Radio’s mighty percussionists

Have you ever attended the symphony and decided to focus on the percussion section in the back? It’s kind of wild to watch these musicians, who often spend most of the concert with their hands folded, suddenly spring to action with mallets upraised, waiting until the exact moment to hit something with absolute precision.

This is what radio sound effect artists did all day long in network studios during live broadcasts: their instruments might be special doorbell buzzers belonging to each family in a soap opera, or a shallow box filled with gravel for footsteps. The notion that radio was a “theater of the mind” is largely thanks to its live sound effects; and indeed, some of the earliest sound effect artists came to broadcasting from theater or silent movies, where they punctuated the action (or jokes) with sound.

Betty Bauer, a sound effects artist at WGY in Schenectady, 1942 (via The Radio Historian).

The best sound effects artists got to invent whole worlds: they chewed on wooden berry boxes to evoke a horde of rats attacking a light house; they slowly turned a cast-iron lid to create the sound of an alien spaceship door. Sound effects teams had their own subculture at radio networks, prone as they were to stress and boredom and demands from show directors to create impossible sounds on a moment’s notice.

I had been intending to write a post about all that (working title: Radio SFX Are Lit) — but on the way, I tripped and fell into an adjacent rabbit hole, one in which the world-building power of sound effects bled into the “real” world and affected our understanding of a danger that threatens us all.

Nevada Test Site, June 24, 1957 (AtomicArchive.com)

Sound “sweetening” comes to TV news

I fell into this rabbit hole while reading Radio Sound Effects by Robert L. Mott. If you’ve watched US network TV from the 1980s or earlier, you’ve probably heard a sound effect produced by Mott. He worked on everything from the soap opera Days of our Lives to the kiddie show Captain Kangaroo, back when a lot of television was basically live-to-tape. He had to be quick on his feet and responsive, a skill he got from doing effects for live radio dramas at CBS like Gangbusters and Perry Mason.

No doubt that’s why, early in his career, Mott was assigned to be the sound effects guy for the CBS Six O’Clock News.

This was news to me, that newscasts once had studio sound effects. Mott says on the radio, newscasts shunned SFX. He believes that was thanks to “the notoriety earned by the War of the Worlds broadcast” in 1938, which supposedly alarmed the populace with its faux-news conceits.

“It did not stop the television news people, however,” Mott writes.

So yes, at least some newscasts had sound effects artists in the studio to smooth over the sonic mess of a program that relied on film for its field sound. And one day, Bob Mott says he was given half an hour to prepare for a segment on an atom bomb test. 

Robert Mott demonstrates a manual effect to evoke the sound of waves at the beach. (Television Academy, 2003)

I should note here that, as with many of these memoirs by old-time radio veterans, Mott’s books (there are a few) are heavy on lore and free-associated anecdotes, but not so strong on fact-checkable details like dates. So it’s hard to confirm when the newscast in question took place. But it wouldn’t have been earlier than 1951, since that’s when CBS hired Mott. 

The US government started testing atomic weapons in Nevada that same year, and while that devastating practice continued regularly for more than a decade, the newsworthiness wore off after a few years. The way Mott describes it, this was still in the early days.

Mott did not plan to do a “manual effect,” the kind of thing we associate with classic radio drama (clopping coconuts for horse hooves, etc). By this point, most sound effects were pulled from special records, some made by commercial services, some by the network’s own engineers. The job of the SFX artist was to choose the best tracks quickly and cue them up on a console that would make a DJ’s head spin with envy.

A three-turntable rig on an NBC radio sound stage, 1938. (via The Radio Historian)

The all-purpose effect

Building sonic sequences with these records took creativity and specialized skills. Here’s how the 1951 manual Radio and TV Sound Effects describes the equipment:

You got all that?

Anyway, on the day of the atom bomb-test segment, Bob Mott quickly chose his SFX records, planned the order of his sequence, and adjusted the speed and output levels of each turntable. 

“When the picture showed the sudden billowing cloud, I played the records I had selected and crossed my fingers,” he wrote. “Fortunately, the reaction in the control room to the bomb sounds was good. However, far more importantly, the printed media the next day didn’t suspect that the sounds of the ominous and terrible Atom Bomb had been ‘sweetened.’” (71)

Mott says what saved the day was a recording he and other sound effects artists relied on heavily: a recording of a waterfall in Africa he calls Mogambi (that place name does not actually exist, as far as I can tell). 

Like I said, Mott’s story is not verifiable. I couldn’t find any recordings of the CBS Six O’Clock News from the early 1950s. But his anecdote did make me realize the extent to which sound effects, especially when paired with imagery, can shape our perception of reality in a careless, and ultimately corrosive, way.

Cue record scratch

“How do you come up with the sound of something that no one has ever heard?” Mott asks. But of course, people had heard the sound of an atomic explosion. Foremost among them, the victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. 

And before them, there were the scientists who witnessed the Trinity Test of the first atomic explosion. 

Here’s where we discover that A-Bomb media artifice has been a thing since the very beginning. What you see above are scientists James Conant and Vannevar Bush pretending to watch the first, top-secret atomic bomb blast in the desert at Alamogordo, New Mexico. In truth, they are lying on a sand-covered garage floor in Boston a year later.

This was all in service of the 1946 newsreel film Atomic Power! (the “!” is part of the title!)

Some context: we’ve dedicated recent posts here to the popular radio news-reenactment show The March of Time. Well, that program had an even more popular film companion, a monthly theatrical newsreel. And those newsreel producers often managed to persuade public figures to perform as themselves. They did that in spades for Atomic Power!

March of Time even got Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein to re-enact themselves. The latter mainly smokes a pipe “like a long-suffering and highly sagacious old yak,” as Time Magazine put it.

