Variety radio directory (1939)

FEDERAL RADIO REGULATION— Continued period. Among the issues at the forefront were those created by the demands of particular groups, including labor and a group of educational institutions, for allocation of broadcast facilities (for example, a specified percentage of frequencies in the standard broadcast band). The repercussions were severe and, for a while, had a considerable effect on the decisions and policies of the Commission, but are now all but forgotten. At all times, including the present, it must be added, there has been an undercurrent of charges and suspicions that the Commission's decisions in individual cases have been too often the result of political pressure and other off-the-record considerations rather than of evidence received in open hearing, and that the Commission has not hesitated, for reasons best known to itself, to ignore its own rules and regulations to the advantage of certain favored applicants, or to rest decisions granting applications on substantially the same facts and arguments as those cited as reasons for denying other applications. Beginning in about 1936, agitation against the Commission has revived and, by a succession of events, has been fanned into a flame which recently threatened to parallel that of 1928-9. In a general way, the agitation may be said to have begun with complaints stirred up in Congress against the network companies by a religious organization endeavoring to secure better facilities for its broadcast station in New York. This led to charges in Congress of undue favoritism to the networks on the Commission's part, of failure to exercise the power conferred on it by Congress to adopt regulations on chain broadcasting, of permitting the networks to acquire ownership or control of too many stations (specifically the high-power clear channel stations), and of tying up too large a proportion of the remaining stations by contracts with unduly restrictive provisions. The charges were aggravated by the Commission's approval, in the summer of 1936, of a sale of a 50-kilowatt clear channel station in Los Angeles to one of the networks at the price of $1,250,000 and subsequent attempts on the part of the same network to secure other stations by purchase or lease, leading to the claim that the Commission was sanctioning "trafficking in licenses" and the "sale of wave-lengths." Into the resulting melee was tossed the issue of newspaper ownership of stations. To all this was added a continuing indictment of the Commission for improper practices in the decision of cases. There were thus initiated a succession of violent attacks on the Commission in both Houses of Congress and of insistent demands for investigation both of it and of the industry. A resolution introduced by Senator White calling for such an investigation by a sub-committee, with an appropriation of $25,000, was favorably reported by the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce on August 11, 1937, and escaped adoption only by a narrow margin due to the strategy of Administration leaders. It was no secret that the President's appointment of Mr. McNinch as chairman of the Commission was for the purpose of bringing about sufficient remodeling of the Commission's policies and practices to deflect the pressure for investigation. Senator White's resolution slumbered in the hands of the Senate Audit and Control Committee until the spring of 1938. In the meantime, the Senator, the original sponsor in the House of the Radio Act of 1927 and generally acknowledged the leading radio authority in Congress, was appointed Chairman of the American Delegation to the International Telecommunications Conference at Cairo and was absent from the country for 910