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SENATORS AND COMMENTATORS IN HOT FREE SPEECH DEBATE
It was give and take in the Town Meeting of the Air “Freedom of Speech on the Air” debate from the Taft Auditorium in Cincinnati last night tThursday), participated in by Senator Burton K, Wheeler ( D) , of Montana, Senator Chan ^rney ( R) , of South Dakota, members of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, and Gilbert Seldes and H, V. Kaltenborn, CBS and NBC commentators respectively, George V. Denny, Jr., Moderator, had quite a job on his hands to keep everybody from talking at once.
Senator Wheeler led off by saying:
“At the recent hearings before the Senate Interstate Com¬ merce Committee, it was contended that the broadcasting companies should have the right to place whomsoever they saw fit on the air and to keep anyone off the air and that this right should be supervised by no one. They contended this constituted free speech. Free speech for whom? Free speech for themselves. What they want is not free speech but controlled speech controlled by them and them alone. They would become dictators of opinion of what is good, what is bad for the American people to hear. * * *
“Wave lengths or frequencies on which radio operates belong to all the people. They are licensed to individuals and corpora¬ tions to be used in the public interest. Licensed by the Federal Communications Commission an arm of the Congress, It is, then, for the Federal Communications Commission to review the administra¬ tion of the use of these frequencies. This is in no way an abridge¬ ment of freedom of speech. On the contrary it is a protection against the abuse of that freedom through maladministration by the broadcaster. The broadcaster is fully protected, in turn, against any unjust action the Federal Communications Commission might take through his power of appeal to the courts,
“No one can speak on the radio unless the station owner permits him to do so. This being true, Congress must see that when one side of any public controversy is aired, all sides are aired equally over Identical facilities, -w * *
"As long as I am in the Senate I am going to raise my voice against any radio station being permitted to put on one side of the question and deny the other side the right to be heard. I am going to oppose the privilege of any radio station to put on a commentator to use innuendos or to lie about somebody and not give that person an opportunity to be heard. That is the most un-American thing that. could possibly happen. If you permit it then you could very easily draw this country into a. fascist dictatorship and cer¬ tainly I am opposed to that and so are the American people. “
Senator Gurney countered with:
"There is not enough actual time on the radio for each and every one of our 130 million people to state their ideas on every question over the radio, so let^s be practical about it, and instead
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