Radio: Going To Town

Although Federal Communications Commission Chairman Frank Ramsay McNinch thinks purge is a nasty word, last week he persuaded his commission to oust three more FCC staff men, bringing his purge score to seven. By abolishing FCC’s examining division, incorporating the examiners in the legal division under McNinch’s right-hand man. General Counsel William James Dempsey, FCC sidestepped civil service statutes and fired Chief Examiner Davis G. Arnold, Examiner Melvin H. Dalberg. Similar action ousted Publicity Man G. Franklin Wisner. But FCC will not be without apressagent. Marion Livingston Ramsay was borrowed for 90 days from the Rural Electrification Administration.

Loudest squawk came from Examiner Arnold, who before his ouster had been offered a $5,000 Veterans’ Administration job in exchange for his $7,000 FCC post. When he refused, he said, Chairman McNinch told him that “in these days that’s a pretty good salary for a Republican.”

Promptly Chairman McNinch took to the air over NBC, CBS, MBS networks, denied that his reorganization was a purge. Most emphatically he denied making the wisecrack attributed to him, quoted himself as saying instead that “thousands of men with families are living on salaries smaller than that.”

While he had his lavish array of microphones, the chairman also denied reports that he was about to resign from FCC. He said he would return to the Power Commission only when his FCC job had been finished.

He declared that his reorganizing was completed,”in the main any way,” and that FCC was now “going to town.” First sally toward town came this week—the opening of the Commission’s radio monopoly hearings.