Radio: QRX

The House Naval Affairs Committee last week set May 16 as the day it will begin hearings on Representative Emanuel Celler’s Pan American Broadcasting Station Bill. This measure would: 1) authorize the Navy Department to construct and operate a $700,000 Government broadcasting station (with $50,000 for annual maintenance) with power and equipment adequate not only for short wave broadcasting to South America but for the whole U. S.; 2) instruct the Commissioner of Education to provide programs of national and international interest, running the full educational and entertainment gamut covered by commercial broadcasters.

Representative Celler comes from Brooklyn, and so has a very real and very natural dread of Naziism. Fundamentally he designed his bill to provide the U. S. with means of competing with short-wave propaganda regularly broadcast for the past four or five years from Europe’s totalitarian countries. Of the 30-odd bills pending in House & Senate to muscle Government further into radio, the Celler Bill is closest to the hearing stage and is, therefore, hated & feared by private broadcasters. It is their contention that the radio industry already provides ample technical and artistic facilities for South American propaganda broadcasting. In spite of Representative Celler’s contention that one Government station will scarcely interfere with the 728 private stations now licensed in the U. S., what particularly pains the broadcasters is the idea of domestic Government broadcasting. It sounds too much like the yardstick principle which is currently turning utility men’s hair snowy white.

Therefore, with the Celler Bill hearings about to open in Washington this week, the QRX signal to stand by hummed through the U. S. radio industry. A more important fight than was ever put on the air—the match between the two great opposing philosophies of broadcasting— was about to begin. In this corner—the legislators and Government officials who look on radio as too vast and permeating a moral instrument to be left ungoverned by the body politic, too valuable a natural resource to be left free from State control. In that corner—the private broadcasters who have an estimated $150,000,000 invested in plant, who last year made some $140,000,000 from time sales, and gave a 24-hour free show 365 days to a whole nation.

This week’s fight will have the additional flavor of a return match, for Government and private broadcasters have crossed gloves off & on for 26 years.

1912 to McNinch, The 1912 Radio Communication Act antedates the birth of broadcasting. The license plan adopted at that time was a system of registry for the three radio groups then active: the Navy, private companies engaged in ship communications and the small group of early-bird amateurs. Anybody who applied got a license. Its issuance was part of the job of the Secretary of Commerce, a very small part until 1920 when KDKA (Pittsburgh) applied for the first wireless telephone broadcasting station license. The Secretary granted it a wave length of 360 meters, continued issuing other stations licenses on the same wave length until 1923.

With hundreds of stations all on the same frequency, radio sets from one end of the country to the other began to squeak & squawk with interference. Secretary Herbert Hoover called a conference of all radio interests, and a definite broadcasting band was set aside. This solution was only temporary. Stations grew steadily in number and power until all wave lengths were occupied. The Department of Commerce thereupon declined to issue any more licenses. A 1926 Federal court decision threw the whole situation into chaos again by ruling that the law did not authorize Secretary Hoover to make individual wave length assignments, that stations were free to pick their own wave lengths, to wander at will through the frequencies. More than 200 stations jumped into the air in less than a year, mingled their random signals with the howls of heterodynes, raised bedlam that once more provoked a storm of pained and angry protest from listeners.

Next year Congress passed the 1927 Radio Act, created the Federal Radio Commission to regulate the industry “for the public convenience, interest or necessity.” Thus was established the principle that private ownership and operation of a radio station is a Government granted privilege and the FRC (from which in 1934 the Federal Communications Commission inherited its powers) became the dispenser of the privilege. The law now allows maximum three year licenses. The Commission makes them subject to a renewal petition by the broadcaster every six months. Last year, with Republican Senator White of Maine and others baying that a sharp political odor was arising from the FCC, President Roosevelt—to whom radio means a lot—sent over his acute and large-eared little trouble shooter, 65-year-old Frank Ramsay McNinch, to be the Commission’s chairman.

Chairman McNinch comes from Charlotte, N. C., a thriving city of which he was twice mayor. A small but fearless Presbyterian Elder, in 1918 he armed a number of citizens as special police officers during a bloody streetcar strike, survived a recall vote that followed the disorders and picked up a local reputation for political effectiveness. In 1928 he jumped the Democratic Party to work for Mr. Hoover. Mr. McNinch is against liquor (he keeps a vacuum jug of milk on his desk) and Mr. Al Smith is not. President Hoover rewarded Frank McNinch with a seat on the Federal Power Commission.

There he immediately took a sharply regulatory attitude and by more than one opinion established himself, to the dismay of his Republican sponsor, as a New Dealer before the New Deal began. Power Commissioner McNinch attacked holding companies two years before the Roosevelt Public Utility Act of 1935.

“Keep Democratic!” Within the first few months of his FCC chairmanship, Mr. McNinch served notice on lobbyists that their visits and pleadings to Commissioners would receive the fullest publicity. He brought the Commission up to date on its hearings, eliminated departmental divisions, which caused the dismissal of a friend of Jim Farley, a relative of Justice Black and the nephew of Sam Rayburn. The little man, it was agreed, had lots of political nerve.

Turning to the broadcasters, he spooked them thoroughly by referring to a station as a “project.” It had been seen that McNinch had no qualms about taking power by the ell, so when he began talking about investigating radio time rates, the broadcasters got the scare of their lives. Not long ago, however, Chairman Mc-Ninch came to realize that it is the advertiser who pays the rates, that advertising is an unregulated industry and that there is no way to be sure that lower rates would be passed on as price reductions to the consumers of the products advertised.

