Radio: Brown and White

CBS caught a bear by the tail last week.

In full-page newspaper advertisements the big network reiterated that it had no editorial views on anything but radio itself, and expected its newscasters to have none either. This high-sounding declaration really started something.

Most directly hit by CBS’s stand was the Association of Radio News Analysts (TIME, June 28), whose stock in trade is opinion. Cried the organization’s founder and mouthpiece, opinionated Hans von Kaltenborn: “No news analyst worth his salt could or would be completely neutral or objective!” CBS men and A.R.N.A. members met to thrash the matter out (see cut).

Newspapers hopped gleefully into the controversy when they got another newsbreak: the resignation of one of CBS’s most publicized newscasters. He was pale, frail, combustible Cecil Brown, 36, the honest but emotional reporter who survived the Repulse sinking and won radio’s Peabody award for his warcasting (TIME, April 20, 1942).

Brown had resigned his CBS job three weeks ago when News Chief Paul White objected to his broadcast statement that “a good deal of the [U.S.] enthusiasm for this war is evaporating into thin air.” White said that was just Brown’s opinion, told him to label it as such. Brown said he had developed the opinion on a recent countrywide tour, felt no embarrassment at uttering it without qualification. The announcement of Brown’s resignation had not been publicized because his $1,000-a-week contract with his sponsor (Johns-Manville) did not expire until last week.

Human Impossibility. More basic than this personal controversy was the issue which CBS had apparently stumbled on unawares: although it is highly important that purveyors of news should not take sides, every intellectually honest newsman knows that impartiality (as distinct from nonpartisanship) is a human impossibility. If it could be achieved, far from being a feather in a newsman’s cap, it would merely make him a man without principle and without perspective.

Actually much credit is due to CBS newscasting for being neither impartial nor without principles. Its accounts of the outbreak of the war were instinct with editorial views of the dangers of totalitarianism.

If radio becomes guilty of making its commentators take sides—or pull their punches—in order to curry favor with advertisers, it will have much to account for. But it will also have much to account for if it abandons all editorial views in order to put on a false front of impartiality.