DouglasSusan-_WorldWarIIandtheInventionofBroadcastJournalism_inListeningIn-RadioandtheAmericanImagination.pdf

:7: World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism

You could hear it in the very way that H. V. Kaltenborn, in 1939 and1940, reported the news from Europe: he used words like lugubriousalient, and temporize; he pronounced at all "at tall," and chan "chahnce." Yet in the next breath he would become much more colloquial, saying of the Germans, "All their stuff is censored," or that French lines were holding except for "a couple of unimportant spots." He frequently prefaced information from foreign communique's with "what this means is" or "what this shows." Upper-class pedant or guy next door—what should the radio newscaster be?

When people listen to old-time radio, they don't listen to old news shows; most are lost forever. Only CBS seems to have made a systematic ef- fort to preserve their war coverage (which they did on acetate disks, mag- netic tape not yet having been invented), and you've got to go to the National Archives to hear the full collection of broadcasts.1 With the excep- tion of Edward R. Murrow, television reminds us of its history with the news: John Cameron Swayze, Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite. And as Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson point out in The Murrow Boys, thei rousing account of the invention of broadcast news at CBS, CBS itself did little, after the advent of television, to keep the memory of its own pioneer radio correspondents alive.

Yet by the fall of 1938 radio coverage of the Munich crisis had rendered the newspaper "extra" all but obsolete—people didn't run out to the street for the news; they tuned their dials, and they listened. "Radio," wrote Kaltenborn, "became of itself one of the most significant events of the cri- sis." More radio sets were sold during the three weeks in September that

/ 161 Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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radio broadcast the crisis than during any previous three-week period. One year later over 9 million new sets were sold, a new industry record. In 1935,67 percent of American families had radio; by 1940,81 percent did. "Glued to the set" became a national clicheV

With the seemingly endless documentaries made, and still being made, about World War II, and the success of the History Channel (nicknamed by some the Hitler Channel), we tend to think of this as a highly visual war, expe rienced by Americans back home primarily through pictures. And certainly, with 85 million people going to the movies each week, Americans saw the progress of the war through newsreels, as well as through photographs in newspapers and magazines. But the way we have come to remember the war— through this visual record—misrepresents how people followed and imagined this war on a daily basis. This was a war that people listened to. The media's c lective memory of this war, which serves the programming needs of television, suggests that the visual was more important than the auditory, when just the opposite was true. And especially with the advent of gasoline rationing, radio listening increased as people were forced to stay closer to home. World War II was a radio war.

With the loss of so many news broadcasts, it is not easy to write about what was, quite simply, a total revolution in American life: the bringing of national and international news, with the actual sounds of political rallies, air-raid sirens, or gunfire, right into people's living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Broadcasts included daily accounts of the Lindbergh trial, commentary on the New Deal, sentimental human-interest stories like the funeral for a blind man's Seeing Eye dog, and, of course, World War II. Listeners were transported to di ferent places and times by radio. As Popular Mechanics gushed in 1938, "T rapid strides of radio during the past few years have made possible world- girdling hook-ups which, in the space of an hour, will take you into yesterday, today and tomorrow."3

Fortunately, some commentators wrote memoirs about the emergence of broadcast news. Still, there is so little left to listen to today, to hear what it a tually sounded like. So much has been lost or destroyed that radio news from the 1930s remains severely underrepresented in histories of the press, and in histories of the period. Major books on the period, like Paul Fussell's Wartime or Alan Brinkley's recent analysis of the New Deal, The End of Reform, don't even have the word radio in their indexes. Miraculously, enough has survived from transcriptions made at the time that we can get some idea of the inven- tion of broadcast news.4

And this is what we hear: a struggle over how men would deliver the news—which included a struggle over radio oratory—and a pushing out of

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 163

horizons as listeners added new maps to their mental geographies. There were experiments with the use of sound—the use of ambient sound from the scene of the news story, the more contrived use of sound effects in the studio—to convey a sense of immediacy and urgency. News listening on the radio, as broadcasting styles were being invented, moved people between cognitive reg- isters—informational listening, which was more flat and less imaginative as people took in brief, factual reports, and dimensional listening, as people were compelled to conjure up maps, topographies, street scenes in London after a bombing, a warship being dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe. We also hear certain radio reporters subtly leading public opinion toward a less isolationist stance, a worldview more sympathetic to mobilization and, eventually, engagement. They weren't supposed to do this, however, and most historical accounts of the rise of radio news in the late 1930s emphasize reporters' objectivity and net- work policy against editorializing.

But if you listen to the news broadcasts from 1938 on, you hear an insis- tence that Americans become much more aware of the world around them and understand that democracy itself was at risk. The Munich crisis as broadcast on radio made Americans much more interested in and knowledgeable about news from Europe: a public opinion poll from November 1938 asserted that this story was twice as interesting to the public as any other event of the year. Radio news in the 1930s and '40s played a central part in shaping a new vision of America's role in world affairs, a vision with considerable consequences for American foreign and domestic policy since World War II. As the radio histo- rian David Culbert put it, "Radio emerged as the principal medium for com- bating isolationism in America."5

Indeed, Kaltenborn had no compunctions about asserting in I Broadca the Crisis, the collection of his Munich crisis broadcasts published in the fall o 1938, that radio made "the blind, head-in-sand isolationist view of foreign af- fairs . . . no longer tenable." More to the point, after June 1940—after Churchill became prime minister of Britain and approached Roosevelt for help, after Dunkirk, after the fall of France—radio commentators supported Roosevelt's "preparedness" policies, helping to sway public opinion toward support of American intervention abroad. They implied and helped construct what seemed like a consensus about U.S. involvement in the war.6 What we hear, as part of the radio industry's conscious and unconscious efforts to con- struct a sense of nationhood and national unity in the 1930s, is the evocation by commentators and newsmen of the national "we," the "we" that was united despite our differences, the "we" that was allegedly monolithic in its outlook and will.

At the same time, during this decade we hear the evolution of what would

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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become the standards for objectivity in broadcast news. Although such stan- dards began to be more firmly encoded in the print media during the 1920s, especially with the separation of commentary from news stories, they did not instantly, or even easily, migrate to radio.7 Radio also sparked special concerns about the dangers of opinion or bias, because it was felt that the timbre and tone of the human voice alone could be used to unduly influence listeners. With the sainthood accorded Edward R. Murrow, and the loss of so many of the news broadcasts that preceded his legendary reports, it's easy to think of "objectivity" as appearing, somehow full-formed, out of the CBS studios in 1939. It's equally easy to forget that radio news and commentary were, for ten years before that, anything but "objective." Demagogues flourished on the air in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and news commentators—who were in the mid-1930s more common than actual broadcast reporters—felt no compunc- tion to be unbiased or neutral. Father Coughlin and Huey Long were not the only men with strong opinions on the air. Much of early radio commentary was openly partisan, as when Boake Carter referred to administration officials as "fat New Dealers" while Walter Winchell fawned all over FDR. By 1945 wha counted as objectivity, what the public and opinion leaders accepted as objec- tivity, became established in broadcasting. Newsmen, the networks, the gov- ernment, and advertisers battled over what exactly constituted objectivity, until the fight spilled onto the front pages in 1943.

During the 1930s, when broadcast news was being socially constructed and fought over, we hear a genre being invented, and we hear that male arche- type—the newsman—being designed as well. Only a few women—Dorothy Thompson, Mary Marvin Breckenridge, Betty Wason—got on the air in a deeply sexist industry in which it was gospel that people did not like and would not trust the female voice over the air. Radio commentators and war corre- spondents became national celebrities—sometimes overnight stars—their voices instantly recognizable, their public images often carefully crafted. In the evolution from the pretentious announcer Boake Carter—who actually said "Cheerio" at the end of his broadcasts—to the no-nonsense and conversa- tional approach of Ed Murrow, Bill Shirer, and Bob Trout, we hear men who sounded like they came from middle America dethroning their pseudoaristo- cratic predecessors. Scribner's in 1938 reported Murrow as saying that h wanted CBS's foreign broadcasts "to be anything but intellectual. I want them to be down to earth, in the vernacular of the man on the street."8

We also hear these men praising simple heroism and denouncing cow- ardice during World War II, and reaffirming the centrality of American man- hood to the survival not just of the nation but of the world. After the giggling of Ed Wynn, or Jack Benny's effete pretentiousness, or Edgar Bergen's being

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 165

put in his place by a prepubescent dummy, or George Burns's frustration at being trapped by Gracie Allen's illogic—all played for laughs, of course— here were serious men sometimes risking their lives to deliver the news, men confident in the American man's place in the world, men affirming that knowledge, rationality, stoicism, courage, and empathy, and an utter disdain for upper-class pretentiousness, were what made men "real" men. By 1941 the apotheosis of American manhood wasn't Boake Carter or Eddie Cantor, it was Edward R. Murrow, the radio version of Humphrey Bogart's "Rick" in Casablanca.

Few events in the history of radio have been more notorious than the Halloween Eve broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Even people who kno absolutely nothing about the history of radio know about this episode: peo- ple fleeing their homes around the country to escape the invading Martians so realistically portrayed by the Mercury Theatre that Sunday evening in 1938. We don't have reliable figures on how many people actually fled, but Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog, and Hazel Gaudet in their study of the panic, estimated that about 1 million Americans were scared by the broadcast.9

Orson Welles, director and star of the program, had to hold a press confer- ence the next day to apologize and insist he meant no harm. Dramatizations of simulated news bulletins became verboten. And the broadcast was taken, in many circles, as an indisputable demonstration of the "hypodermic nee- dle" theory of radio's power to instantly inject an unsuspecting people with unchecked emotions that would produce irrational responses. There is good reason to believe that the panic was less extensive than initially sensational- ized in the press; after all, it made for great headlines. In the first three weeks after the broadcast, newspapers around the country ran over 12,500 stories about its impact.10 But what mattered was the new perception of radio's power. And many in the industry took the panic as evidence of the intellec- tual simplicity of much of the audience, and the need therefore to speak to them in simple language.

It has become a commonplace to explain the panic as a result of people's newfound dependence on radio news, which, in the fall of 1938, had been bringing Americans increasingly urgent and disturbing bulletins about Hitler's conquests in Europe and particularly about the Munich crisis and Neville Chamberlain's capitulation. This explanation still makes sense. After all, War o the Worlds aired just one month after the crisis had been temporarily resolve one month after Americans had been glued to their radio sets, used to having programs interrupted by the latest news from Germany. But how had radio news evolved, and why did a dramatic rendering of an alien invasion resonate so with it? What were people hearing on the radio that was different from what

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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they read in the papers, and how did listening to the news—as opposed to reading it—reorient Americans toward current affairs?