Oppenheimer only shows up for a blip, making the whole experience akin to watching a more genuine but cornier version of the Oscar-winning movie Oppenheimer (some sequences from that film seem lifted directly from March of Time tbh).

Oppenheimer (center) as Oppenheimer in Atomic Power!

The atom bomb also starred as itself in the newsreel, thanks to government footage, but that footage came without sound. So The March of Time cooked some up, presumably by turntable methods similar to what Robert Mott would do a few years later at CBS News. (Go read this book by Raymond Fielding for more on the fascinating history of the newsreel March of Time.)

Slot in: Wagner traxx

When it comes to actual recordings of the atom bomb exploding, you have to hunt a long time for sound. The US government has declassified hundreds of films and uploaded them here, and most are silent.

Much of the sound that does exist is either drowned out by airplane engines (if recorded from a bomber). Or, as in this recording from 1953, the films also capture the reactions of onlookers. 

One thing is for sure, as nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein points out: most popular depictions of atomic explosions are “shifted in time so that the explosion and the sound of the blast wave are simultaneous.” But, he notes, “the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound, and the cameras are kept a very healthy distance from the test itself, so in reality the blast wave comes half a minute or so after the explosion.”

Wellerstein suspects most films of nuclear explosions that contain sound are using “a stock blast effect.”

In 1951, when the Department of Energy produced a film about nuclear tests, it mainly settled for a sonic hint of explosion, followed by generous helpings of Wagner’s overture to The Flying Dutchman. And honestly, a similar impulse seems to have seized broadcasting’s finest directors when faced with the question of how to illustrate this massive weapon.

yeah, Bob Hope!

Sixteen thunder records

In 1950, producer Fred Friendly and his sound engineer Bob Schwartau went through a lot of trouble to manufacture an explosion for their NBC radio documentary series on the atom bomb called The Quick and the Dead.

These guys were not yet their future semi-famous selves: Friendly would go on to work with Edward Murrow at CBS and later become president of the network before quitting in disgust. Schwartau would become a legendary music recording engineer for the likes of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. 

But in 1950, they just wanted to concoct and record their best version of a megaton blast for this radio doc. There actually was a recording of the underwater Bikini Atoll test available to them, but that sound apparently didn’t match the ambition of what they wanted to depict — and anyway, the Trinity Test happened on land. 

Matthew Erlich’s book Radio Utopia led me to this incredible account in the New York Times of the production:

You can hear the sequence about six minutes into the first track of this digitized recording of The Quick and the Dead. Who knows if young Bob Mott heard this broadcast, but it surely set the standard for all fake atom bombs to come.

Is the Bomb just another light saber?

Perhaps because The Quick and the Dead was audio only, it actually takes advantage of the narrative tension in the delay between the sight of the blast and the sound of the explosion. 

But what all of these productions — The March of Time, The Quick and the Dead, the government films, and the CBS newscast — have in common is their unexamined need to concoct a big bomb-ey sound, the bigger the better. The actual recordings of test explosions were not good enough because the “theater of the mind” got there first.

This blending of manufactured sounds and narrative truths is something film critic Michael Chion calls synchresis: he invented the word to describe the power of sound (usually combined with visuals) to help us fully enter the conceits of an imaginary world. Lightsaber sounds in Star Wars are one famous example — but basically all sound effects in audio drama rely on synchresis.

Nonfiction audio producers also lean on synchresis in subtle ways. Consider how a piece of ambient sound might prolong the sense of being out in the field, when you are actually narrating the scene in a studio. Or the way a scratchy-record effect can persuade us to forgive the bad sound quality of “old stuff.” Or even the way we “sweeten” our own voices to become nobler, more equalized versions of ourselves.

But this atom bomb sound effect is on a whole other level, so much so that it makes me more skeptical about the provenance of archival sound effects in general. When Charles Maynes and I made the Cold War history series Spacebridge, we used archival sound of a nuclear explosion near the top of one of the episodes. Do we know where that sound came from or how it was recorded? We do not.  

“Although recording equipment today is much more sophisticated, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sound used for the bomb that night is now stored in a post-production department’s sound computer’s microchip,” Mott wrote.

I don’t think he is actually that surprised (I mean that rhetorically — Mott died in 2016). His entire sound effects library is available for purchase here for $495. And look what shows up on the second line of this screenshot from an alphabetized spreadsheet of the effects. 

(from a .pdf of all 1700 of Bob Mott’s sound effects)

Beyond synchresis

It was not Bob Mott’s call whether or not to manufacture an atom bomb sound for the CBS Evening News — he was just doing his job. That decision was on the CBS show director. But imagine if that director had decided to break this pattern of fakery?

What if he had made the call to be honest with the audience and explain that the sound they had wasn’t great, and made up for it by having the anchor read from eyewitness accounts instead? Some viewers might have stopped to think that there is a good reason why the detonation of this massive weapon, built to incinerate cities and sicken millions, wasn’t easy to record.

A still from Children of Hiroshima (Wikipedia).

There are much better ways to evoke the real horror of the atom bomb than the four-holer treatment. 

At the end of Kaneto Shindo’s 1952 film Children of Hiroshima, the characters notice the menacing sound of low-flying airplanes — after all they have been through, that sound is enough. 

Or consider the long silence at the beginning of Morgan Knibbe’s documentary The Atomic Soldiers, about the surviving US veterans of nuclear tests. 

These men simply stare into the camera for minutes on end, saying nothing. When they do speak, you understand why. They explain how the military ordered them never to speak about the test explosions they witnessed. They talk about the emotional and physical costs of what they’ve endured. 

