The Battle for Ears

When television began to masquerade as the new electronic horizon, cynics pronounced radio dead, or at least moribund. The great names in radio--Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Red Skelton et al.--moved into view and their audiences followed them. For about five years radio played country cousin to TV. Then radio, in terms of listeners and earnings, began a spectacular comeback. Last week radio's listenership was up 8% over last year, 25% over its pre-TV peak in 1947. A record 140 million sets are in use v. 66 million at TV's dawn. Radio's revenues are higher today than they ever were even in radio's so-called heyday, and are expected to total $700 million for this year.

Lusty Child. But 1958's radio is not 1947's radio. The radio set is no longer in the living room but in the kitchen, on a bedside table, in the car. 1958's audience listens with half an ear, usually while doing something else.

Along with the audience, the sounds emitted by the nation's 3,779 AM and FM radio stations have changed too. In place of the nostalgic big names and expensive-talent dramatic shows, most U.S. stations blare forth a starless mishmash of hip music, skimmed news and honey-voiced disk jockeys.

Radio's new and lusty child is the local station. It aims at "local identification," homing in on the market in its neighborhood at the expense of network operation. While the networks watch the big nationwide advertisers crowd into TV, local stations are thriving on the patronage of local stores, restaurants and services. Result: in the midst of general radio prosperity, network radio has been fighting for its life. The NBC and CBS networks have lost millions (exact amount too elusive to pin down) in recent years. ABC and MBS have long been in the red. The local is usually a completely independent station, but roughly one station out of four is affiliated (with increasing reluctance) with one or more networks. With some honorable exceptions, the locals' standard fare consists of the so-called "Top 40" tunes (mostly rock 'n' roll), news-headline teasers, whooped-up contests and giveaways, voices of home-town deejays that every housewife learns to know and like during her lonely hours spent over dishes, ironing board and stove. More and more, local affiliates are dropping network shows; even the familiar 27-year-old broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday matinees have been canceled out by some ABC stations. Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. disaffiliated its five stations from the networks (four from NBC, one from ABC) to go local, boasts that now all but one rank No. 1 in audience in their respective cities. The networks offer newscasts from Moscow and an occasional big name; local radio offers bargain pork chops at a nearby butcher shop, a $50,000 check that may lie buried in the listener's own backyard, a chance to shake hands with the man who spins Elvis Presley records.

"Horse-Radish." "More platter, less chatter!" cries Manager Ben Strouse of Washington, D.C.'s eminently profitable WWDC, which features "Lucky Buck" giveaways. "All network radio is good for is to supply soap opera to a dwindling number of little old ladies weaned on that sort of thing." As for the independents' news coverage, Bill Shaw, manager of San Francisco's booming KSFO, snorts: "People are more interested in a fire down the street than in the Lebanon crisis!"

Most radio network executives are defiantly optimistic in public, but privately worried. CBS apparently believes that there is no use in bucking TV in the evening with any strong radio competition; it fills the sunny hours unimaginatively with soap opera and such housewife pacifiers as Arthur Godfrey and Art Linkletter. At ABC, which dropped untold thousands in network radio last year, gloom is officially repressed. But one network bigwig groaned last week: "Network radio is just a ghost. They're doing horseradish. All we're doing is keeping the lines up."

Only NBC has organized a major counterattack on radio's localitis. NBC is invading a thousand city limits with its ubiquitous weekend potpourri Monitor, with on-the-spot newscasts that are signaled by bells ringing coast to coast on its "hot line," with appeals to advertisers to switch from the "Top 40" tunes to NBC's "Top 40" personalities, e.g., Groucho Marx, Marlene Dietrich. NBC's pitch in ads: "If you sell white buckskin shoes and bubble gum, by all means use a jukebox station."

The battle for ears may not be decided for years. Though the local programmers are riding high now, the networks' optimists predict that the locals will sooner or later run all their bad things into the ground. But it may be later than sooner.

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