KDKA's "inaugural" broadcast was a news program—coverage of the pres idential election returns of 1920. But news remained an afterthought in early radio, which was dominated by talks, music, and fledgling variety shows. Lis- teners could hear the Democratic and Republican conventions on the air in 1924, and WGN in Chicago paid $1,000 a day for a telephone line to Dayton, Tennessee, so it could provide intermittent coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" trial. And radio was able to scoop the newspapers on the progress of Charles Lindbergh's flight and his safe arrival in France. But as the networks formed, and advertisers came not just to sponsor but also to produce radio shows, the overwhelming emphasis was on entertainment. One of the earliest quasi-news shows was Floyd Gibbons's highly popular The Headline Hunter, which pr miered on NBC in 1929. Gibbons didn't report the news; with an orchestra backing him up, he recounted his adventures covering past news stories. Prob- ably the most popular "news" program of the early 1930s was The March o Time, in which actors impersonated famous newsmakers like FDR, Huey Long, or Benito Mussolini. As late as 1938 a CBS executive would assert that "none but the most urgent or important news would displace temporarily a program designed to entertain."11

Nonetheless, with major breaking news, such as election returns, radio brought instantaneous coverage of the latest tallies, making such stories irre- sistible to the networks and their listeners. And even listening to something as dull as a Hoover campaign speech in 1932 was much more gripping on the radio. It wasn't just that the announcer evoked the scene by telling you that "more than 30,000 people packed and jammed every available seat" in this au- ditorium in Cleveland—you heard the sounds of people milling around, talk- ing, yelling, and applauding. When the announcer described the "huge audience, standing as one man, greeting the president," you heard the ovation and the rousing band music. Listening on the radio brought you to the hall and allowed you to participate vicariously in this large event, to be part of this crowd, and to envision a thriving public sphere consisting of thousands of everyday people.12

Two events in 1932 proved to be turning points in the evolution of broad- cast news. At 11:35 on Tuesday night, March 1, WOR in New York interrupte its programming to announce that the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped. Forty minutes later CBS interrupted a dance program on its network with the same bulletin. By the next morning CBS and NBC had both established specia lines to reporters in Hopewell, New Jersey, near the Lindbergh estate. Both net works kept a constant vigil for seventy-two days until the baby's body was

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 167

found.13 On-the-spot radio reporting had been established technically and journalistically. That November the networks' coverage of the Hoover- Roosevelt election returns scooped the nation's newspapers. What came to be known as the press-radio war was on.

Meeting at their annual convention in April of 1933, the American News- paper Publishers Association voted to stop providing the networks with news bulletins and to discontinue publishing daily schedules of radio programs un- less the stations paid for them, as if they were advertising. At this time NBC an CBS had skeletal news staffs and only a few regularly scheduled news pro- grams. In 1930 Lowell Thomas and the News premiered, airing on NBC in t eastern half of the country and on CBS in the western half, and moving to NBC the following year.14 H. V. Kaltenborn, an editor at the Brooklyn Eagle who h been doing weekly commentaries on WEAF since 1922, signed with CBS in 1930. These men read and commented on the news, drawing from newspapers and the wire services. After the ANPA resolutions, both NBC and CBS began building their own news departments, with CBS's efforts being especially am- bitious. Newspapers began a CBS boycott, which included a publicity blackou of many of its sponsors.

The media historian Robert McChesney gives the best behind-the-scenes account of this "war," which, as he emphasizes, was not between radio and newspapers so much as it was between some newspapers and others. Many radio stations were owned by newspapers, and those that weren't were often af- filiated with a paper in their town. One-third of the stations in the CBS net- work, for example, were by 1932 owned by or affiliated with newspapers, which were more interested in cooperation than in war. Network executives, for their part, were concerned about an ongoing campaign by educators and reformers to limit—or even eliminate—advertising over the air, a campaign some newspapers had already endorsed because they felt radio was stealing clients from them. Broadcasters did not want to give any newspapers reason to support such regulation, especially as Congress was preparing to deliberate over what would become the landmark legislation governing broadcasting, the Communications Act of 1934.

In December of 1933, broadcasters signed on to the Biltmore agreement, in which they pledged not to broadcast any news that was less than twenty-four hours old. The news agencies would supply the networks with brief news items, which would be broadcast in two five-minute newscasts daily—one after 9:30 A.M., the other after 9:00 P.M., to "protect" the morning and evening papers. Each broadcast had to end with the line "For further details, consult your local newspaper." Commentators were not allowed to touch spot news. And CBS was to disband its fledgling news-gathering organization. Kaltenborn

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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described this as a "complete defeat for radio," and the chairman of the Scripps-Howard chain was congratulated for coming out of the negotiations "with the broadcasters' shirts, scalps, and shoelaces."15

Such postmortems were premature. Once the Communications Act was passed, and the commercial basis of American broadcasting was assured, broadcasters had little to fear from the press. Besides, the public hadn't liked the outcome of the war, telling pollsters in 1934 that they wanted more news over the air. Renegade stations, like WOR in New York, had refused to honor the agreement and aired the very sorts of news broadcasts the agreement for- bade.16 And several upstart news agencies, most notably Transradio Press, began competing with the wire services to provide breaking news to radio sta- tions. Within a year the Biltmore agreement was being widely ignored, and radio news was poised for revitalization.

Besides, in January of 1935, radio was all too happy to provide coverage of one of the decade's most sensational stories. The media circus in the mid- 1990s surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial—including the endless hype that it was the trial of the century—made it hard to remember that another trial, equally shameless in its exploitation by the press, remains a contender for that title. The Lindbergh kidnapping trial was the first nationally broadcast murder trial, and it made relatively unknown announcers national celebrities. Boake Carter was, in 1932, a print journalist who was also doing two five-minutes- day broadcasts over Philadelphia's WCAU. His boss, the owner of WCAU, wa also William Paley's brother-in-law and persuaded CBS to send him to Hopewell, New Jersey, to cover the kidnapping. The exposure helped Carter land a daily program of commentary on the CBS network. Gabriel Heatter, an- other unknown, also became a star through his coverage of the trial, especially when, on the night Bruno Hauptmann was put to death, he was forced to ad- lib on the air for fifty-five minutes because of a delay in the execution. In a fiv year period he went from making $35 a week to earning $130,000 a year.17

But one of the biggest radio stars of the trial was Walter Winchell, who had been on the air since 1930 and in 1932 had begun his Jergens Journal, whi aired on Sunday night at 9:30 on NBC-Red (one of NBC's two networks) and made him one of the highest rated commentators on the air. Listeners recalled being able to walk down the street at night and hear WinchelPs trademark rapid-fire "flashes" coming out of nearly every house on the block.18 Winchell had made his name as a gossip columnist for the New York Graphic and the the Mirror and, as his biographer Neal Gabler emphasizes, turned gossip into a commodity that coexisted on the same pages—or in the same broadcast— with news. In the process, then, he helped—for better or for worse—to rede- fine what was news and stirred up heated debate about who had the right to

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 169

shape listeners' tastes in and expectations of broadcast news. Here was another contest over the invention of broadcast news in the 1930s—would it be infor- mation, entertainment, or some hybrid of the two?

Since the "radio boom" of the early 1920s, educators, reformers, and com- mentators in the press had envisioned the social impact of radio through a Utopian lens, seeing a future in which "the masses" were "uplifted" through radio, made better educated, more appreciative of classical music and intellec- tual engagement, more rational and deliberative. These were class-bound, bourgeois hopes, and in many ways they would be dashed. For they were coun- tered by another vision of radio—as a profit-making vaudeville house on the air—which corporations and federal regulators ensured would be institution- alized.19 This was the vision Walter Winchell brought to the air, and his intu- itions about how to translate his newspaper column to radio were brilliant.

Already Winchell had seized on the post-World War I delight in slang, lac- ing his column with gaudy, inventive wordplay: "made whoopee" meant "had fun"; "Reno-vated" or "phffft" meant "divorced"; "Adam-and-Eveing it" meant "getting married." On the air—at 200 words a minute—such language inter- mixed with sound effects and WinchelPs personal, direct address to the audi- ence. Gabler perfectly captures Winchell's voice—"clipped like verbal tap shoes"—and reports that his voice went up an octave when he was on the air. Winchell opened the show with the urgent tapping of a telegraph key, which wasn't really tapping out anything resembling the Morse code but which did signify news "hot off the wire." "The big idea is for sound effect," Winchell noted, "and to set the tempo." The tapping bracketed the beginning and end of each story, and was coded to let the listener know what was coming: low- pitched clicks for domestic news, high-pitched beeps for international news. Winchell then greeted "Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea," sug- gesting, in his classic telegraphic form, that his broadcasts spanned oceans and that Mr. and Mrs. America was a national category all his listeners fit into. "I want to create as much excitement as a newsboy on the streets when he yells, 'Extry, extry, read all about it,'" he declared.20

At first the program focused almost exclusively on celebrity marriages, di- vorces, and love affairs, but gradually it combined a mix of celebrity and gang- ster gossip and national and international news. Winchell would open with an urgent "flash," often a train wreck, murder, or other disaster story. An assistant combed foreign newspapers for his "By Way of the High Seas" segment, which he introduced with the beeping sound of wireless dots and dashes.21

Critics of "mass culture" past and present have emphasized its appeal to the emotional, its cultivation of the irrational, its emphasis on romance, lost love, and melodrama in general. In other words, they have—sometimes quite con-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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sciously, sometimes not—derided mass culture as "feminine" and as contami- nating more elite, allegedly intellectually based, masculine culture with femi- nized values and attributes. His contemporaries leveled such criticisms at Winchell, who was attacked for being too emotional and too corny, and for bringing gossip into the realm of serious journalism. After all, his program was sponsored by Jergens, and his news items were interspersed with messages about "the importance of charming hands to a girl." But if we accept these cul tural constructions of what is "feminine" and what is "masculine," Winchell did represent a different kind of radio commentator than Kaltenbom, or Low- ell Thomas, and certainly Murrow. Winchell fused male power, authority, and interest in the political with hysteria, irrationality, and an interest in the inter- personal and romantic. His appeal came in part from his emotionalism and urgency, from the permission he gave men to be passionate and even irrational about issues and events. Gabler very rightly points out that the controversies surrounding Winchell in the 1930s stemmed from class-based biases about who had the right to shape the nation's cultural agenda, an educated intellec- tual like Walter Lippmann or a scrappy rabble-rouser from New York's Lower East Side like Walter Winchell. But there were also tensions here about mas- culinity, about what kinds of men deserved such power, and about what kinds of things such men should discuss and how they should discuss them. These tensions, too, shaped the evolution of broadcast news in the 1930s.

