Radio: Propaganda Pigeons

CBS last month unlimbered against enemy propaganda the kind of weapon which is mighty and shall prevail. Entitled Our Secret Weapon (Sunday, 7 p.m., E.W.T.), the program has nothing secret or even subtle about it. A CBS announcer reads a blatant statement from a recent Axis broadcast, then Rex (“Lie Detective”) Stout uses it as a clay pigeon to shatter with the truth. A typical exchange:

ANNOUNCER (sharp German accent): “The best soldiers and officers in the United States Army are Germans. So are all the best baseball and football players.”

STOUT (with lunch-counter sarcasm): “As you see, they’ve got the facts, no getting away from it. Take the six leading batters in the major leagues: Williams, Gordon, Wright, Reiser, Lombardi, Medwick. Some bunch of Germans. Also the great German prize fighter, Joe Louis.

CBS’s first four shooting matches left the air full of fragmented lies and cheers from the audience. The New York Times’s sensitive Radiocritic John Hutchens called it the best of the summer shows. More than 2,000 listeners wrote in about it. Sample: “Rex Stout, you’re the nuts.”

The job of supplying Stout with propaganda pigeons falls to Jack Gerber, director of the CBS short-wave listening station. Said Gerber last week: “We wondered if they’d tell enough lies in a week to keep the program interesting. They sure do. We hear twice as many as we can use.”

CBS’s short-wave listening began on an experimental basis from a booth at the National Lawn Tennis championships at Forest Hills in September 1939. Engineers installed the listening equipment there because reception was good, and when Ted Husing was not giving a hushed account of the tournament, monitors used the direct wire to relay short-wave news from Europe back to Manhattan headquarters. CBS has been eavesdropping on the Axis —and on more friendly stations—ever since.

Under monolingual Director Gerber now work eleven listening linguists, each of whom knows at least three languages. For 19 hours a day the squad listens to both Axis and United Nations broadcasts. Each day the monitors compile a 20,000-word digest of news and propaganda slants, another 30,000 words of direct transcriptions. Carbons are turned over to the OWI, important stories are relayed to press associations by teletype, but the main purpose of the listening post is to aid CBS in its fight against Goebbels.