"Broadcasting for Marginal Americans"
Excerpt from Sayre Smith, Jeanette, “Broadcasting For Marginal Americans,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter, 1942), pp. 588-603
Excerpted by Aimee-Marie Dorsten
Broadcasting in public interest is in times of war more than an editorial catchword and certainly more than a part-time activity. And when radio reaches an audience whose integration into the war effort is a pressing problem of the day, its responsibility becomes more profound. The public interest is, under such circumstances, the public safety. Foreign language broadcasts, long the step-child of the radio industry, reach just such an audience. Domestic programs in Italian can reach almost an eighth of our foreign-born population. Yet in spite of the fact that foreign language broadcasting in this country is at least a decade old, little is known about it, either as to the nature of the programs broadcast, or as to its effect upon listeners.1
This paper is a partial report of the findings of an investigation into social and political attitudes, and the relation of broadcasting to those attitudes, in the North End of Boston.2 The neighborhood is densely populated, almost exclusively Italian, and consists of about twenty thousand people. In June 1941 a survey was conducted of listening habits in the district, with reference to both long and short wave radio. Interviews were made in every eighth house along representative streets to discover language preferences, program preferences, and shortwave listening habits, if any. From these interviews, respondents were divided according to constellations of listening habits, and subsequent intensive interviews, were conducted with sixty-two people chosen to represent the various constellations. These interviews were directed at the deeper lying social and psychological factors which influence and are influenced by radio listening.3 After the outbreak of war this study would have been very difficult; it was difficult enough to conduct with the tension of the group a year ago. In spite of the fact that some of the material is dated, it does permit an appraisal of the war-time problem of foreign language broadcasting “in the public interest.”
[…]
LOCAL ITALIAN BROADCASTING
The function of local Italian broadcasting, both actual and potential, must be viewed in relation to its setting, the mind of Italian Americans who now find themselves engaged in struggle against their mother country. That state of mind in the months preceding the war was such as to make one fear for their active enthusiasm in the struggle. Seventy-two per cent of the people asked said “This is not America’s war,” while less than ten per cent felt that American had a part to play in defeating Fascism. In a community strongly organized by the Democratic Party it is significant that one-third of the people disapproved of President Roosevelt merely because of his foreign policy, while another third (mostly recipients of Federal Aid) approved of his internal, but not external policies.
[…]
ITALIAN BROADCASTING IN BOSTON
During June 1941 the listener wishing to hear Italian programs in Boston might choose from thirteen hours and forty-five minutes of Italian on Station WCOP each week, one hour and forty-five minutes on station WHDH, three hours and thirty minutes on WAAB, and a one-hour program on Station WMEX, announced in English but consisting of Italian records and singing in Italian.4 With a good radio he might hear Salem, Fall River, Providence, Hartford, and New York. If he understood only Italian there was little real choice for him, for at only one time during the day was there a chance for him to hear more than one Italian program: the 12 to 12:30 noontime period when three programs might be heard
[…]
WHERE LIES THE BLAME?
In seeking the source of the lack of responsible leadership in the field, one is first aware that Italian broadcasting is the orphan child of the radio industry in Boston. For the most part station managers do not speak languages other than English. They have lost control over these programs by selling time on the air to brokers, who in turn create the program, find advertisers, and do pretty much as they please. Only occasionally does the station demand or offer audience surveys to find out whether anyone is listening to these programs. So long as they are paid for their time on the air little else is really important. No records are kept of most of the programs, so that it is impossible to make an accurate estimate of the content of these broadcasts. Most of the employees interviewed at the stations now carrying foreign programs in Boston had no idea at all of the content of the programs. The manager of the station carrying the largest amount of Italian broadcasting gave the writers a completely inaccurate description of two of his programs and confessed that he had no idea what the others were about. No one at the Yankee Network could be found who knew the content of a half-hour program they broadcast every day which they pick up from Station WOV in New York… In the ultimate analysis, it is a good job here and not a talk from a government official which will make the insecure immigrant feel at home. But broadcasters in this field have been small business men conducting marginal operations. They have not turned down potential income because they did not like what the program director said; and they have not done a constructive job in the field simply because it did not present any immediate monetary rewards.
[…]
An outsider cannot tell the broadcaster how this should be done; this is his job. We can merely point out that treatment of minority groups in this country, whether it be at the employment office or in the radio fare they are offered, is a problem whose solution is crucial to our national unity in war time and, for many of us, to the kind of world we wish to see after the war. Italian radio in Boston has essentially failed in this job. But the answer is not to stop broadcasting in Italian (this is probably true of other foreign languages as well) but to encourage broadcasters to adopt a constructive attitude toward their public.
For a recent study of the content of foreign language broadcasts see: Arnheim and Bayne “Foreign Language Broadcasts over Local American Stations,” Radio Research 1941. Edited by P.F. Lazarsfeld and F. Stan-ton. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1941) ↩
The study was financed by two grants: one form the Princeton Listening Center, a project of the Rockefeller Foundation and Princeton University and the other from the Radiobroadcasting Research Project, also a project of the General Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation. The writer is indebted to Professors Harwood L. Childs of Princeton and C.J. Friedrich of Harvard for support in this work. ↩
A part of this investigation has already been reported in the pages of this journal. For a more detailed description of the community studied, the methods used, and the questionnaires, see Bruner, J.S. and Sayre, J. “Short-wave Listening in an Italian Community,” Public Opinion Quarterly. 1941. No.5, Vol. 4, pps. 640-656. ↩
Prior to 1940 there were several Italian programs on WMEX, but these were discontinued. Most of them shifted to WCOP. ↩