By the time of the Lindbergh trial in 1935, Winchell had become a national celebrity, and he claimed that several of his broadcasts had helped police ap- prehend Hauptmann. With the Biltmore agreement ban on radio news all but defunct, and with over 100 photographers and between 300 and 350 reporters swarming over Flemington, New Jersey, the Lindbergh trial marked another turning point in radio news. It also embodied the term media circus. The loc sheriff sold tickets to the trial; vaudeville impresarios offered witnesses con- tracts to go onstage; tourists by the busload descended on the small town. There was daily coverage of what went on in court, and NBC, the network that carried Winchell, struggled to prevent him from convicting Hauptmann on the air. Winchell ignored the network's directives and insisted that he was not "partial or biased" but simply in possession of the facts, all of which pointed to Hauptmann's guilt. In the courtroom he was as much an actor as a reporter, giving tips to the prosecution, mouthing comments to Hauptmann, sitting next to Hauptmann's wife during testimony. After this trial, writes Gabler, "the media would be as much participants in an event as reporters of i t . . . turning events into occasions, national festivals."22

In none of these stories was Winchell a dispassionate, unbiased conveyor of information. His notorious staccato style conveyed a barely repressed hyste-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 171

ria. He was a shameless self-promoter, determined to make the news as well as announce it. By the early 1940s, the announcer for the show opened the Jerge Journalby reminding listeners that Winchell's column was "in 725 newspapers from New York to Shanghai." Winchell positioned himself, whenever possible, as omniscient. In kidnapping stories he appealed to the kidnappers on the air; in murder stories he implied he might have evidence for the police. "Ladies and gentlemen, here's the absolute lowdown," he would announce, and he often re- ferred to predictions he had made that had turned out to be true—"I was right"—or speculative tips he had passed on that were subsequently verified, to reaffirm his credibility and access to inside sources.23

Nor was Winchell politically neutral. Roosevelt had called him to Wash- ington for a brief meeting shortly after the 1932 election, and Winchell became a die-hard fan, always praising FDR in his broadcasts. He also began advocat- ing economic social justice by berating the way the police and petty bureau- crats often harassed and discriminated against the poor and unemployed. By the late 1930s the administration fed Winchell news tips, inside information, and angles on FDR's policies, which Winchell happily translated into his rat-a- tat-tat, everyman's argot, wrapped up in a pro-Roosevelt spin.

Winchell was, much earlier than other commentators, an outspoken critic of Hitler and the Nazis, and a harsh critic of Chamberlain's appeasement. Yet he was at first opposed to U.S. involvement in another European war because Europe was "morally bankrupt," a frequent charge of isolationists at the time. He did, however, support U.S. preparedness. And after the fall of France he changed from isolationist to interventionist and made this clear on the air. So in 1940, with the country still divided between isolationist and international- ist sentiments, Winchell advocated a military buildup, expansion of the navy, and increased aid to the Allies. He also attacked isolationist congressmen on the air as Nazi sympathizers and announced, straight out, "I believe [the] Sen- ator is wrong." He called his isolationist listeners "Mr. and Mrs. Rip Van Win- kles" and taunted their complacency: "Don't worry about it happening over here Don't forget we have two lovely oceans—one on each side To drown in." By early 1941 he was mocking critics of his interventionist stance with the "Walter Winchell War Monger Department." He broadcast the names and addresses of people like "Maj. Johnnie Kelly" from New Jersey, a "dear, dear pal of the Nazis" or "a rabble-rouser with the initials D.S.—who really does the dirty laundry for big-name Nazi lovers in the U.S."24

Once France and England declared war on Germany, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle, knowing Winchell's politics, asked his assistant if Winchell might "help prepare the country for war," which he happily did, continuing to take the lead from the administration. Winchell's

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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assistant also fed him propaganda and intelligence supplied by the British Se- curity Coordination office, a front for a covert propaganda organization de- signed to help bring the United States into the war. This is hardly insignificant, since by late 1940 Winchell was tied with Bob Hope for the highest rated pro- gram on radio. Thus Winchell, as one of radio's most popular commentators, helped "to destroy the opposition to preparedness and soften the public toward intervention."25

Winchell had proven indispensable to the Roosevelt administration. Boake Carter—Mr. "Cheerio"—had not. By the late 1930s Carter, sponsored by Philco on CBS, had developed a national following of people who tuned in specifically to listen to his broadcast at 7:45. In 1936 he was heard over twenty three CBS stations; the next year he was heard on sixty. In Boston and Cincin nati in 1938, nearly a third of the radio audience listened to him, while over half of those in St. Louis did. In larger cities like Chicago and New York, with more stations to choose from, he was less popular, but still one-fifth tuned in to Carter. Evidence suggests that he was more popular among lower-income and rural listeners, and he was favored by Republicans and isolationists. By thi time Carter—whose publicity photos featured him in jodhpurs and riding boots—broadcast from his studio-equipped estate outside of Philadelphia. Larry LeSueur, who would soon become one of the "Murrow Boys," was the poor guy back at CBS who fed Carter information about the day's events from a Teletype machine in New York.26

Carter had the classic deep radio voice, and he affected upper-class pro- nunciations, as when he pronounced military "mili-tree." He asserted that Arthur Morgan, the head of the TVA, had been fired for being "contumacious." Purple prose and cliches often dominated his reports: "Thus when the shad- ows of two mailed fists etched their dark outlines across war-torn, fire-ridden Madrid today, there stretched another dark shadow across the whole of Eu- rope." His reading of the news was rapid, urgent, and dramatic, yet filled with the appropriate timing and pauses, as if he were reading a story to a bright child. Then he would segue into reading an ad for his sponsor, first Philco and then Post Toasties, as if there was no distinction between performing the news and performing a commercial. Another famous news commentator of the time, Edwin C. Hill, billed as "the best dressed newspaper man in New York," wore pince-nez with a black silk ribbon fluttering from them.27 These were faux upper-class fops who did no reporting but who often voiced strong opinions.

Carter can be thought of in some ways as the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s. He was popular, in part, because he was controversial. He hated Roosevelt and liberal politics, views he happily shared with his radio audience. In addition to reading predigested news, Carter repeatedly unburdened himself of his

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 173

anti-New Deal and isolationist sentiments on the air, even supporting, for ex- ample, Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria in March of 1938, the Anschluss, a a welcome corrective to the Versailles Treaty. In the Russo-Japanese border dis- pute in 1938, he sided with the Japanese.28 But, most important, whatever the international crisis, he advocated that America focus on itself and stay out of foreign affairs. Carter accused the president of trying to pay less income tax than he owed and of causing a senator's fatal heart attack. The Roosevelt ad- ministration, whose members referred to him as "Croak Carter," were incensed by his increasingly virulent attacks on New Deal initiatives.

But Carter's partisanship wasn't his only problem. His commentary was often filled with "innuendo, invective, distortion, and misinformation" instead of facts, and by the winter of 1938 he sounded not like a newsman but like a shrill demagogue. He didn't act as a reporter; he didn't check his sources; he often deliberately misinformed his audience. This didn't upset just those po- litically opposed to him. It upset important General Foods stockholders, gov- ernment officials, and other corporate leaders.29 Like Father Coughlin, Carter became more extreme in his views, and more deluded about his invulnerabil- ity, the longer he stayed on the air.

By 1937 the White House had three agencies investigating Carter, and ad- ministration officials put pressure on William Paley to pull him off the air. That same year, during the Little Steel strike, Carter began attacking the CIO, and the union responded by voting to boycott Philco products. Philco canceled its contract to sponsor Carter in February 1938, but CBS received so many angry letters from listeners that when General Foods—whose chairman of the board hated the New Deal and organized labor—offered to step in as sponsor, Carter got a temporary reprieve. Now the administration went straight to Paley, suggesting that it might be time for the FCC to seriously investigate mo- nopoly practices in the broadcasting industry. Paley pulled Carter off CBS for good in August 1938.30

The timing could not have been better for CBS. The kind of news that was gripping the nation's attention now was breaking news about the crisis in Eu- rope, news that required reporters to be on the scene and witnessing with their own eyes what was going on in Poland, Vienna, Berlin, and London. In August, as Hitler made it clear that the Sudetenland belonged to Germany, Chamber- lain warned that an invasion of Czechoslovakia would mean world war. As the crisis evolved in September, Americans were riveted to their radio sets. As Sudeten Germans held mass rallies in favor of union with the Reich, and 20,000 rallied in Madison Square Garden in support of the Czechs, Chamber- lain met with Hitler on September 15 and again one week later, finally signing the Munich accord on the thirtieth.

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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By this time listening to the radio was the nation's favorite recreational ac- tivity, according to a Fortune poll. And nearly a quarter of the respondents no got most of their news solely from the radio, while another 28 percent relied on both radio and newspapers. News broadcasts were listeners' third favorite type of program, and "the combined popularity of the two leading commen- tators, Boake Carter and Lowell Thomas [this was just before Carter's sacking], nearly equaled that of the two leading entertainers." These news commentators had national audiences, and each was "capable of becoming the most potent voice in the land." "By an inflection of the voice, a suggestive pause, he may nearly as effectively color the meaning of the news as by rigorous editing of the script from which he reads." In another poll published in 1940, Fortune re- ported that when asked, "Who is your favorite radio commentator?" 38.0 per- cent said they had no favorite. Of those who did, Lowell Thomas was the favorite; he was chosen by one-quarter of all those polled. H. V. Kaltenborn wa next, chosen by 20.0 percent of respondents, but he was the favorite of those from the upper-income brackets and the professional classes. Carter, once so popular, was now chosen by only 6.0 percent of those polled and was beaten b Edwin C. Hill (9.3 percent) and Walter Winchell (6.8 percent), who was cho- sen as people's favorite syndicated columnist, especially if they were lower mid- dle class or poor. The audience for news shows was greatest on the Pacific coas with those in the Northeast coming in second, and these listeners often listened to more than one news show. Those in the "isolationist Midwest," as Business Week put it, were the least likely to tune in to the news.31

Those who preferred radio news offered the obvious reasons: they got the news more quickly, it took less time to find out what was going on, and they found it more interesting and entertaining. As Fortune wrote, those who in th past might have gone out for a newspaper extra now "are likely instead to watch the clock for the hour to turn on the world's routine news And what they hear," enthused the magazine, "is likely to sound so authentic, and personal, and vibrant, and final, that the next day's paper will seem like warmed over Monday hash not worth bothering with. This is an aggressive faculty of radio that is not likely to weaken with the years."32

In Radio and the Printed Page, published in 1940, the ORR also examin the extent to which radio news might be supplanting newspapers. By this time there were regularly scheduled fifteen-minute news shows, plus five-minute news bulletins. The study reminds us how much of this history has disap- peared—while it's possible to hear a few surviving broadcasts of the major network reporters and commentators, the local newscasters, who dominated the air in the late 1930s, are lost to us. So it is important to remember that there were four times as many locally originated news programs as national ones: 80

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 175

percent of news reports came from local stations and featured local commen- tators. Of the more than nine hundred stations on the air in the early 1940s, 43 percent were not affiliated with any of the networks, and three-quarters used 1,000 watts or less.33

By 1939, according to the ORR, 61.5 percent of Americans listened regu- larly to radio news shows and were deliberately tuning in to them. Radio had not yet replaced the newspaper, but people were using a mix of both to get their news. As the war in Europe intensified, most people were poised between two media with distinct but overlapping qualities. Radio had obvious advantages: it was often first with breaking news, it was "free," you could get the news whil doing something else, and listeners often felt transported to the scene of the event. Newspapers, by contrast, provided pictures of many people and events, allowed readers to pick and chose what they wanted to read, and choose the time to read as well, provided more in-depth coverage, and offered specialized coverage of financial news, society, and so forth.

