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.
Oracle: Radio 137
It is a principle flattering to the power of radio and much more impressive than the mean concept of a frivolous entertainment implied in "they can turn it off, can't they?" Because no one can escape the effect of a broadcast by refusing to hear it. A million sensitive people, capable of judgment, may tune out a demagogue, but if twenty million others listen to him, the minority will be swept away in whatever whirlwind of passion follows. Not what one person can avoid hearing, but what everyone else does hear, is the heart of radio's power and the core of its responsibility.
This principle, unformulated but vaguely felt, underlies some of the attempts to restrict the freedom of radio, as surely as it is the foundation of radio's commercial success. No grand moral law gives it majesty; it conforms only to the way broadcasting works. The fraction of the population that does listen is sufficient to support the advertisers; the non-listeners buy the same goods. If the listeners are moved to elect a candidate to office, he will govern equally those who never heard his voice. The circumstance that people listen by ones and twos, and not in large groups, does not make radio less of a mass medium; and since radio offers itself as a mass medium to the sponsors it cannot pretend that its audience has no mass, but is composed entirely of discrete particles, when it faces its social responsibility.
The broadcasters themselves often say that their commercial and their public service functions are closely related; to increase the consumption of good soaps and food is a service to the community, and it is supremely important to the economy as a whole that industry should flourish and have jobs to give. To this end, commercial radio creates an atmosphere of acceptance; the listener is hospitable to the suggestions of the announcer; to be successful a program must lower the threshold of doubt so that simple assertions, without proof, will be accepted without criticism. Of the millions who listen simultaneously to broadcasts, only a negligible fraction has been trained to assess and criticize what they read or see or hear, and radio itself steadily lowers the