For a long time, these veterans had to keep the whole terrible experience to themselves — as have downwinders, former residents of ruined Marshall Islands chains, and the people who grew up near the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. So mighty was the mighty-sounding bomb that for the sake “nuclear security,” all of its victims had to shut up about what these explosions had done to them and their communities.

When you get down to it, the sound of the atom bomb is the sound of death. And no one can sweeten that.

P.S. Bob Mott’s full interview with the Television Academy is here. It’s fascinating!

Note from JB: Continuous Wave floats atop the work of thousands, many of them volunteers, to save broadcast media’s ephemeral past. This project would be a lot less interesting without all the old radio publications, sound, and equipment that people have digitized or otherwise preserved.

So I’m excited to bring you today’s guest post from one of radio’s Archivist Kings, Andy Lanset. Lanset, now retired, is the founding director of the New York Public Radio Archives at WNYC/WQXR. Those stations’ histories go back more than a century, and Lanset has done far more than simply preserve recordings and documents.

Lanset’s own career in public broadcasting goes back to 1981. He’s been a reporter, producer, and engineer. He is able to bring radio’s past alive by helping us understand all the challenges producers faced.

His post today is all about the “actuality” — a term of art that originated in film, but in US radio came to mean recorded material gathered from the world outside the studio. An actuality can be just a soundbite, but the word contains the idea of something “real” — an unscripted moment; a bit of verité that carries all the subtext we hear in human voices. These days we call it “tape” — but its qualities were valued well before tape was a recording medium.

I’ve written about how unusual it was to hear anything unscripted on US network radio in its first decades. Now here’s Andy Lanset with the story of a few brave producers who tried to build programs around tape back in the days when tape did not exist.

The birth of the radio newsreel

Through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, broadcast news did not sound like anything we today would call “real.”

Radio news began as something drawn from text but not captured from life. Still, early broadcasters knew people wanted information and analysis of current events, so they found a way to offer “newscasts.” Those radio newscasts relied heavily on newspaper copy and wire services, read aloud by announcers. 

What we now call actualities — audio recorded on location — were largely absent because the recording technology of the time (sound trucks and disc recorders) made gathering field tape very challenging. Aside from occasional — and expensive — direct telephone feeds for major speeches or special events, broadcasts in the earliest decades of radio rarely included the voices of the people actually making news. 

As guest poster Cynthia Meyers explains here, The March of Time (debuting in 1931) and its imitators offered something more dramatic: Actors on these programs portrayed newsmakers, and sound effects stood in for real events. The result was entertaining and popular, but still removed from reality — and often susceptible to exaggeration or bias.

The challenge remained how to get sound from outside the studio and to edit it, at a time when there were no portable tape recorders, no simple editing tools, and no easy way to gather sound spontaneously. Every recording demanded planning, logistics, and technical support — not to mention, money.

Despite all this, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, radio evolved into a medium capable of presenting reality itself — something with real voices, real events, real sound. The story of how that happened is fascinating and worth understanding.

A WNYC sound truck from 1937 (courtesy NYC Municipal Archives).

A thousand-pound rig

Sound recording technology moved in Hollywood much more quickly than at US networks. Sound-on-disc systems appeared as early as 1926, and by the end of the decade all major producers had adopted synchronized sound-on-film. 

Radio, by comparison, lagged behind. If it hoped to compete with film, it needed to sound like the world it described.

The turning point came with the development of instantaneous (also known as “transcription”) disc recording in the late 1920s, a technology more widely adopted by the mid-1930s. This recording technology that could be put in a truck and taken out of the studio and into the world.

Recording in those days meant cutting audio directly onto lacquer-coated aluminum discs using bulky, delicate machinery. A typical field setup could approach 1,000 pounds and required a skilled engineer to operate. 

Some of the earliest broadcasters to use this “portable” technology worked at the BBC, where Laurence Gilliam and Olive Shapley pioneered the integration of recorded actualities into documentary programming starting in the 1930s.

A Radio News Reel program as sent to radio stations in 1940 (A. Lanset Collection)

Editing without tape

How did actuality-based programs come together in an era before our modern notions of cutting or splicing tape, much less before digital waveform editing, copying or pasting?

Back in the studio, producers worked with stacks of heavy lacquer discs. They marked in- and out-cues with grease pencils, then re-recorded selected segments in sequence onto new discs. Each edit required multiple turntables, precise timing, and careful handling to avoid audible distortion as records reached speed.

Generational loss further degraded audio quality: each re-recording introduced additional noise and reduced fidelity, much like making repeated copies of photocopies.

A typical 15-minute program might require several hours of raw sound, itself all recorded on discs, most of which would be discarded. 

Besides the cost of the truck and crew, the recording material itself was not cheap: In 1940, lacquer discs cost about $1.30 each for roughly 30 minutes of recording time (two sides) — about $29 in today’s dollars.

The goal back then, as it is now with narrative audio, was to construct a seamless story that used voiceovers, interviews, and music with transitions that felt natural and unobtrusive.

Once completed, the final program had to be pressed onto 16-inch transcription discs and delivered via snail-mail to stations.

The radio newsreel magazine format demanded enormous effort and cost with minimal turnaround time while struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing world events.

“Authenticity” was the selling point — the actual voices of both newsmakers and ordinary people, as opposed to actors imitating them.

But the economics behind that version of authenticity were punishing: not only was it labor intensive to produce, but discs were fragile and production itself incredibly difficult. 

That probably explains why experiments in actuality-driven radio in the US were short-lived in the pre-tape era.

1940 ad for American Radio Newsreel (courtesy Andy Lanset).

A newsreel for radio

In the United States, KMTR in Los Angeles experimented as early as 1937 with what it called “documentary radio,” incorporating recorded sound into its syndicated 20th Century International Radio Newsreel. The goal was clear: to make radio news sound more like the popular movie newsreels.