Again, using class as a way to categorize listeners, ORR researchers found that radio news was preferred over newspapers as the listeners' economic sta- tus went down, and women greatly preferred hearing the news over the radio. So did young people, who constituted the first "radio generation," and those who lived in rural areas. The ORR also found that over 50 percent of high- income and professional men listened to political radio commentators, but only 37 percent of unskilled workers and men on relief did so. Fortune, in it 1938 survey, put it slightly differently: "News is welcomed by twice as many of the poor as of the prosperous Housekeepers (who like to listen while they work), wage earners, and the unemployed rank by occupation at the head of radio news fans."34 While researchers sought to neatly demarcate those who preferred getting their news from newspapers and those who preferred radio, they found considerable overlap, especially during political campaigns, when radio seemed, to voters, "to give more clues about the personality of a candi- date."

Using Cincinnati as one case study, the ORR documented that by the late 1930s radio was giving much more attention to international news than news- papers did, and more than 90 percent of those the ORR polled said that radio news had increased their interest in foreign affairs. Another study, of listeners in Buffalo, found that the five commentators people listened to most were Boake Carter, H. V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas, Edwin C. Hill, and Walter Winchell. As the CBS commentator Elmer Davis heard from his friend Bernar De Voto, who was traveling in the West, "Everybody was listening to you, learn ing from you, and applying you. The radio had completely repaired the failure of the press, which appalled m e . . . the war news in the local papers would av-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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erage between a half and three quarters of a column." Radio listeners, he re- ported, "had the most astonishing amount of information about the war."35

Without images, there was a need for the newscaster to use his voice to dra matize events, and this often made broadcast news more emotional. The ORR claimed that in radio news there was an emphasis on conflict and more focus on crime and its prosecution. Radio, of course, was ideally suited to breaking news about natural disasters and accidents, and about the latest events in the European and Sino-Japanese wars.

Broadcast news created a sense of intimate participation in "a larger world." "The radio signals, coming instantaneously often from the very scenes of events and entering directly into the home, gave listeners a feeling of per- sonal touch with the world that possibly no other medium could provide."36

Radio relieved suspense about "what happened" in the course of a news story's narrative, and it did so faster than newspapers. Thus it intensified excitement about the news. One thing was clear: radio cultivated, especially among women, people of lower-income levels, and those living in rural areas, a greater interest in the news, and for many of these groups an interest they didn't pre- viously have.

By 1938, especially in the aftermath of the Anschluss, NBC and CBS wer competing to scoop each other with breaking news in Europe. (By comparison, radio before 1941 devoted very little coverage to China, Japan, and the rest of Asia.)37 This was a very new development—"news," such as it was, directly fro Europe had previously consisted of coronations, debates at the League of Na- tions, or speeches and concerts transmitted from abroad. The job of the for- eign correspondent was to find and book such events. But now the networks were setting up news divisions: CBS hired Edward R. Murrow, who in turn hired Bill Shirer, Larry LeSueur, Eric Sevareid, and the others who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.

Max Jordan of NBC, known as Ubiquitous Max, had signed exclusive con- tracts with various state-owned radio systems, including those in Germany and Austria, which gave NBC access to their broadcast facilities. CBS re- sponded by initiating, in March of 1938, the first of its news roundups, which brought the reports of foreign correspondents directly into Americans' living rooms. By 1940 MBS—the Mutual Broadcasting System, established in 1934— devoted much of its evening programming to news. NBC provided at least seven news summaries through the day, from 7:55 in the morning until 1:57 the following morning. And now, on a regular basis, Americans could hear, live, speeches by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, or Daladier, translated on the spot, if necessary, by network announcers. Fifty years later listeners recalled vividly what it was like to hear Hitler's frantic, sometimes screaming voice live

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 177

on the radio, often, given the time difference, first thing in the morning as they were going to work, and how the sound of his voice alone convinced them that danger was ahead.38

Shortwave transmission, pioneered by the hams, was now invaluable to the networks: it was the only way such news bulletins could travel from Berlin or London to New York. The networks also had "shortwave listening posts" in New York, where those fluent in foreign languages monitored international shortwave broadcasts. NBC correspondents in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Geneva broadcast via shortwave to RCA's enormous receiving facilities at Riverhead, Long Island. If the correspondent wasn't in or near a studio, he would phone in his report, which was then carried by phone lines and possi- bly even cables to the shortwave transmitter before crossing the Atlantic.39

From Riverhead the reports were sent by telephone line to a master control room in Radio City, from where they went out by wire to NBC affiliates around the country. Those affiliates then broadcast the transmissions on the AM band.

CBS's technical challenge in doing the news roundup involved even more than getting the shortwave broadcasts across the Atlantic; technicians also needed to connect the various correspondents to one another. Murrow in Lon- don, Shirer in Berlin, Trout in the New York studio, and the others had to be able to hear one another—which required multiple shortwave channels—but not to hear themselves, which would have produced lag and interference. The frequency that each correspondent would use—a CBS report from Berlin in 1938, for example, broadcast on 25.2 meters, or 11,870 kilohertz—had to be cabled to New York in advance.40 Everything had to be timed to the second as New York shifted from one European city, and one frequency, to another.

But shortwave transmission had its problems. Precisely because short- waves were reflected back to the earth by the ionosphere, they were subject to its seasonal, weekly, even hourly vagaries as the ionosphere billowed, ebbed and flowed, and responded to magnetic pushes and pulls no one could see or predict. Engineers would test and clear a frequency only to find that, a few hours later, transmissions no longer came through. Shortwave sounded tinny and remote. Worse, it was subject to interference from bad weather and sunspots, and was sometimes accompanied by whines and crackles. Some correspondents sounded like they were underwater. Or there was an under- current of quasi-musical tones that sounded like slowed-down and muted jack-in-the-box music. Often a constant undercurrent of high-pitched Morse code accompanied the broadcast. Sometimes the broadcasts didn't come in at all, or cut off in the middle. Trout, from the studio in New York, would in- troduce a report from Finland by saying, "Go ahead, Helsinki," only to hear nothing in reply. "This is Bob Trout calling Helsinki, go ahead Finland."

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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Nothing. "Apparently we shall be unable to contact Finland." This was not an unusual occurrence. During the Munich crisis, Bill Shirer broadcast for two days from Prague, only to learn later that Atlantic storms, as well as govern- ment interference for official messages, prevented nearly all of his dispatches from coming through.41

This actually heightened the romance of hearing the New York an- nouncer's voice imploring the ether with "America calling Prague; America calling Berlin; come in, London" and to hear Shirer answer, "Hello, America, hello, CBS, this is Berlin," as if the announcer embodied the city itself. The ver auditory drawbacks of shortwave made this news listening all the more com- pelling as an auditory experience. You were inclined to lean closer, to try to use your body to help pull him in yourself. And listeners came to understand a semiotics of sound, as different sound quality itself signified the genre, the ur- gency, and the importance of the broadcast. Between 1933 and 1937 the sales of "all-wave" receivers, which allowed listeners to tune in European broadcasts for themselves, had soared from 100,000 to over 3 million.42

What did listeners to the first CBS roundup hear on March 13,1938? They heard an act of interruption—"We interrupt our regularly scheduled broad- cast"—that broke up the easy, patterned flow of radio entertainment and an- nounced the urgency of the news program, the importance of world affairs, and the credibility of the reporters standing by. In the wake of the Anschlus Bob Trout in New York announced, "The program of St. Louis Blues, normal scheduled for this time, has been canceled." Instead, "To bring you the picture of Europe tonight, Columbia now presents a special broadcast which will in- clude pickups direct from London, from Paris, and other capitals in Europe." His tone was urgent yet conversational. "Tonight the world trembles, torn by conflicting forces. Throughout this day, event has crowded upon event in tu- multuous Austria News has flowed across the Atlantic in a steady stream." His language was straightforward and anchored in facts as he outlined troop movements and anti-German demonstrations in London, but he shifted easily to the colloquial, as when he noted that Chamberlain and his aides "put their heads together" to consider the crisis. And Trout's language was hardly neutral. "Right at this moment, Austria is no longer a nation Austria and Germany are being welded together under one command... the Nazis are driving with all their might to bring Austria under complete Nazi domination." He an- nounced that Jews and Catholics were being jailed.

He used language that helped listeners see and even hear what it had been like, and related the recent events to those that Americans might remember or have participated in. "The Associated Press says you have to visualize what hap pened in every city, town, and hamlet of the United States in 1918 on Armistic

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 179

Day" to get a sense of the celebrations that accompanied the Nazi march into Vienna. "Masses of shouting, singing, flag-waving Viennese milled around, marched through the streets saluting and yelling the Nazi call 'hail victory' [which Trout delivered as a cheer]. Truckloads of men, women, and children— there were even mothers with babies in their arms—rolled through the streets setting up a terrific racket. It seemed as if the whole population was in the streets." How did the takeover sound? There was a "switch of coffeehouse music from the old, graceful Viennese waltzes to new, German, brisk martial airs." Trout acknowledged that it was hard to know how the Austrians really felt and told his listeners that the Nazis had taken over the press and radio: "They are out to control everything."43

"And now," announced Trout, "Columbia begins its radio tour of Europe's capital cities, with transoceanic pickup from London We take you now to London, England." The word tour suggested a visual experience and transoceanic an almost physical vaulting over the Atlantic. Throughout the w the network made a point of presenting itself as the agent of transport to Eu- rope, to the site of news in the making, as its announcer declaimed, "We take you now to ..." Bill Shirer, who had witnessed the Anschluss and had just flow in to do the broadcast, compared what he'd seen in Austria and London. "What happened was this," the easygoing translator explained. Describing the anti- German demonstrations in London, Shirer noted, "I must say, that after the delirious mobs I saw in Vienna on Friday night," the demonstrations in Lon- don "looked pretty tame." After Edward R. Murrow's report from Vienna, from which he promised an "eyewitness account" of Hitler's entry into the city the next day, he said, "We return you now to America."

As the war spread, with the Nazis conquering Czechoslovakia in March of 1939 and Poland that September, and France and England immediately de- claring war on Germany, radio correspondents became reporters and teachers, providing essential instruction in geography and in how to read and decon- struct government communique's. This was especially critical because all the news coming out of Germany was heavily censored.

