Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest

3. New and Sparkling Ideas

3 New and Sparkling Ideas The creation of the CBS Documentary Unit in 1946 reflected contradictory impulses within CBS and its head, William Paley. A common historical assessment of Paley and the network in the immediate postwar years is that they largely abandoned the pretense of public service in favor of finally seizing the competitive edge over their archrival NBC.1 Paley wrote in his memoirs that he rejected a proposal in 1945by his second-in-command Paul Kesten to transform CBS from “a mass medium into an elite network” that would reject crass commercialism in favor of quality—in effect, the kind of programming represented by Norman Corwin. To Paley’s mind, such a plan would result in a “narrower, specialized network of dubious potential,” whereas he “was determined that CBS would overtake NBC as the number one radio network.”2 Soon after, Kesten was replaced by Frank Stanton, and CBS began luring high-rated entertainers and shows away from NBC. At the same time, Paley “believed that he could have it all,” as one historian has written; he could at once “surpass his commercial rivals and hold his head high among his more cerebral friends.”3 There was also residual idealism from the war, during which Paley had served as a lieutenant colonel in Europe while socializing with Edward R. Murrow and other CBS journalists and witnessing the horrors of the Dachau extermination camp just after its liberation. In the words of CBS’s Robert Lewis Shayon, for a time afterward, “the smell of wartime clung to the men in the grey flannel suits, and in their civvies, they continued to honor the national purpose.”4 So it was that Paley at the end of 1945promoted Murrow to network vice president of public affairs in what was seen at the time as “the first major attempt to elevate [noncom- mercially sponsored] sustaining fare to the same high level of commercial programs” and with a comparable level of funding.5 The Blue Book and the Documentary Unit Paley and CBS’s efforts in that direction would be motivated by more than altruism. According to New York Times radio critic Jack Gould, 1946 would see radio “subjected to more diverse and insistent criticism than the industry experienced in the whole of its previous twenty-five years, the main burden of the complaint against the ethereal art being excessive commercialism .”6 Among other things, Gould noted the popularity of the novel ἀe Hucksters, which satirized the influence of advertising on radio. Many others weighed in on broadcasting’s shortcomings. The New York University professor Charles Siepmann, who had formerly worked for the BBC, wrote Radio’s Second Chance, in which he charged that the American networks had “largely abdicated to the interests and point of view of [advertising] agencies and firms that have become more masters than clients.” Meanwhile, sustaining programs had grown “subject more and more to the slings and arrows of a most outrageous and paradoxical fortune,” such as being aired at times when few were likely to listen.7 Siepmann was a consultant on the most controversial critique of radio in 1946, the so-called Blue Book issued in March by the Federal Communications Commission. The report quoted Frank Stanton’s testimony before Congress that CBS’s sustaining programming represented its “greatest contributions to network radio broadcasting” and helped it achieve “a full and balanced network service.” At the same time, the FCC report said that many local stations opted not to broadcast such network offerings and instead aired more commercially lucrative programs. The report also graphically described radio’s rampant commercialism, noting that the industry had drifted far from the purported standards of 1930, when William Paley had told Congress that CBS prohibited “overloading of a program with advertising matter.” The Blue Book indicated that future broadcast-license renewals would rest in large part on the extent to which stations curbed “advertising excesses” and aired sustaining programs dealing with substantive public issues.8 Some praised the Blue Book when it first appeared. “Broadcasters now must face the fact that radio cannot operate under the same set of rules as those which govern other business operations,” editorialized Variety, adding that up until then, radio had “only paid lip service to the responsibility inherent in its use of” a public commodity and that the report might “be a new and sparkling ideas · 47 blessing in disguise” in...