20th Century International Radio Newsreel’s history is a bit murky, and only one known recording, from 1939, appears to survive among collectors. (It’s a rather tepid report on an ocean liner disembarking.)

As tensions in Europe escalated in the late 1930s, the demand for more immediate and vivid reporting grew. Broadcasters saw an opportunity to capture some of the audience drawn to newspapers and theatrical newsreels.

In 1939, a small production company in New York called Ayers-Prescott launched a quarter-hour program called American Radio Newsreel (ARN). At a press conference, producer Erich Don Pam explained that programs would be recorded on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pressed onto discs, and shipped to stations for broadcast the following day. (Though the ad above claimed releases would occur three times weekly.)

“Recorded on the scene by reporters with portable equipment, the various interviews are edited and combined into a continuous program at the company's headquarters and are then pressed and sent to the subscribing stations,” Broadcasting magazine reported.

Newsweek observed that the format assembled “a diversified but unified table d’hôte for the ear” — something difficult to achieve in live broadcasting.

From Radio-Craft, September 1940, p. 175 (courtesy Andy Lanset).

Ambition meets actuality

Ayers-Prescott reportedly secured as many as 300 subscribing stations. Even so, the service appears not to have lasted beyond a year. A small number of surviving discs are now held in the Randy Riddle Phonodisc Collection at Duke University.

By the spring of 1940, KMTR’s earlier experiment had evolved into Radio News Reel. Station head Victor Dalton joined with WMCA’s Donald Flamm to finance a national fleet of more than 100 specially equipped trucks: Ford V-8 sedan delivery wagons outfitted with disc-cutting equipment, microphones, mixing panels, and hundreds of feet of cable. In effect, they were mobile studios.

The audio equipment on board was self-powered, using batteries and converters, and could record almost anywhere. Crews typically consisted of two people: an engineer-driver and a producer-announcer. They ran cables into homes, offices, and event spaces to capture interviews and events with newsmakers.

From this material, Radio News Reel producers assembled twice-weekly, 15-minute programs distributed to subscribing stations. At its peak, the service reportedly reached some fifty affiliates.

The pitch was straightforward and ambitious: these were “the voices of people in the news… not re-enacted but transcribed where it happens.”

But by September 1940, Broadcasting reported that KMTR had “suspended” Radio News Reel and dismissed staff amid internal disputes. The whole operation had collapsed after only four months.

By late 1943, both Billboard and Variety noted that WMCA was considering reviving the format — despite the fact that “every radio newsreel idea to date has laid an egg.”

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, however, the BBC’s government-funded Radio Newsreel — broadcast via shortwave to North America beginning that summer — proved more durable. It continued for decades. 

The documentary experiment

Alongside newsreel experiments, documentary radio developed on a parallel track. Here, recorded sound was used less for rapid news delivery and more for crafted storytelling.

Herb Morrison’s on-the-spot recording of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster remains a defining moment, demonstrating the emotional power of recorded actuality.

In 1939, WOR incorporated similar eyewitness techniques into its annual year-in-review program under news director Alvin Josephy. That same year, WNYC established a BBC-inspired documentary unit employing “movie-like” editing methods.

And in 1940, with support from the Library of Congress and Alan Lomax, Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin recorded life in California migrant labor camps. Their work led to the 1942 WNYC documentary Songs of the Okies. 

The Library also supported a 1941 documentary, narrated by Arthur Miller, profiling Wilmington, North Carolina, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II. [See this post for more on that project — JB]

Library of Congress acoustic engineers John Langenegger (background) and Jerome Wiesner inspecting a fresh-cut disc. Wiesner later became president of MIT. (Library of Congress)

From experiment to expectation

In retrospect, we can see how all these pre-tape efforts to incorporate actualities into radio marked a turning point in broadcast journalism. 

Recording technology, however, lagged behind the ambition. True portability and efficient editing would not arrive until well after World War II. The first step was the introduction of the magnetic tape recorder, beginning with the first commercially available Brush Soundmirror in 1946. The Soundmirror recorded onto reels of paper-backed tape coated with metal oxide.

WNYC’s news director, Lily Supove Blake, was among the early adopters. The same year as the Soundmirror became available, she hauled one, along with its paper tape, to cover the National Aircraft Show in Cleveland. 

From the Soundmirror on, the technological drive was to improve the tape and lighten the load of the equipment. But the conceptual breakthrough of the audio actuality had already occurred. 

Long before podcasts and digital editing, radio producers were gathering real sound, shaping it into narrative form, and bringing audiences closer to events as they unfolded — despite formidable technical obstacles.

They were, in essence, inventing modern audio storytelling before they had the right tools for the job.

Thanks to super-archivist (and CW Member) Andy Lanset for helping us to imagine producing radio stories with trucks and turntables. Be on the lookout for a history of WNYC from him in book-form one of these days!

1948 ad for Soundmirror “portable” recorder.

Continuous Wave explores radio history, mostly, because it explains so much of what we hear and see today, from popular television to podcasts to online media. But this project is also attracted to human folly and psychodrama (which says something about my disposition). And there’s plenty of folly and psychodrama in the annals of the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS.

Don’t take it from me, take it from the network’s most famous correspondent and news anchor, Edward R. Murrow: “You’re only important around here as long as you’re useful to them, and you will be for a time,” he once told a colleague, according to David Halberstam’s 1979 book The Powers that Be (p. 150). “And when they’re finished they’ll throw you out without another thought.”