While Chairman McNinch is still very much inclined to read the fullest social & economic implications into the FCC’s limited authorization to license radio stations according to “public convenience, interest or necessity,” he does not scare broadcasters anything like as much as he did last year. He is now recognized as no Tom Corcoran of the air. After all, his most alarming (and most repeated) shibboleth is “Keep radio democratic!”

Investigations. To keep radio democratic, the FCC is engaged in two investigations : into superpower and monopoly. The man most interested in superpower is enterprising Powel Crosley Jr., who holds for station WLW in Cincinnati a temporary license for experimental purposes for 500 kilowatts, ten times the power of any other commercial American broadcasting station. Around the 831 ft. WLW antenna at Mason, Ohio, the 500,000 watts charge the neighborhood with enough electricity to light an electric bulb with nothing but a wire stuck into the ground. And they cast an audible signal over 13 States. Crosley now wants the FCC to license his “experimental” 500-kilowatter as a commercial station, although WLW has been broadcasting commercially with 500 kilowatts for four years. Fifteen other stations have applied for equal power. Hearings have been set for June 6.

Last fortnight the FCC issued the rules & regulations which are to be the basis of the hearings, setting 50 kw. as top power for a commercial broadcasting station. FCC considers 500 kw. completely proved as an engineering possibility, holds experiments no longer necessary. It is now up to Experimenter Crosley and other applicants to prove that further 500 kw. coverage will not damage many low-power local stations in their capacity as media of local self-expression. The big broadcasters are already divided on the superpower questions. CBS has withdrawn its one super-power application, put in for station KNX (Hollywood) by a previous owner. KDKA (Pittsburgh) and WBZ (Boston) have also withdrawn their applications. The Commissioners who will conduct these hearings are George Henry Payne, a fan-letter collector who does a lot of very public complaining about blood-curdling children’s programs; Rhode Island’s one-time Governor Norman Stanley Case, a gracious and imperturbable New Englander; and Tunis Augustus MacDonough Craven, ex-Naval officer and the Commission’s one technical man.

The FCC’s monopoly investigation is in the data-gathering stage, with no action expected for several months. Commissioners Sykes, Brown & Walker are to handle the hearings. Judge Eugene Octave Sykes of Mississippi is the senior member of the FCC. Bland and calm, he has faith in the good intentions of the broadcasters. Cautious and noncommittal Colonel Thaddeus Harold Brown ranks next. Like the chairman, he was active in his support of Herbert Hoover in 1928, managing the Ohio campaign and appointed in 1929 to the post of general counsel to the old FRC. He is the short, fat member of the Commission and not easily aroused. A former schoolteacher, Oklahoma Democrat and public utility investigator, Paul Atlee Walker, whose A. T. & T. report drew blood from the telephone monopoly, is more skeptical. But he wants full data and will wait for it before he investigates.

Hearing. The seventh member of the FCC, Chairman McNinch, may get his most strenuous spring inquisitorial work-out not as an inquisitor but as the most authoritative witness the Celler Bill hearings can call upon.

The type of legislator who will make the most noise in behalf of the bill’s provisions is Representative Lawrence Connery of Lynn, Mass. Catholic Mr. Connery, an oldtime song & dance man, dislikes the radio as much as Commissioner Payne, or perhaps any other oldtime song & dance man. The Mae West affair set him off for days and in Congress he keeps alive a complaint initiated by his late brother, Billy, against a Mexican Government broadcast over NBC. The broadcast included a reading of a poem in Spanish which Billy called obscene.

Against this sort of opposition, the broadcasters have for months been closing ranks and putting out defenses. The industry has reorganized its National Association of Broadcasters under temporary President Mark Foster Ethridge. Nonmember stations are joining the N. A. B. in droves and hoping that the permanent paid president will be a man chosen from outside the radio industry, a man with no station at stake, who can stand up to the Commission and to Congressional snipers.

Shrewdly the broadcasters have observed that one good way to lick the Celler Bill might be to encourage other similar bills. Already California’s Senator McAdoo and New Mexico’s Senator Chavez have suggested San Diego, Calif. as a site for a Government station, countered by Florida’s Representative Lex Green, who wants it for his home State.

Broadcasting chains are extending their short-wave service to Pan American countries, ready to contend against the Celler Bill that they need only Government co-operation to do the whole anti-Fascist job through private enterprise. And the broadcasters have long been indirectly warding off domestic Government competition by spending big money on non-commercial programs like NBC’s costly Toscanini concert series, CBS’s Workshop. Most recent and most arch example of radio pointing to its good deeds in the public service is a series of WOR ads. One reads:

“We think there ought to be a certain amount of culture in the land and that some of it probably ought to come from one Greater New York station. . . . Doesn’t this kind of programming cost us jack we’ll never get? You should hear what our treasurer says! If he got real nasty you know what we’d do? We’d blow a tickler in his face, that’s what!”

What the radio industry will be chiefly tuned in for during the next couple of weeks is what Mr. McNinch says, if and when, as head of the President’s interdepartmental Committee on Pan American broadcasting, he turns thumbs up or down on the Celler Bill’s Government station. Since he has not pressed the radio time rate inquiry, and since he is not willing to make accusations against a radio monopoly until one is proved, there is a likelihood that Mr. McNinch will at any rate oppose the bill’s domestic broadcasting provision. Hopefully the industry looks forward to Mr. McNinch’s stringing along with Commissioner Case in the belief that “we had better hold on to what we have until we get something better,” that U. S. broadcasting in its present state is worth holding on to and that the industry and the Commission had better goahead together slowly.