And while we may know these reporters today as Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer, or Robert Trout, on the air they introduced themselves, at least at the beginning of their radio careers, before they became institutions, as Ed, Bill, and Bob—regular guys who didn't need or want pretentious names like Boake or Edwin or Gabriel. And, tellingly, the New York anchor, when intro- ducing Murrow or one of the others from overseas, did not say "Here's our cor- respondent in London" but rather "Here's our man in London, Ed Murrow." According to Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in The Murrow Boys, Murro was determined that CBS newsmen not come across as upper-class pedants, or

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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as breakneck-speed hysterics selling an artificial sense of urgency. They were to be neither in the mansion with Carter nor in the gutter with Winchell.

These men spoke to and for everyday Americans in a conversational, per- sonal style, often using /, which some of their counterparts in the print media could not. Murrow's hallmark, and the one he wanted his "boys" to adopt, was to create concrete mental images—of what shopping for food was now like, or sleeping, or crossing the street—of how the war was affecting everyday people. Such details made a story told with words but not pictures more vivid and im- mediate; they also cultivated identification and empathy in the listener. Mur- row especially hated purple prose and instructed one reporter, "Don't say the streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman I usually say hello to every morning is not there today."44 Nor did their voices have to be standard radio issue—Shirer's voice was actually somewhat thin and nasal by radio an- nouncer standards, but by the standards of how a lot of everyday men sounded, his voice was refreshingly natural. Nor did Eric Sevareid have the classic baritone radio voice. As he and Shirer broadcast from European capitals in the throes of war, the very timbre of their voices affirmed the bravery of reg- ular guys.

Although these men were becoming experts in European politics and warfare, they made it seem normal to discuss such things in everyday terms. They used the first and second person to address their listeners directly and involve them in what the war felt like. Shirer, whose account of his broadcasts from Germany, Berlin Diary, became an immediate best-seller, was the mo adept at and comfortable with assuming a relaxed and intimate style of re- porting. He told listeners that the Germans' bombing an undefended town in Poland "reminded me of the coaches of champion football teams at home, who sit calmly on the sidelines and watch the machines they created do their stuff." You could hear papers rustling and a chair creaking in the studio dur- ing his broadcasts, yet you felt he was really chatting, not reading a script. "I'm afraid I cannot arouse much interest by going through the German press with you tonight," he told his listeners on November 1, 1939, referring familiarly to his ritual of sharing with Americans what was being reported in the German newspapers so they'd understand what government control of the press meant and how thorough the Nazi propaganda machine was. Shirer introduced reports with "Incidentally" or "Well" or "What happened was this," just as you would at the dinner table. He spoke to the audience as if they were equals, explaining what they couldn't know because they were in the States but also addressing them as informed adults, with asides such as "the official position, as you know.. "45

Murrow could be informal too, and, like Shirer, he often reported what was

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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being said in the British press. Citing an item from the newspaper he was about to read, Murrow admitted, "I don't know why I give it to you, it just caught my eye. Here it is," as if he were reading it to you in your living room. Murrow also moved between being a teacher and acting as if his audience was already well- informed. He would preface his reports with "You're already aware" or "As you know." But he also educated. For example, he explained that there was a possi- bility in England of compulsory evacuation of people and animals; "in other words, if the government says 'go,' you've got to go whether you like it or not." Compulsory billeting meant that if "you had a house in the country with an extra room, the government might billet, without your consent, two or three people in that room." In commenting on Soviet foreign policy, Murrow noted, "Those surprising Russians keep handing out surprises." The Murrow Boys' broadcasts were sophisticated and simple at the same time. They were also si- multaneously ethnocentric and international in their language and viewpoint. And Murrow himself couldn't resist reminding his listeners of what CBS was providing. "I'm not boasting when I tell you that you're getting as much infor- mation as the average Britisher."46

By the standards of Boake Carter, these broadcasts were much more objec- tive. And Ed Klauber, William Paley's personal assistant, had imposed certain guidelines for CBS news. In the aftermath of the Carter contretemps, Paley as- serted that CBS "must never have an editorial page." Klauber elaborated: "Co lumbia . . . has no editorial positions about the war." Thus, its reporters "must not express their own feelings." Commentators should "not do the judging" for the listener. The voicing of opinions should be confined to political round ta- bles and other similar broadcasts where opposing views could be aired. "An un excited demeanor at the microphone should be maintained at all times," added Klauber.47 He was especially emphatic about emotionalism in the news: this was a male preserve, and real men did not show their emotions; they conveyed "the facts" without revealing what might be in their hearts.

Again, such standards did not emerge from any high-minded ideals about objectivity. FDR had hardly ignored the fact that in the 1936 campaign most of the country's editorial pages had opposed his reelection. Support for him and for the New Deal had been achieved very much through his administration's adroit and calculated use of radio. But by 1940 more than one-third of the country's radio stations were owned by newspapers. FDR regarded this as a di- rect threat to his policies. The FCC in 1938 began an investigation into mo- nopoly practices—what was called chain broadcasting—in the industry. Privately, the president in 1940 asked the new FCC chairman, Lawrence Fly, "Will you let me know when you propose to have a hearing on newspaper ownership of radio stations?" Publicly, through his press secretary, Steve Early,

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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Roosevelt told broadcasters that "the government is watching" to see if they air any "false news." Radio, Early warned, "might have to be taught manners if it were a bad child." Network executives understood "false news" to be news crit ical of the administration's policies.48

Commentators were now called analysts, and they were not to indulge in editorializing on the air. Nor were CBS reporters to reveal any emotion or bias They were not supposed to say "I believe" or "I think" but instead to use phrases like "it is said" or "there are those who believe" or "some experts have come to the conclusion." Nonetheless, Bill Shirer "made radio history" The New York Times noted in 1943, "by editorializing in his broadcasts from Na Germany." And H. V. Kaltenborn, who thought the distinction between "com- mentator" and "analyst" preposterous, continued to express his opinions. He couldn't say "I think" or assert that some German communique" was an out- and-out lie? Well, then, he would say, "No one who has the slightest idea of the facts of this war believes these German propaganda claims." Kaltenborn also got pressure from his sponsor's ad agency to tone down his opinions so as not to alienate listeners.49

Once France and Britain declared war on Germany in the fall of 1939, the networks agreed that their commentators would not discuss how the United States should respond to Hitler. In May of 1941 the FCC, in what came to be called the Mayflower decision, ruled that "the broadcaster cannot be an advo cate," thereby forbidding editorializing on the air. In practice this was impos- sible, especially as Shirer, Kaltenborn, Murrow, and others were deeply antifascist and anti-isolationist. They didn't have to say "I think" to convey a very decided point of view. Happily for the networks, their views supported Roosevelt's policies. But even tone of voice was to be regulated: Eric Sevareid was reprimanded when his voice cracked during a broadcast. The CBS news- man, warned Paul White from New York, should not "display a tenth of the emotion that a broadcaster does when describing a prizefight," even if thou- sands had just died.50

The struggle over what objectivity meant and how it was to be achieved constituted an ongoing experiment during the years before America's entry into the war. And let's keep in mind that it wasn't just government officials, network executives, and reporters who participated in this struggle—so did politicians, owners of local radio stations, the general public, and, notably, sponsors. Corporate executives who had their products advertised on the air were more likely to be conservative than liberal, and they were extremely wary of antagonizing listeners with isolationist attitudes. When they didn't like the opinions or slant they heard on "their" newscast, they first tried to reason with the newsman and his bosses. If that failed they would simply terminate their

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 183

contract to sponsor the show, which often meant that the newsman in ques- tion lost his time slot.

What counted as opinion, and which kinds of opinions were more accept- able on the air, plagued newsmen who had been to Europe and felt they had a crucial perspective that most Americans did not. Eric Sevareid, after he re- turned from Europe in late 1940, found that his anti-isolationist bias provoked repeated outcries from congressmen, station managers, and his bosses. Edward R. Murrow confessed to a friend as early as 1938 that "I am finding it more an more difficult to suppress my personal convictions." On the air he insisted that he and Shirer in Berlin were "both trying to do the same thing. Trying to bring you as much news as we can, avoiding so far as is humanly possible being too much influenced by the atmosphere in which we work."51 So, while bowing to the ideal of objectivity, he also suggested that any reasonable person would find it impossible to maintain a stance of pure unbias under the circumstances.

One way Murrow got around the rules was to read to his American listen- ers excerpts from the British newspapers, which he carefully chose as Congress launched its neutrality debate in the fall of 1939. For example, on September 20 he read an editorial from the Evening Standard predicting that England an France could be facing a "Nazi-Bolshevik Bloc stretching from the Rhine to the Pacific Ocean. If this is so, we shall be justified in hoping that the rest of the civ- ilized nations, and among them, the greatest, who want us to destroy this men- ace, will lend us aid more material than their prayers." During the same broadcast Eric Sevareid reported how the French, once armed with "the new, fast, American planes, the Curtis planes with the Pratt and Whitney motors," were able to down German Messerschmitts, thus flattering Americans into see- ing the merits of military aid. David Culbert in News for Everyman argues tha the period between September 1939 and September 1940 marked a crucial turning point in what was considered objective. In 1939 the networks refused to allow the broadcast of an air-raid alert because it was "unneutral." One year later, in one of his most famous broadcasts from London, Murrow took his mi- crophone outside so that Americans could hear the sirens warning of another imminent bombing by the Luftwaffe. Variety, ridiculing some of the rules go erning broadcast objectivity, asked, "Who doesn't want England to win?"52

American correspondents in Berlin before America's ê ntry into the war had their scripts previewed at least thirty minutes before broadcast by censors representing the military, the German Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Pro- paganda. Because CBS, NBC, and Mutual broadcast from the same tiny studio, a fourth censor in the control room, following their preapproved scripts, could cut them off the second they deviated from the text. Nonetheless, broadcasts critical of the Nazis got through. Bill Shirer, reporting from Berlin in January

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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of 1940, read an official German communique—a common practice for cor- respondents—announcing that a Dutch airplane had "violated German terri- tory" Shirer, as usual, addressed his audience as if he and they were sitting in a living room together. "Reading this communique' a few minutes before I went on the air this morning, I was struck by that last sentence," he said, letting lis- teners in on his own thoughts. "Note that the communique does not specify whether the Dutch plane was a military or a civil machine," he instructed his listeners. He gave those back home a geography lesson, describing the alleged flight plan of the plane. He tried to get clarification, but "being a Sunday, it wa difficult to contact" German officials. Listeners felt they were getting an inside, eyewitness account. Shirer had to struggle not to yell "bullshit" into the mike after reading most German communique's.53

When he was done, Bob Trout in New York suggested, "Now let's call in our correspondent in London for a report." Here listeners heard the famous introduction "This [pause] is London." Murrow was interviewing an RAF pilot who, for security reasons, could not give his name. Murrow's purpose was clear—to showcase the bravery and endurance of the British military, particularly of the pilots, whom Murrow held in special awe, and to bring alive what American supplies meant to the British a full year before Lend- Lease. The pilot described his engagement with German planes, several of which he downed. He told his American audience that he was especially happy with the plane he flew, which was American and heated. Murrow then praised the pilot's "sheer gallantry and courage." Murrow was an interna- tionalist who believed America had moral obligations to democracies abroad. He was up against a recent poll in which 66 percent of respondents had an- swered no to the question "Do you think the United States should do every- thing possible to help England and France win the war, even at the risk of getting into the war ourselves?"54