Although many people say CBS is now betraying the spirit of Murrow, he might not exactly be surprised by what is happening today, though it surely would make him sad. After the parent company of CBS, Paramount, was sold to Skydance last year with the blessing of the current right-wing US administration, the network is shedding legacy talent and assets at record — and wrecking — speed.

Today is the last for meddlesome late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert on CBS. (Following more than a week of rowdy tributes: a wall-of-dudes episode of Strike Force Five; a mind-meld with predecessor David Letterman to throw furniture/foodstuffs from the roof of CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theater).

In a quieter but no less devastating development, tomorrow (May 22) is the last day that CBS News Radio will be heard at the top of the hour across nearly 700 commercial radio stations nationwide. Meanwhile, correspondents at 60 Minutes are signing off for good, and layoffs are besieging what’s left of the TV side of CBS News.

Perhaps this all seems like a more dismal version of the misery that has beset media all around. But CBS in many ways created the unstable commercial- and personality-driven model of broadcasting that that digital media adopted and now regrets. CBS is the decoder key and worth learning from.

So in recognition of this week’s pathetic milestones, I’ve removed paywalls on four posts I wrote this past year about CBS. Although the network has not been great about keeping its historical archives intact, the place has always been a leaky vessel (see Murrow above), and so it leaves a different kind of record behind: psychodrama!

Enjoy the excerpts below and click over to the full posts if you’d like to read more.

The Young Prince

Colorized/modified image of William Paley (center) completing a hook-up to West Coast network stations in 1929. (TheRadioHistorian.org)

(originally published Jan. 1, 2026)

On September 18, 1927, listeners of 16 radio stations, from the East Coast through Ohio to Chicago, got to hear a special live program emanating from WOR in New York. The new Columbia Chain, a rival to the just-established NBC network, was making its debut. The highlight was the performance of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

The debut was not auspicious.

The Columbia network turned into a money pit for its eponymous sponsor, Columbia Phonograph, which quickly lost $100,000 (in 1927 money!) before pulling out. In desperation, the network’s founders turned to wealthy friends in Philadelphia for fresh investment. And one of those friends eventually turned to his in-laws, the Paleys.

The Paleys ran a successful cigar-manufacturing business and had used radio sponsorship to boost sales of their most famous brand, La Palina. Now the family had the option to buy a major stake in the struggling Columbia venture. So they did, and restless heir William “Bill” Paley became president of the network, soon to be renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paley had just turned 27, and he rolled into town with his own valet.

Paley quickly established a reputation as a shrewd media mogul, in part because of ballsy investment deal with Paramount Pictures that, thanks to the changing fortunes of movies and broadcasting during the Great Depression, paid off handsomely. [Irony noted.]

Paley’s reputation was also reinforced by the competent seconds-in-command he hired. He had an eye for people who could accept blame for decisions their boss made, while giving him credit for things that turned out well. All of these men waited for their promised reward — which they did get in compensation, but never in appreciation. 

(Read the rest of “All the King’s Henchmen” here.)

In Control

George Clooney as Edward Murrow on Broadway, spring 2025.

(originally published June 5, 2025)

Edward Murrow was called the “editor” in the intro to [his 1950s CBS-TV show] See It Now. (He was also called “distinguished reporter and news analyst” because they liked to lay it on thick.)

Here’s something else interesting from that intro. It called the show “a document for television, based on the week’s news and told through the actual voices and faces that made the news.”

That word “actual” is a big clue to the innovation that Murrow and [executive producer] Fred Friendly were bringing to broadcasting, and it was so important that the introduction uses the word twice. It goes on: “Now speaking to you from the actual control room of Studio 41 is the editor of See It Now, Edward R. Murrow.”

At which point Murrow swivels to the camera, cigarette in hand, to start the program. He’s in the actual control room so he can call up field reports and interviews on the monitors to his left. These monitors act as props — the field reports quickly materialize and fill our whole screen.

But Murrow has evoked the reportage through this little magic trick. In his cramped control room, surrounded by knobs and cameras, he is both the master of ceremonies and the guy who makes sense of everything at the end with a little homily.

Murrow delivered a banger at the end of A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a famous March 9, 1954 broadcast… Quoth Murrow:

Now, this particular program of Murrow’s was a bit unusual in that it didn’t have any reports from the field. It consisted mostly of clips from speeches and hearings featuring Senator McCarthy railing against this or that menace, a stray cowlick escaping his comb-over to flop against his wide forehead. 

[….] It was a game McCarthy was almost certainly bound to lose. That’s because inside Studio 41, there were no live “guests” — I mean, where would they even fit in there? Other people were always on tape. 

There’s even a moment a couple of minutes into his famous 1954 program when Murrow plays a reel-to-reel tape of McCarthy’s voice, in order to bring us words from a speech that wasn’t filmed.

Screenshot from See It Now showing Sen. McCarthy as a reel-to-reel machine (YouTube).

…Edward Murrow is hosting live. The Senator is 100% pre-recorded and thus already contained.

Immediately after the broadcast, CBS offered to foot the bill for McCarthy to film a half-hour rebuttal, and he took them up on it. The fool.

(Read the full post “A Letter to George Clooney” here.)

Radio’s “Like” Buttons

(originally published Dec. 4, 2025)

[CBS President] Frank Stanton was the kind of guy who liked to build things, so he took on the task of constructing a contraption that could measure listener reactions in real time. They called it the Program Analyzer. But people at CBS soon called it Little Annie.

Little Annie was based on the same basic technology as a polygraph machine. (By the way, historian Jill Lepore has a fascinating book and podcast episode about one inventor of the polygraph, William Moulton Marston, who was interested in more kinds of poly- than just graph, if you catch my drift).

Anyway, here’s Frank Stanton in an oral history for Columbia University describing how his program analysis machine worked:

Yes, this was perhaps the first “like” button, one provided in a dim room along with cigarettes. 

