Radio: Crisis Credit

When Adolf Hitler, at the Nürnberg Congress, last fortnight promised German aid for the Sudeten Germans, his broadcast speech signaled the Sudeten uprising. Touted as an instrument of international harmony, radio has a bad record as a peace maker. It was no bar to war in Spain, war in China. In every major crisis since the World War, radio has shouted provocative insults, challenges. All last week Berlin’s official broadcasting voice screamed against “the Czech mass murderers,” bombarded the rest of the world with atrocity stories, invented a radio language in which the Czech army was “the Hussite mob” or the “Red Horde,” the Czech Republic a soviet, Czech mobilization “Moscow’s war mongering,” Premier Syrovy a “Communist.” Not only does radio permit nation to shout at nation, but radio can also shout a neighbor down. Germany reported a mystery station which blanketed the European air with static during Chancellor Hitler’s Nürnberg speech. Similar reports charged German stations with sending out code signals on the Prague wave length to obliterate Premier Hodza’s speech. In Germany, listening to Moscow’s broadcasts has long been a criminal offense.

And European governments have experimented with radio sets limited to domestic reception—radio ears that will be structurally deaf to foreign voices. But still the main effort goes to answering propaganda with propaganda.

If radio did nothing to minimize the European crisis, however, in the U. S. the networks did a bang-up job of bringing the throbbing reality of it to listeners. NBC, CBS, MBS constantly carried crisis news in spite of a magnetic storm which marred short-wave reception for three days and a hurricane which broke power and communication lines, flooded transmitters. The announcement of the Czech reply to the Chamberlain-Daladier ultimatum was read to CBS listeners by Maurice Hindus eleven minutes before any other U. S. agency got the news. NBC and CBS stayed on the air all night keeping U. S. listeners in touch with Europe.*

Most exciting broadcasts, however, were not straight news but eyewitness impressions by U. S. journalists and radiomen.

When the voice of Columbia’s Hindus told of going to a Prague dinner party and finding his fellow guests carrying gas masks, the effect was one unattainable in written journalism. Equally stirring was the account of the Czech mobilization from the New York Herald Tribune’s Walter B. Kerr. As Mr. Kerr spoke his grave words, offstage noise was made by the drone of gathering airplanes.

* According to network records, only once before have CBS and both NBC networks operated simultaneously all night: for the Hughes flight.