By the fall of 1940 Murrow was less circumspect and insisted that Amer- ica become Britain's "fighting ally." Yet he also made periodic efforts to con- form to the network's guidelines about objectivity. In December of 1940 he reported that the British overwhelmingly had wanted Roosevelt to win the election and, more to the point, wanted the country to abandon its neutral- ity since most agreed that victory couldn't be achieved without American help. "There are no indications that any British minister is going to urge you to declare war against the Axis," advised Murrow, but the British believed that "a democratic nation at peace cannot render full and effective support to a nation at war." Of course, this is what Murrow believed. But he added, "As a reporter I'm concerned to report this development, not to evaluate it in terms of personal approval or disapproval." Nonetheless, at the height of

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 185

Murrow's coverage of the Blitz, public opinion had turned around, with 52 percent favoring more aid to Britain.55

Until 1940, when Kaltenborn moved to NBC, the news roundup was fol- lowed by his commentary and analysis. Although Kaltenborn had been a reg- ular commentator on CBS since 1930, it was his round-the-clock coverage of the Munich crisis in September of 1938 that made him famous. In eighteen days he made somewhere between eighty-five and one hundred broadcasts, bringing thousands of new listeners to CBS and receiving 50,000 fan letters. Kaltenborn was also known for his simultaneous translations and analyses of Hitler's speeches to the Reichstag as they came to America live via shortwave. He so embodied the archetypal radio commentator that the following year he played himself in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Kaltenborn, along with R mond Gram Swing at Mutual, added another element to the construction of journalistic objectivity on the air: unlike Boake Carter and Gabriel Heatter, they refused to read the commercials sponsoring their shows. They insisted that the news be separated from the ads, and that a newsman could not be ex- pected to report a fact-based story one minute and sell a product the next.56

Since Murrow and his "boys" were foreign correspondents, writing and re- porting the news and not, at first, tied in with sponsors, the separation of the news from sales pitches became institutionalized by the early 1940s.

Although he was raised in Milwaukee, Kaltenborn had just the slightest hint of what sounded like a Scottish accent, which added a tone of authority without sounding upper-class. He sometimes rolled his fs, and Russia became "R-rush-shee-ia."57 His broadcasts had a rhythmic cadence to them, and his language constantly moved between the academic and lofty on the one hand and the conversational and colloquial on the other. His approach was to have his listeners hear him sort out the wheat from the chaff, as when he would in- troduce a story with "Here's an important piece of news."

On June 3, 1940, after the Germans had conquered Belgium and the Netherlands and were on their way to Paris, which they would occupy on the fourteenth, Kaltenborn analyzed the meaning of a rumor that Hitler was ready to talk peace with France. An official communique from Berlin denounced the rumor as absurd. "What this suggests," instructed Kaltenborn, was the exis- tence of a faction in the government or the military that did want peace and sought to leak it as a possibility. "All their stuff is censored," he explained. "When they talk peace over the radio, or over the cables, it's because someone in Germany wants them to talk peace and lets them talk peace." Each commu nique" or government statement was followed by an explanation, which began with "What this shows" or "it means," so that listeners understood behind-the- scenes strategies, learned how to see beyond the surface content of commu-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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niqu6s, and grasped the often subtle ways propaganda worked.58 Kaltenborn then discussed Charles Lindbergh's recent neutrality speech, which he cast as "unfortunate," and reported that "reaction in the United States was not favor- able." To drive home his point, he read an extensive denunciation of the speech by a U.S. senator.

As the Germans advanced on Paris, Kaltenborn (now on NBC) drew the audience in. "Hitler has no time to lose, that's the thing to bear in mind," he in- structed. While the Allies—which Kaltenborn pronounced "M-lies"—still had time on their side, Kaltenborn lectured, "Obviously, they don't have as much time as they thought, and certainly we know now that they did not utilize their time to the greatest advantage." Then he really built up steam and raised his voice: "They wasted it in keeping a man like Chamberlain in office who co tinued to temporize and hope for the best while the situation was developing." He added hopefully that "man for man, the French army is as good, if not bet- ter, than any in the world," and thus France wouldn't collapse overnight the way Poland and Czechoslovakia had. Relying now on a direct, personal address to his listeners, he said, "Don't expect to get the same decisive results that we got in the earlier part of the German drive on the western front when they were, after all, tackling an enemy very much inferior to themselves."

Newsmen drew maps in listeners' heads, describing the geography of a re- gion to help people understand where they were. French pronunciations were sometimes mangled, as when Seine was pronounced "sane" or Le Havre be- came "Le Hah-vera." But what mattered was the way these countries became less remote, less easy to push out of one's mental landscape. Kaltenborn—who gave away maps of Europe to listeners so they could locate the places he men- tioned on the air—described where the Somme was in relation to the English Channel, and after mentioning the town Noyon added, "That's only sixty miles north of Paris." He adored radio's capacity to induce a powerful feeling of psy- chic and geographic transport. In / Broadcast the Crisis, he wrote to his au ence, "I look upon most of you who are reading this book as old traveling companions. We traveled far together in September."59 Newsmen would lay out the route of the Loire River and describe "the ancient and picturesque city of Rouen." When an announcer said, "I return you now to Columbia, New York," he was the listeners' vehicle of transport.

Commenting on the recent tax increase to support the defense effort, Kaltenborn chastised his countrymen, but note that he used the third person instead of the second, so that his listeners were not implicated. "Americans are rather insensitive to what's going on in the world, a great many of them. Per- haps if they can begin to feel it in their tax bills immediately they may become a little more concerned, a little less sure that we can do what we please in the

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 187

new world without paying attention to the old." By June of 1940 many of Kaltenborn's broadcasts urged more U.S. aid to Britain.60

It was commentary like this that led isolationist groups in America to at- tack Kaltenborn for trying to stir up war hysteria. America First, one of the pre- miere isolationist groups, reportedly approached his sponsor to try to mute his opinions. The isolationist magazine Scribner's Commentator charged that "h broadcasts are as packed with Go To War jingoism as any on the airwaves."61

Before U.S. entry into World War II, Murrow, Shirer, and Kaltenborn ad- hered narrowly to network directives or developed their own methods to ap- pear objective. But what they chose to bring to the nation's attention, and their subtle but persistent assumption of a "we" that shared a national consensus naturalized an internationalist point of view as obvious. When Kaltenborn an- nounced, during the Lend-Lease debate in Congress, "We are committed ir- revocably to helping the British cause—that is a major fact," he wasn't just stating his opinion. He was asserting the existence of a national consensus and embedding that consensus in a framework of "common sense."62

This was, of course, radio's first war, and once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the government was going to have to figure out its relationship with broadcast news. The timing was rotten. Industry-government relations were at a new low: in May of 1941 the FCC issued its Report on Chain Broadcasting attack on monopoly conditions in the industry. Among other things the report ordered that RCA, which operated two networks, NBC-Red and NBC-Blue, di- vest itself of one. It gave stations more power when negotiating with the net- works they were tied to: an affiliate could reject any network show it felt did not serve the public; affiliates were bound to a network for only a year at a time, instead of five as previously mandated by the networks; affiliates could air pro- grams from other networks if they wanted. The networks were also forbidden from owning more than one station in the same "service area," which meant that NBC would have to sell stations in New York, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco. The networks were outraged, claiming the new rules would "threaten the very existence of present network broadcasting service." NBC and CBS filed suit in October to have the regulations struck down.63 (In 1943 the Supreme Court upheld the FCC.) In this acrimonious atmosphere, two months later the industry and the government found themselves in the first radio war.

It was radio that flashed the news across the country on that Sunday after- noon less than three weeks before Christmas. Sunday afternoon programming usually consisted of public affairs shows and classical music. NBC-Red, for ex- ample, was about to broadcast its University of Chicago Roundtable. CBS just finished a talk about labor sponsored by the CIO. Fans listening to the

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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Dodgers-Giants football game over Mutual got the news first, at 2:26. At 2:31 John Daly broke into the CBS network, stumbling over the pronunciation of Oahu as he announced, "The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack was also made on naval and military activities on the principal island of Oahu" At 2:39 Albert Warner, at CBS's desk in Washington, announced the attacks on bases in Manila. Sta- tions all over the country abandoned their scheduled programming, many staying on the air around the clock. CBS continued airing its Sunday concerts but interrupted them incessantly. The FCC immediately ordered the shutdown of all amateur stations, and some stations on the West Coast went off the air for fear their broadcasts could be used by the enemy to home in on targets. The Naval Observatory stopped broadcasting weather forecasts. Some stations hired extra guards to protect their transmitters. On Monday 79 percent of all homes in the country tuned in to hear Roosevelt's famous "day that will live in infamy" speech, requesting a declaration of war. The next day an estimated 60 to 90 million Americans—the largest audience up to that time—listened to Roosevelt's fireside chat as he told the country, "We are now in this war. We ar in it—all the way."64

Given that radio was indispensable to getting out urgent information, to generating and sustaining support for the war effort, and to keeping up morale, how would the government handle its management? The precedents set during World War I by the Committee on Public Information, America's first ministry of propaganda, had not been happy. Then the government took over all commercial wireless stations. Censorship of journals and magazines, especially as imposed by the overzealous postmaster general, Albert Sidney Burleson, was draconian. News was tightly controlled by the government, and the CPI manipulated information as it saw fit, leading George Creel, its direc- tor, to write a book in the early 1920s boasting How We Advertised the W Postwar revelations about the distortions and lies involved in British propa- ganda, and about the cynical way the CPI represented the progress of the war to Americans, meant that a similarly tightfisted control now would actually be counterproductive.

Despite the fears of many in the industry, the government did not take over radio but instead sought a close, cooperative relationship based on voluntary codes of censorship. The National Association of Broadcasters developed such a code, which included instructions not to broadcast anything "which might unduly affect the listener's peace of mind." And CBS updated the Klauber guidelines of 1939, insisting on an "unexcited demeanor" before the mike. Yet obviously pretenses to strict objectivity were silly now; on the contrary, as one CBS memo advised its news staff, the American people must constantly be re-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 189

minded that "this is a war for the preservation of democracy," and listeners must "always be kept vividly aware of this objective."65

In January of 1942, Roosevelt appointed Elmer Davis, a news commenta- tor for CBS, as head of the Office of Censorship; that June, Davis became head of the Office of War Information, which was meant to coordinate the efforts of a range of media—film, advertising, radio—in the selling of the war, and par- ticular war initiatives, to the public. Newscasts were, of course, subject to mil- itary censors, who were at first deeply anxious that radio reporters not inadvertently give valuable information to the enemy.66 Walter Winchell, for example, whom the army had tried to remove from the air for fear he would reveal sensitive military information, had his scripts reviewed by his own as- sistant, two attorneys for Jergens, his sponsor, and one attorney for the net- work. They sought to delete not just sensitive military information but politically biased stories as well, an effort Winchell vehemently fought.