(Read “The Mysterious Listener” here.)

The Poet and the King

Norman Corwin (Radio Hall of Fame)

(originally published Aug. 28, 2025)

“I didn’t leave radio; radio left me,” Norman Corwin often said. But the whole time it was leaving him, he took extensive notes. There’s a lot we can learn from what he noticed.

The moment Corwin felt things unravel happened on a train in July 1948. He was on board the eastbound Santa Fe Chief, a favored cross-country shuttle for the entertainment set. 

Corwin was by then well-known for his incredible, audio-phonic verse and range of work [mostly on CBS]. Actors adored his scripts, and he won prestigious awards and rare prizes.

Corwin radio plays bookended US involvement in World War II: We Hold These Truths, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in late 1941, ran on four radio networks simultaneously and ended with a live speech by President Roosevelt; On a Note of Triumph ran on VE Day, May 8, 1945, and created such a powerful response from listeners that it was published as a book and commemorative album, both of which sold out immediately.

But that evening three years later on the Santa Fe Express, Corwin was not feeling triumphant any more:

Paley was William “Bill” Paley, the head of CBS. Corwin had run into him, along with Paley’s new wife, on the platform in California. It turned out they were all heading to New York on the same train. Paley invited Corwin to lunch in the dining car the following day. 

Bill Paley was a big deal, but not yet the famous head of CBS TV later depicted in countless books, lightly fictionalized exposés, and Broadway plays. Back in 1948, Norman Corwin would have seemed more famous than Bill Paley to most members of the public.

And Bill Paley was not exactly his boss — Corwin was an independent writer who’d brought a ton of prestige and goodwill to the network for a decade. Still, Corwin wasn’t getting commissions like he used to. He sensed that Paley, for all his charm, was jilting him.

Over a salad in the dining car the next day, Paley confirmed his fears. “You know,” he said (according to Corwin, the only source for this conversation), “you’ve done big things that are appreciated by us and by a special audience, but couldn’t you write for a broader public? That’s what we’re going to need more and more. We’ve simply got to face up to the fact that we’re in a commercial business, and it’s getting tougher all the time.”

[….] Corwin wrote and spoke about his encounter with Bill Paley in 1948 not because it ruined his life. But it was emblematic, and meaningful emblems were his stock in trade. He never stopped urging media to embrace the poetic power of the spoken word. He believed the way radio could use words had the potential for reverence, and people deserved that, to participate in making meaning together with the voices they heard.

Like many who came after, Bill Paley sat atop an empire of electrons and turned them into cash. But Norman Corwin knew what they were worth. And so, he teaches us, can we.

(Read the rest of “Poetic Justice” here)

Philadelphia Inquirer, Aug 23, 1982. Did he retire then? Not really!

More tales from the network zone…

Want more psychodrama? Here’s a post about NBC’s larger-than-life founder, David Sarnoff. And what does the birth of NBC/regulatory love-child ABC also have to do with Life Savers candy? Find out.

And there’s more on CBS: You Burned the City contains excerpts of speeches given by, and in honor of, correspondent Ed Murrow just a few days before the US entered World War II. The words delivered that evening showed off CBS’s commitment to civic discourse at its best, in a way that puts everything happening now to shame.

There are more stories waiting to be told. Help Continuous Wave get back in the archives by becoming a supporting member today:

And thanks for reading to the end. The nicotine-stained ghost of Ed Murrow says don’t ever trust the bastards.

Murrow in 1954 (TIME/LIFE).

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Note from Julia: The cold-open segments of NBC’s Saturday Night Live often rely on parodies of newsmakers, as cast members don wigs and assume weird accents to portray exaggerated versions of recent events. We might assume that news re-enactments on air have always been ridiculous and over-the-top.

In fact, the “Golden Age” of radio in the US was a golden age of news re-enactments, and these ones were taken seriously. I wrote a little about that here, but I was just scratching the surface.

Radio’s love of re-enactments was so vast, and so mind-bending for us today, that we need help to understand it. We need a media historian who knows why radio relied on re-enactments, and what went into popular “docu-drama” shows — foremost among them, a weekly roundup called March of Time. 

Today we have a guest post from Professor Emerita Cynthia Meyers, whose book A Word from Our Sponsor is one of my favorites. She’s done a ton of original research in a neglected corner of radio history: the role of ad agencies in production. Her post today is adapted from a great paper on March of Time she wrote a few years back.

Consider this post a soft launch of a series I’ve been wanting to do on the theme of authenticity. In a mediated world, how do we judge what is “authentic” and why? The program that Meyers writes about here reveals just how much our sense of authenticity can change over time.

Here’s Cynthia:

Time marching on

Amelia Earhart’s voice sounds faint, yet distinct, as she radios her position and announces her airplane’s fuel levels are low. She says she cannot see Howland Island, yet she is sure she is near it. 

Many radio listeners, hearing this on July 8, 1937, believed it to be Earhart’s actual last transmission before she disappeared.¹ In truth, they were hearing  an actress perform in a fictionalized, scripted re-enactment. Dramatic re-enactments were how The March of Time worked, week after week. 

Broadcast live on network radio from 1931 until 1945 — reaching as many as 62 million listeners per broadcast — the program featured a 23-person orchestra and a roster of ten or more actors. 

In this introductory clip from April 5, 1935, you can hear the announcer mention the fact that it was the “re-enacting of memorable scenes from the news of the week.”

One of March of Time’s sponsors was Servel (courtesy Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library).

The re-enactments, which may sound inauthentic to us today, were hailed as credible and powerful. Here’s how one journalist breathlessly described the program in 1936: “With no trace of exaggeration or caricature, they hold a mirror up to humanity, quoting verbatim the utterances of those in the news. If someone objects, he objects to the sound of his own words.”

