The great audience (1950)

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False Witness 203 sound very much alike; when Galen Drake was ill, many listeners refused to believe that it wasn't his own voice saying, "This is Roger Bennett substituting for Galen Drake." Knox Manning, who established a considerable reputation as a newscaster, an interviewer, and something of a personality in his own right, has kept his name but "regrooved his voice and style" when he began to do the "homely philosopher" programs similar to those of the others. These men not only sound alike but for the most part say the same things; they tell the same stories and they chuckle in the same places; it is either a monumental coincidence or the triumph of mass production. Writing in the New York Times, Val Adams has described the process which began when Mclntyre de Pencier transformed himself not only into Fletcher Wiley, but into the Housewives Protective League as well, though no one knows definitely against what the Housewives are actually protected. Fletcher Wiley sold the League to CBS "for approximately a million dollars," and with it the idea of manufacturing commentators by the traditional American system of identical parts, particularly the larynx. "Each commentator gets the same batch of material every day and turns out the allotted amount of whimsy and reflection." Something of a maverick in this stable, Galen Drake "insists that he uses very little, if any, of the script material ground out bv [the League's] mimeograph machines. His programs, he points out, are ad libbed from notes." Moreover, he has committed an act of "insubordination" by having his picture published. The League is opposed to this exploitation of personality; just as all thoroughbred horses have their official birthdays on January first, so the members of the League stable are all supposed to have the same face— which is never seen. In an age of prodigious faking this is surely the easiest to forgive; most of what these commentators say in their identically grooved voices is innocuous, without bite or character or personal style. Who cares whether they say their own words, utter their own thoughts? Who can be sure that their profoundest