But this was also, as Paul Fussell reminds us, a war very much guided by shrewd public relations, and having radio reporters covering action in war zones dramatized the heroism of GIs and officers alike. Military brass and gov- ernment officials—not just American but British as well—wanted stories that would boost public morale and the image of the armed forces and that were not at odds with stated foreign policy. In theory this seemed fine, but in prac- tice many of these reporters found that government news management really meant censorship of the truth. It is important for us to remember that such censorship—what was left out—also played a key role in the evolution of what would come to be thought of as objectivity in radio news.

Between 1940 and 1944 the hours devoted to news increased by 1,000 a year, up 300 percent. By 1944 news specials and newscasts constituted nearly 20 percent of the networks' program schedules. The number of "pundits" in- creased too, to approximately sixty on the four networks by 1943. Listeners tuned in, on average, for four and a half hours every day. And the men they lis- tened to—Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Cecil Brown— became heroes and celebrities, stardom fusing with journalism, and not without help from the networks' own ruthlessly efficient public relations de- partments. Advertisers, too, wanted to capitalize on the success of radio news and began sponsoring regularly broadcast shows. The first sponsor of CBS's World News Roundup was Sinclair Oil, which paid each correspondent a seventy-five-dollar bonus every time he appeared on the air. By late 1943 on CBS, it was not "We take you now to London" but "General Electric takes you now to London."67

Listeners moved between informational and dimensional listening, some- times being compelled to shift cognitive gears quickly, often inhabiting both

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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listening modes at the same time. Robert Trout, for example, in his Decem- ber 7, 1941, broadcast from London, began his report with a rundown of events fin Europe and of British efforts to monitor Japanese movements in the Pacific. He then moved to a consideration of recent criticisms that Britain's war machine didn't employ the same "modern war techniques" that Germany's did. Suddenly, we are taken into the war. There had been com- plaints, reported Trout, "that while British tanks in the desert lay up at night like a defensive circle of covered wagons out west, the desert darkness is lit up with the flares of the Panzer repair squads patching up damaged German tanks for the next day's battle." This we visualize—the depth, the lights, the dark. Then a straight, factual deadline or report would move the listener out of this mode.68

As a result of the Munich crisis and, later, the Battle of Britain, Edward R. Murrow's name was, as Variety put it, "up in lights for the first time." In De- cember of 1938, Scribner's ran a profile and described just what kind of a ma he was: "tall without being lanky, darkish without being swarthy, young with- out being boyish, dignified without being uncomfortable." More important, he was a well-educated man who nonetheless had "no tea-time accent and no curl to the small finger. He's more a Scotch-and-story man." Yet "he knows what the big words mean."69

Murrow's wartime broadcasts, especially his coverage of the Blitz, became legendary for the way that they conveyed what the war meant to everyday peo- ple in England. His signature opening "This . . . is London," and his emphasis on details of everyday life that listeners could see and feel were shrewdly de- signed for an auditory medium that encouraged listeners to imagine them- selves in other situations, in other people's shoes. As Archibald MacLeish put it in a speech honoring Murrow in November of 1941, "You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead... were mankind's dead."70

What is also striking is how simply and vividly Murrow's broadcasts show- cased masculine courage and defined the basic elements of enviable manhood. There was a honey-hued, Frank Capra sensibility here, romantic while appear- ing to be antiromantic. RAF pilots were "the cream of the youth of Britain." As they discussed an upcoming bombing raid, "There were no nerves, no profan- ity, and no heroics. There was no swagger about those boys in wrinkled and stained uniforms." The firefighters who doused the flames after bombs had hit were equally unflappable and businesslike, focused on the job at hand. "Those firemen in their oilskins and tin hats appeared oblivious to everything but the fire," even though many of them risked and lost their lives in the course of dut

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 191

In his famous rooftop broadcast in September 1940, Murrow described seeing one of the spotters watching for incoming bombs. "There are hundreds and hundreds of men like that standing on rooftops in London tonight, watching for fire bombs, waiting to see what comes down," evoking again the simple, quiet, unseen courage of so many everyday men.71

In another broadcast in 1940 from the outskirts of London, Murrow talked about "the little people . . . who have no uniforms and get no decorations for bravery" and who had to deal with their houses having been bombed. "Those people were calm and courageous There was no bravado, no loud voices, only a quiet acceptance of the situation." A few moments later he added con- descendingly that "even the women with two or three children around them were steady and businesslike." And he was impressed by watching the Women's Auxiliary Air Force drill in formation. But Murrow was, as many of his friends noted, a "man's man," and the heroism he celebrated was almost exclusively male.72

One of his most famous—and stunning—broadcasts described an RAF bombing mission over Berlin that Murrow went on in December of 1943. The heroes here were barely men, "the red-headed English boy with the two weeks' old mustache" and "the big Canadian with the slow, easy grin." Jock, the wing commander, was calm and quiet, even in the face of deadly attack. Once up in the air and over the German coast, the gunners and the wireless operator "all seemed to draw closer to Jock in the cockpit. It was as though each man's shoulder was against the other's. The understanding was complete The whole crew was a unit and wasn't wasting words." Courageous, taciturn, work- ing in sync as a team—these were the young men of the war in Murrow's eyes. Murrow then described the hair-raising mission over Berlin and stated that many men, including two journalists, did not make it back. "In the aircraft in which I flew, the men who flew and fought it poured into my ears their com- ments on fighters, flak, and flare in the same tones they would have used in re- porting a host of daffodils."73 Murrow confessed his own fright during the mission, but primarily as a way to emphasize the sangfroid of the young air- men. Besides, listening to his now steady, deep voice, you couldn't help but think he was being overly modest.

While it would be heresy to suggest that Murrow sought, in his broadcasts, to showcase his own heroism, his accounts of what he and his colleagues wit- nessed and experienced contributed significantly to the image of the foreign correspondent as a daredevil with nerves of steel, defying danger to come his way. Physical courage was of utmost importance to Murrow, who expected it of his newsmen and praised it on the air. Describing his and Larry LeSueur's drive through London while an air raid was in progress, Murrow told his lis-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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teners that "an antiaircraft battery opened fire just as I drove past. It lifted me from the seat and a hot wind swept over the car."74

Murrow was hardly alone in celebrating the courage of everyday American men. In December of 1942, Charles Collingwood, covering the African cam- paign from Algiers, noted that there was not much official news. "I'm just as glad, because I just got back a few hours ago from Tunisia, and I want to tell you all about it." Collingwood had visited an impromptu airfield set up in the desert, where he encountered "some of the finest American boys I've ever met." The lucky ones slept in tents; the others, under the stars. "These boys, these fresh-faced American kids in flying jackets, are up against the cream of the German Luftwaffe," Collingwood warned. The pilots flew from the airfield to Tunis and Bizerte; "it's just about as hazardous a trip as you can make these days, and that's why the boys call it the milk run It's a very tough war these men are fighting," he reported; "it's cold, it's muddy, and it's windy, and lots of things they need aren't there." He reminded listeners that there was "nothing gay or romantic about life at the front," but that these boys were "fighting it well."75 In reports like this, these were everyone's boys; ethnic and class divi- sions were eradicated, invisible.

Webley Edwards, on the six-month anniversary of Pearl Harbor, gave an account of the mood in Honolulu two days after the Japanese's catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Midway. His mixture of mid-American slang and praise for the sailors' courage was very much like the hokey, faux-conversational newsreel narration people heard in the movies that sought to define the war, rhetorically, as everyman's war. The war was "this scrap"; at Midway "our force threw everything in the book at them, yes, and some things that weren't in the book. The Jap couldn't take it." But it was Edwards's equation of national prowess—"might," as he repeatedly called it—with masculine achievement that was so striking. His incessant use of the word hard, and his emasculating language when describing the Japanese, made it clear that manhood and na- tionhood were one. After Midway, Japanese cruisers and transports "went limping off to find a place to die." The Japanese "crumbled"; they "couldn't take it." "We still poured it out, with men gritting out harsh words between their teeth, as they struck vengeance for Pearl Harbor." In Honolulu " 'let 'em come' seemed to be the general opinion" toward a possible strike by the Japanese, "'we'll handle'em.'"76

Gripping eyewitness accounts from the front combined dimensional lis- tening—you were vividly transported into the scene of the fighting—with por- traits of male heroism. Cecil Brown gave one such account via shortwave from Singapore when he described the sinking of the British battle cruiser Repulse on December 7,1941. "Nine Japanese bombers flying at 10,000 feet dropped

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 193

twenty-seven bombs. I stood on the flag deck amidships and watched them streaking for us . . . bombs exploded all around us . . . the flashes were blind- ing, the guns deafening." The gunner trying to shoot down the Japanese bombers "was something like a cowboy shooting from the hip." Brown contin- ued with a blow-by-blow description of the attack until he, like everyone else, had to abandon ship. "I jumped twenty feet into the thick oil surrounding the ship. When I was fifty feet away, the Repulse went down, its stern kicked up in the air, then disappeared."77

With history-making events like Dday, the listeners were right there, hearing and imagining the invasion, before they saw newsreel footage. By all accounts this was one of the most complicated and spectacularly successful newscasts in American history. Newsreels, and all those "World at War" doc- umentaries, have made us forget this. George Hicks of NBC-Blue (which be- came ABC during the war) recorded from a warship his eyewitness account of German planes attacking the Allies' landing craft; it became an instant classic, airing on every network for days after the event.78 What's striking is how much the account resembles the play-by-play of a ball game. Hicks de- scribes everything he can as it's happening; gives a sense of distance, location, and trajectory; and pauses to let listeners hear the battle. We hear the low roar of airplane engines, and Hicks tells us, "That baby was plenty low." "Tracers have been flying up . . . the sparks just seem to float up in the sky," and we hear distant gunfire. Then, back to that German plane: "It's right over our heads now," he announces, and we hear the plane engine, the bombs, and the gunfire. "Here comes a plane!" and we hear men yelling. "There's very heavy ack-ack now," and instantly you hear it, but you see it, too: the explo- sions, the men rushing to shoot down the German plane, the ship rolling in the sea. "The sound you just heard," he tells us, came from 20-mm and 40-mm guns.

