State of Broadcasting

In Los Angeles a CBS program director shot into the office of a vice president one morning with a new idea. A few nights later CBS's local outlet, KNX, announced at 1:15 a.m. that instead of signing off it was inaugurating a regular four-hour program lasting to 5 a.m. for the benefit of "swing shifters" in local war industries. Knocking off work and dining after midnight, accustomed to stay up until at least 6 a.m., these men and their families now may listen to a full "evening" of radio, including, by transcription, some of CBS's best sustaining shows (e.g., the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, Report to the Nation). This was smart public service, and an immediate success.

But it was only one token of a change coming over radio, a change more profound than loss of advertising revenue, a war change in radio's audience.

If good programs are in order in the early morning, what about the daytime? In all parts of the country, as men worked in shifts around the clock, as other men began to arrive in Army & Navy hospitals, the daytime audience was losing its simplicity. That audience has always been considered as "the housewife." To sell her, the agencies have loaded the networks from dawn to dark with soap operas or, in radio lingo, "washboard weepers." Listed last week were no less than 65 of these daytime serials. They had about 80% of daylight network time.

Critics of this preponderance have lately become vigorous. Sports Writer Bill Cunningham, discovering daytime radio with a shock, snorted last month in the Boston Herald: "Try driving 400 miles, as I did yesterday, with nothing but the radio for company, and if you don't go nuts between 10 a.m. and sundown, you're tough enough to laugh off anything." Fortnight ago, Fred Allen, with his razor-strop smoothness, put on a savage parody (Clipso, the aristocrat of soap chips, presents Susan Spavin, Girl Sandhog). In Ottawa, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s general manager, W. E. Gladstone Murray, said he was going to work up a new "code of good taste" for afternoon programs.

More helpful, perhaps, were certain figures in the annual Crossley summary on program popularity released in Broadcasting this week by the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting. Although confined to evening programs, they strongly suggested that at least one type of program could be safely substituted in daytime for a few of the sadder washboard weepers. From October 1940 to April 1941, Drama & Serial Drama had an average popularity rating of 11.7, with 28% of evening time on the air. Only 1.2 behind in popularity was Classical & Semi-Classical Music at 10.5, but this type of program had only 3.2% of evening air time.

For commercial announcements the National Association of Broadcasters' code, adopted in 1939 (TIME, July 24, 1939), allows three minutes, 15 seconds out of every daytime quarter hour; two minutes, 30 seconds out of every nighttime quarter hour. The extra 45 seconds in daytime may account for much of soap opera's sales pull; also for much suffocating boredom. The merciless unction of long, repetitive commercials struck both U.S. listeners and U.S. advertisers as downright incongruous in the days just after Pearl Harbor. The advertisers' reaction apparently wore off, but a certain public feeling remained, especially about commercials that try to capitalize on the war effort.

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