Radio: The News, Unvarnished

From the sick bay of a ship off Salerno, TIME Correspondent Jack Belden (see p. 28) last week reported a colloquy with a wounded American soldier:

[He] came to my bunk a little while ago and he said: “I’m so goddam mad I’m never going to believe a radio commentator or newspaperman again.”

“What have I done now?” I said.

“Oh, not you, you’re just a dumb guy who gets himself wounded. But I just heard the radio say that correspondents report that the Italians lit up the beach [at Salerno] for us and we stormed ashore under cover of a heavy bombardment against the Germans, and everything looked like Coney Island!”

The soldier’s anger at the commentator’s attempt to make a show out of war is not an isolated incident. It is virtually a daily occurrence on every American fighting front. Soldiers have huddled in foxholes under heavy aerial bombardment while their radios told them that U.S. forces had complete control of the air over that sector. They have come out of action, blind with weariness, just in time to get a cheerful little radio earful about what they had just been through.

In such circumstances a soldier’s temper is understandably short. Scores of the troops have spoken their minds to U.S. war correspondents. The sum of their abrupt observations has been that they have lost faith in the veracity of U.S. radio and in the U.S. press. In sectors where Britain’s BBC can be heard, U.S. soldiers in general prefer its plain, unvarnished news commentaries to the high-pressure American product.

Fact v. Opinion. One radioman who has worried greatly over this slack-mouthed matter is CBS News Editor Paul White. Recently Paul White, who has an able staff of warcasters, told the Associated Press Managing Editors Association that commentators should be forbidden to editorialize on the news.

The burden of White’s argument: the number of newspapers which can be published is limited only by enterprise, but the number of radio stations is limited by the frequencies available—which are scarce. Therefore, radio is less likely than the press to give an adequate hearing to those whose opinions differ from those of the commentators. White sent a sharp reminder to his staff to stick to the facts and to CBS’s long-established policy of “no editorializing.” He also spoke up in hope that the other networks would see the wisdom of CBS’s ways.

FCC Chairman James Lawrence Fly also had a word to say about news broadcasting:

“I heard a so-called news program last night. Through the months it has been tending more & more to get away from the news of the day to the philosophies of the particular sponsor. Things like that are done in a somewhat subtle if not oversubtle manner. Only by careful listening do you discover that he is not giving you news or comment on the world news, but is peddling ideas to you from company headquarters.”