NAEB Newsletter (September 15, 1939)

MAEB Hews Letter»».Sept 15. 1939 Pag® 10 X am, X would Ilk© to give you the same speech - 1 dug it out of th© archives and road it * it’s a pretty good speech (HE) and it expresses the way I still feel about it. Conditions haven’t changed a great deal since then. But there are too many of you her© that heard me make it at the Institute, so I must think up other ways to s&$ many of the same things I said then, "Seriously, has the situation changed, are educationally owned radio stations in any better condition to support themselves today than they were in 1935, i© it any easier to build educational programs of quality than it was then, is the problem of building an audience for an educational station any lew®, and what* if anything has been don© during the past five years to make me any more sure that X could or would want to run such a station now? "The whole business of radio and broadcasting sprung into being very quickly and before w® knew it had gotten to the walking stage - after it learned to walk what happened? X can go back ten or fifteen years and see great changes between then and now - but I go back five years and see scarcely any* Why is it? The .America*s Town Meeting of the Air ha© been on the network five years, the formula is the same, maybe it is better maybe it is worse - the formula is the same, I read Mr, Victor Yarros’ article which was appended to your preliminary program* In it ho states "What the Town Meeting of the Air can do, our education¬ al institutions of authority and prestige can do, and do. bet teg --—- X am not forgetting th® University of Chicago Sunday morn ing broadcast, It is good as far as it goes, but it is not a© good as it might be, etc," I wonder .lust what suggestions Mr, Yarros would have for improv¬ ing both the Town Meeting and the Bound Table, X wonder if he knows just how much time and money goes into those programs, how many people of authority and prestige compos© the committee that arranges th© Town Meeting and the hours of time and thought which have gone into both programs? It is so very easy to sit on the side lines and say "they could be improved," We know they could be improved, but we also know that with all the best thoughts back of them, and with th© trying out of innumerable suggestions, the calibre of th© programs remains about th© same, Bon ( t assume for one minute that I don’t think, oftentimes, that they both could b® improved, but I know that every effort is being put forward to make those improvements and we have not gotten very far, I wonder if Mr, Yarros realizes how difficult it is when controversial questions are being discussed, to get the people who know and who should be willing to present their views, to stand up in front of a microphone and be frank and honest and willing to "get their necks out," In many instances, in the case of the Town Meeting, you could get people to make speeches, but they refuse to be heckled in front of an open microphone. So it is not always as easy to accomplish the changes as those sitting on th© side lines think, "What has all of this to do with the subject we are supposed to be discussing, How I would run an educational radio station? Only this, that the problems today are the same as they were five years ago, the principal one being, that under the American System of broadcasting, our first question is to build radio programs of Interest to our listeners and th© second, is the financing of such programs as well as th© operation of the station, "Mr® Yarros is very confident, in his article, that with "the right