for the agency to create the program and take a percentage of whatever it cost. Since the entertainment was primarily intended to carry advertising, it was safe in the hands of those most interested in advertising. Competition sprang up: talent agents, earning ten per cent of the artist's fee, also began to build their own programs; and a new profession grew up, the independent inventor who made his own program, hired talent, recorded a sample or two, prepared a budget, and offered the entire package to any buyer. The discomfited networks saw the most interesting part of their business taken away from them, but they were in a period of intensive growth at the time. They have never entirely given up trying to create programs, and NBC and CBS each had a subsidiary talent agency until the propriety of such combinations was questioned by the FCC. One excellent result of the entire operation was that after they sold their birthright as creators of entertainment, the networks with time to fill spent their energies on sustaining programs.
The original premise of the broadcasters was this: "We are sending out programs that people like; tell them about your product while they are listening and they will buy." This is psychologically different from the basic approach of the new system as the sponsor might express it to his agency: "Put on the kind of program that will be liked by the people to whom I want to sell my product." It placed selling in the dominant position; more than that, it led inevitably to thinking of the audience as "a kind of people" and, presently, to thinking of the audience as a mass. It led to the encouragement of the mass qualities of the audience and to the dulling of those appetites that cannot be mass-fed; and insofar as the audience was not a solid malleable mass, it became the business of radio to turn it into one.