Hicks is brave, but he's also human. After a close call with the first German plane, he says, utterly conversationally and personally, "If you'll excuse me, I'll just take a deep breath for a moment and stop speaking." In the pause we hear more shots and explosions. Now Hicks is much more excited, sounding not unlike Red Barber when someone on the Dodgers hit a homer. "There we go again," he yells, "another plane's come over, right over our port side. Now it's right over the bow and disappearing into the clouds. Tracers are still going up," and he pauses so we can hear the shots. "Looks like we're going to have a night tonight," he notes, which includes the listeners in the "we." "Something's burn- ing, it's falling down through the sky," he reports; "they got one!" and we then hear men cheering. "The lights on that burning Nazi plane are twinkling in the sea and going out," he concludes. Then, "to recapitulate," he gives an instant re-

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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play of what just occurred, including bringing some of the gunners to the mike to tell their names and where they are from.79

The image of these correspondents was of tough, competitive individuals who did what it took to get the story and who seemed, to the public at least, to enjoy vast reserves of physical courage. They were defiant, too, taking on cen- sors, border guards, military police. But unlike the Nazi brutes who seemed in capable of seeing those they conquered as human beings, the newsmen were deeply empathetic with the victims of the war without being schmaltzy. They were, in a word, noble. When the famous print reporter Ernie Pyle died in April of 1945, the on-air obituary delivered by Robert McCormick emphasized how Pyle forced himself to ignore his fears. Pyle had a premonition that he would die in the war just as so many GIs he had covered. "He'd tell me how frightene he was in Europe," McCormick reported, and how he hoped he would never see any more combat. But he went to the Pacific because "he felt it was his job to be here. He never pretended to be a fearless hero, he never pretended he liked shots and shells But he sincerely believed he had a duty to the 11 mil- lion enlisted men . . . to tell Americans how they felt and acted during the worst days they would ever go through . . . he kept at it because he felt it was his job to keep at it."80

This was the romantic image of the GI that would be so celebrated in pop- ular culture for decades after the war: the strong, brave, everyday guy who wa a team player and not a prima donna, understated instead of a braggart, altru- istic and selfless to a fault except where American achievement was at stake. Soldiers interviewed on the air, like Sgt. Herbert Brown of New York, also mod estly yet stoically cast warfare as work: "We have a job to do over here, and the quicker we do it, the quicker we get home."81 But the correspondents had an- other crucial element of masculinity: financial success.

This mantle of perfectly calibrated masculinity fell handsomely over the shoulders of the new radio correspondents, but it did not just drop fully spun from the ether. Every time a correspondent made history and then came home for a brief rest, the network publicity departments made sure he got a hero's welcome. Eric Sevareid had covered the fall of Paris and, fleeing through southwest France, was the first to break the story that France had surrendered to Germany. When he returned to New York in the fall of 1940, he found him- self hounded by autograph seekers, reporters, and photographers, all pumped up by CBS press agents' tales of hair-raising adventure and brushes with death. CBS arranged a national lecture tour for him accompanied by a brochure that made him sound like Superman. In 1943, after he had been forced to jump out of a C-46 flying over Burma and live among headhunters while a rescue party located him, CBS feted Sevareid again, featuring him for two weeks straight on

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 195

Dateline: Burma, making sure his derring-do became synonymous with th network's own image.82

The same treatment awaited Bill Shirer when he returned from Germany in 1940: receptions, parties, a lecture tour, and a book contract for Berlin Diar which became an immediate best-seller. Cecil Brown's leap from the Repulse turned him into an overnight celebrity, with Random House and Knopf vying to land a book contract with him. Random House won the bidding, and Suez to Singapore also became a best-seller. Motion Picture Daily's list of top ra stars now included journalists like Brown. He even got Elmer Davis's prime news slot of 8:55 to 9:00, for which he earned $ 1,000 a week, when Davis joine the OWL83

But Brown quickly became a very public casualty in the struggle over ob- jectivity in radio news. He was an especially outspoken critic of government censorship—early on he was kicked out of Italy for his ridicule of Mussolini and fascism. After his repeated efforts to report—quite accurately, it turned out—how defenseless British-controlled Singapore was against the Japanese, British authorities revoked his press credentials.84

Reporters were learning that it wasn't just information about troop move- ments and the like that they couldn't report. Government officials wanted happy news about how well the war was going—even if it wasn't—and they wanted no critical accounts, however accurate, of America's allies. Sevareid, whose stay in China in 1943 convinced him that Chiang Kai-shek's regime was corrupt and exploitative of* the Chinese people, found that Pleader's Dig would not publish a piece to this effect because State Department officials re- fused to clear it. Nor, in 1944, was he allowed to describe the miseries that American soldiers endured in the Italian campaign because he would allegedly hurt troop morale—which Sevareid already knew to be at rock bottom. Sevareid and others developed a deep contempt for the various generals whose personal staffs were top-heavy with public relations officers. GIs, too, com- plained to the correspondents they met about the rather glaring gap between their experiences and what they heard over the radio. "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," reported Time. "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." As a result, many felt they couldn't trust radio's coverage of the war.85

Brown, however, made anticensorship a personal crusade, and one tactic was to continually push the envelope in his new prime-time newscast by inter- lacing the news with his own analyses, warnings, and advice. Brown was espe- cially concerned about American complacency and, worse, about an erosion of

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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public support for the war. In a two-month tour of the country in the spring of 1942, in which he broadcast reports from different cities, Brown castigated his listeners for a "dangerous and serious overoptimism in the United States" and was especially appalled to hear, repeatedly, that people thought the war would be over by Christmas. This resulted from "hangover propaganda from non-interventionists." In commentary that could hardly have warmed hearts in the Hoosier State, Brown asserted on the air that "such optimism is not jus- tified by any of the facts, but a good many people in Indianapolis do not seem to be concerned with the facts."86 From St. Louis he spoke on behalf of "the people," saying, "They want to wipe Tokyo off the face of the earth. They want a second front. They want an invasion of Europe.... They want an invasion of Germany and, if necessary, the extermination of the German people." Some felt this wasn't exactly the unanimous will of "the people."

What Brown hadn't counted on was the increased clout that advertisers had over radio news now that it had become such a glamorous and profitable commodity. By 1943 news programs were second only to dramatic shows in drawing advertising. When commentators lost their sponsors, as Kaltenborn did in 1939, when General Mills dropped him after Catholic listeners protested his attacks on the Church of Spain, the networks became even more adamant about prohibiting the airing of opinion. Cecil Brown's sponsor, Johns- Manville, unhappy in part with commentary that its executives found too pro- Soviet, withdrew their sponsorship of Brown's news program in the summer of 1943. Paul White, the head of CBS news and an adamant opponent of any editorializing by newscasters, was also unhappy with Brown's continued ha- rangues against alleged American apathy over the war. After a confrontation with CBS executives over his failure to keep his own opinions to a minimum, Brown resigned in September of 1943, asserting he was a victim of censor- ship.87

The firestorm of controversy that surrounded Brown's resignation re- vealed that debates about what journalistic objectivity was or should be on the air were hardly settled, especially when the main censor seemed to be corpo- rate America. Magazines, newspapers, and NBC's America's Town Meeting the Air all showcased the dispute. On the one hand, executives like CBS's Whit sensitive to criticisms from listeners, advertisers, and government officials, in- sisted that commentators' opinions be ruthlessly expunged from broadcasts. He asserted this emphatically in a speech before the Associated Press, and CBS even took out full-page ads in newspapers announcing, "We will not choose men who will tell the public what they themselves think and what the public should think." This sounded high-minded but really sought to blunt mount- ing criticism, including from the FCC chairman himself, Lawrence Fly, that

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 197

sponsors were exerting too much control over which kinds of stories and views got on the air. (White was no doubt made especially nervous by Fly's sugges- tion that sponsorship be eliminated from newscasts.) Kaltenborn, founder and head of the newly formed Association of Radio News Analysts, whose code of ethics opposed censorship, responded derisively to White with, "No news ana- lyst worth his salt could or would be completely neutral or objective." Time agreed. "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 edi- torial views in order to put on a false front of impartiality." But Time also con- cluded that "much of the output of U.S. radio pundits is pontifical tripe."88

Despite denunciations from Walter Winchell, Kaltenborn, Variety, an even FCC Chairman Fly, CBS refused to compromise with Brown, in part, it seems clear, because Brown had become an insufferable prima donna. Four years later, when William Shirer's sponsor withdrew from his news program, there were new allegations that advertisers were wielding too much ideological clout over radio news. Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in The Murrow Boy maintain that this was exactly the case—that both men, however irritating to CBS, would have kept their jobs had they kept their sponsors. But with the new stardom and wealth accorded radio newsmen—Brown and Shirer were earn- ing over $50,000 a year, a staggering amount in the early and mid-1940s— there were strings. By 1943 the CBS newsman Quincy Howe, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, noted that liberal commentators were being replaced by co servatives and that "sponsors snap up the news programs with a conservative slant as they never snapped up the programs with a liberal slant."89 Advertisers had indeed emerged as the most powerful censors of broadcast news, a point that would become even starker during McCarthyism.

As broadcast news was invented on the radio, listeners had the world put before their feet, and they jumped around the country and the globe at will in a way that flattered a certain sense of omniscience and omnipresence. The di- mensional listening that Kaltenborn, Collingwood, Brown, Murrow, and the others insisted upon in their broadcasts compelled people, in their minds' eyes, to look outward. Radio news, then, played a central role—both in its content and focus, and in the kind of listening it encouraged—in shifting American public opinion away from isolationism and away from self-absorbed paro- chialism.

The radio war also powerfully reaffirmed middle-class, American mas- culinity as intrinsic to the nation's identity and to its geopolitical successes. The manhood that had seemed so provisional, so fragile, so in danger of feminiza- tion in the comedy of Ed Wynn, Joe Penner, and Jack Benny was powerfully re

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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cuperated by the drama of the war and the men who reported it. The RAF pi- lots and the GIs that Murrow, Collingwood, and George Hicks portrayed for listeners were not shaken by warfare; they didn't complain; they were stoic; they were everyday guys; they were united in purpose; they obeyed orders fro above yet proved their dominance over the enemy; they didn't brag, but they won. It is here on the radio, through the storiesand voices of the newscasters and their construction of a sense of consensus, that this image of middle-class masculinity seemed to absorb and stand in for men of all classes (but not yet men of all races).

Objectivity, as it evolved on radio news, was embodied in stories that did not routinely displease the White House and those that did not routinely dis- please corporate sponsors. The war brought public relations and news man- agement into broadcast journalism, and the success of radio news imposed commercial considerations on reporters and network executives alike. For the networks, the ideal of objectivity sounded worthy enough, but it was a very ef- fective tool for disciplining uppity newscasters, keeping further regulation at bay, and keeping the sponsors happy. CBS stuck with its policy, which wasn't dramatically breached until 1954, when Edward R. Murrow on See It Now voiced his famous denunciation of Joe McCarthy. But that was the exception, not the rule.

At the same time—the late 1930s and 1940s—that radio news was helping to redirect listeners' attention outward and, in the process, promoting a sense of national identity and purpose within, Americans, particularly the men, were congregating around the radio to listen to an equally important nation-build- ing genre: sports broadcasting. Here, images of disciplined men, standing alone or together to vanquish opponents, resonated powerfully with news of the war in a way that reaffirmed that, despite the Depression, this was a coun- try of real men, of good men, after all.

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845. Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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