The March of Time relied on impersonations, accurate or not, in order to create an aural experience that brought news and newsmakers to life in listeners’ imaginations. The impersonations solved several issues for the producers.

First, in those pre-audiotape days, there were few actuality recordings of newsmakers, and convincing newsmakers to appear in the studio and speak live into a microphone was not practical given the time constraints and the program’s international news coverage. 

Second, the radio networks insisted on live performances, so live actors fulfilled that requirement. Third, the producers and writers could invent speech for newsmakers by paraphrasing, editing, and fictionalizing their words. This enabled the producers to shape the stories narratively and tonally. 

Fourth, such flexibility allowed the producers to make the creative decisions they deemed best for attracting audience attention. By heightening the dramatic elements of a news story and by shaping an actor’s performance to signal a newsmaker’s identity, the producers of March of Time believed that they were providing audiences with a more authentic and engaging version of current events than could be found in other media.

Newspaper + show business

The program’s credibility was based, in part, on it being a production of Time magazine, a newsweekly that featured poached news stories rewritten in a breezy style designed to appeal to busy white-collar professionals. Time founder Henry Luce hoped to attract readership by focusing on newsmakers — the personalities in the news — rather than on dry, abstract topics such as tax policy. 

To stimulate interest and to cross-promote his media properties, Luce extended Time’s content into other media. He launched the March of Time radio program in 1931 and a newsreel version in 1935; in 1936 he reconfigured Life magazine as a pictorial weekly. 

Congruent with Time’s approach to news, the radio program’s producers selected current news events with an eye to entertainment and personalities as well as information. According to Radio Guide, “It is newspaper business. And it is show business. It must be ‘good theater’ because it is show business. Yet no fact may be distorted for theatrical effect.”

The “kaleidosonic” style

The March of Time presented several brief unrelated stories in each episode. For example, the January 18, 1937 broadcast includes these scenes: a boat caught in a storm off Cape Hatteras; a dialogue with a Japanese admiral justifying the invasion of China; a scene with a scam artist who impersonates celebrities; a scene featuring a starving family in Brooklyn discovering that their son has hanged himself to relieve them of expense; a Roosevelt speech about the stock market; British reporters interviewing Haile Selassie; and a debate in the British House of Commons. 

The transition from sketch to sketch was marked by the announcer (referred to as the “Voice of Time”) declaiming, “Time marches on!” accompanied by orchestral fanfare. This sonic style of moving from one imaginary place to another through sound cues is what Neil Verma calls “kaleidosonic.”² Instead of shifting images, the audience experiences “shifting sonic worlds.” 

In this February 3, 1938 excerpt, you can hear the “Voice of Time” — performed by Westbrook von Voorhis — narrate the desperate situation of Soviet scientists stranded on an ice floe in the Arctic.

Despite producers’ claims that most dialogue was “verbatim” and “based on verified quotations,” often the dialogue, characters, and scenes depicted in March of Time were pure invention.³  

To give just one example: in 1938 a British ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean; everybody on board was killed, so no witnesses survived. Nonetheless, in this excerpt from the February 3, 1938 broadcast, writers invented a scene in which listeners could “hear” the ship’s last moments through layers of sound effects including sirens, explosions, and panicking crew members.

To heighten the drama, the disaster is portrayed as the fictionalized last moments of the ship captain’s wife — we even learn her name was “Laura.” The putative innocence and feminine helplessness of the captain’s wife allowed the audience to personalize the injustice and horror of the attack. Thus what might have been a distant foreign incident, the deaths of a ship’s nameless crew, is reconfigured as a tragic love story. 

Ad for Hamilton Watches + March of Time, 1939.

Bartons on the March

Staff at Time magazine did not produce the radio program on their own. Instead, from 1931 to 1939 they turned to the magazine’s advertising agency: Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO). Because the only on-air authorship credit was given to Time, BBDO’s role producing the program has been little known. 

The agency’s most famous founder, copywriter Bruce Barton, argued that business could be a form of service, and that advertising, “the voice of business,” could keep manufacturers honest by publicizing brand attributes.⁴  

BBDO created advertising and public relations campaigns for large corporate clients such as US Steel (“Helping to Build a Better America”), General Motors (“Motorizing the World”), DuPont (“Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry”), and General Electric (“Live Better Electrically”). BBDO considered advertising to be a form of public education.⁵

Like other top ad agencies, BBDO produced many radio programs during the 1930s and 1940s, including General Motors Hour, General Electric Circle, Cavalcade of America, Armstrong Quakers, and programs for Socony, Goodyear, and Ethyl.⁶  

BBDO staff cast, scripted, directed, and arranged the music for the programs that they produced for clients. Often the programs were vehicles for companies hoping to polish their corporate image.

Radio Guide, July 18, 1936, p. 20

The BBDO executives most responsible for The March of Time — Arthur Pryor Jr., William Spier, and Homer Fickett — were also key personnel for programs BBDO produced. Pryor, gushed a journalist, “is an expert director, with an ear like a lynx for puffy acting.”⁷

Spier had been a music critic for five years before joining BBDO. He and Fickett produced the program, overseeing scripts, casting actors, and directing performances.

The sound of a beheading

The production of March of Time was labor intensive, and this intensity was trumpeted as a signifier of quality: “Two hundred and forty hours is a conservative estimate” for the labor of seven writers, one editor, two researchers, two directors, ten actors, and a 23-person orchestra plus its leader. 

The March of Time producers prided themselves on the program’s credibility and “realism.” They publicized the fact that Time editors helped select the stories and that “a research woman”  from Time stood by “embodying accuracy.” They were pleased when listeners were fooled by the re-enactments and impersonations into thinking they were hearing actual events and the newsmakers themselves. 

In 1933 a listener wrote that the re-enactment of an assassination attempt on Franklin Roosevelt was “so realistic” that she wondered if it had “originate[d] in a studio or was it broadcast from some sort of a sound machine which might have been at the scene.” ⁸

This sonic verisimilitude extended to sound effects. In order to replicate the sound of a beheading, for example, CBS sound effects supervisor Ora Nichols chopped “liverwurst, salami, apples and bananas before the microphone” before trying a honeydew melon, which was deemed most accurate sounding.⁹

Unidentified sound-effects engineer and CBS supervisor Ora Nichols (Encore, April 1933, p. 13)

Avatars of newsmakers

The impersonation of actual people raised a host of questions. The program might, for example, be accused of infringing on copyrights, privacy rights, or publicity rights by imitating well-known voices. BBDO protected itself from such accusations by claiming that it was a news program overseen by journalists at Time, and therefore they were not required to get permissions from living people as they would for an advertisement.¹⁰  

Time also claimed that “A voice, as a face, is public domain,” and thus they did not need to get permission to impersonate a voice. 

The March of Time producers sought actors who could perform accurate vocal impersonations in order to build credibility for the re-enactments. The actors were never credited on the air (neither were the BBDO staff), because that would have undercut the impression of sonic verisimilitude. Some of the actors went on to later fame, including Agnes Moorehead, Arlene Francis, and Orson Welles (whose 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast drew heavily on his March of Time experiences).

Because the audience could not see the actors, each actor played multiple parts: William Adams impersonated Franklin Roosevelt, Paul von Hindenburg (the German president during the Weimar Republic), and King Edward VIII; Dwight Weist played Adolf Hitler, George Bernard Shaw, William Randolph Hearst, Fred Allen, and Father Coughlin; and Ted di Corsia impersonated Benito Mussolini, Herbert Hoover, and “various gangsters.” 

Each actor claimed to do extensive research into the roles, listening to recordings, newsreels, and radio speeches.¹¹

Marian Hopkinson played Eleanor Roosevelt, and in this April 5, 1935 excerpt, you can hear the Mid-Atlantic accent signifying her upper class origins.¹²

Dwight Weist also impersonated Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the accused kidnapper of Charles Lindbergh’s son, for more than two years. Hauptmann’s arrest, trial, and execution were each re-enacted on the program. To ensure the most accurate performance, Weist studied the doomed Hauptmann: “He analyzed the bone structure of his head. Bone structure affects the voice. He attended the trial to observe the kidnapper. Loathing him, he made himself feel what Bruno was feeling, understand what he understood.” 

In this October 5, 1934 excerpt, you can hear Weist as Hauptmann defending himself. As one journalist recounted, “When the night came for the re-enactment of the execution, [Weist] felt sick, frightened. He felt, he swears, as though part of him died, too.” 

To play President Franklin Roosevelt, actor William Adams “studies newsreels to get personality as well as correct inflection into his impersonations.”¹³

At BBDO, confidence in the accuracy of his impersonation was so high that in 1934 they tested it on Eleanor Roosevelt. While she was visiting the agency for a different broadcast, she was introduced to Adams. According to the BBDO Newsletter account:

Later in 1934 President Roosevelt, fearing his efforts to calm the national mood were undercut by these impersonations, asked BBDO to stop. Not only was he concerned that March of Time’s fictionalized dialogue would confuse his public statements with fictionalized ones, he was also using radio himself to communicate directly with the electorate in his Fireside Chats.

Although the March of Time did later impersonate the president again, more often they sidestepped the issue by having a different character read from his speech. For example, in this January 18, 1937 excerpt, a rapid list of news headlines ends with a clerk reading a statement by Roosevelt. 

Sales Management, Oct. 20, 1933, p. 417

Aural stereotypes

Through accents, tone, and voice, March of Time built on audiences’ existing assumptions about vocal stereotypes to help audiences quickly identify and “understand” a character. 

Many newsmakers were not English speakers. Instead of impersonating them in their own language, which most listeners would not understand, the producers directed the actors to speak in heavily accented English, employing a kind of aural shortcut to signal ethnicity through voice instead of appearance. To achieve the most credible accented English, the actors would research the newsmakers and occasionally visit the International House at Columbia University to hear foreigners’ speech.¹⁴  

Ted di Corsia, when he impersonated an Arabic speaker, would have a Muslim prayer translated phonetically “so that he can get the exact cadence.”¹⁵  

In this February 10, 1938 excerpt, we can hear Dwight Weist’s Hitler impersonation sounding more like upperclass European nobility than a fanatical dictator, perhaps because the producers were careful to avoid alienating German-American listeners prior to the outbreak of World War II. 

Audience expectations of English proficiency were colored by ethnic stereotyping. Asian newsmakers were often impersonated in accented pidgin English. In one episode, a Chinese-born actor impersonated Chiang Kai-shek in a heavily accented voice — but some listeners complained that the voice was not “Chinese” enough.¹⁶  

In this January 18, 1937 excerpt, a Japanese admiral is distressed at the growing tension between Japan and the US; the clipped, singsong tones are meant to convey the character’s ethnicity. 

Foreigners were not the only characters subject to vocal stereotyping. In this March 29, 1935 broadcast, a reporter interviews a Seminole chief and presents a sympathetic perspective on the need for Native American reparations because “it seems only fair you should have more land”; however, the Seminole chief sounds like a character in a B movie Western.

March & chew gum

Although Time was the nominal producer and sponsor, BBDO was asked to find other sponsors to carry the production and transmission costs. At different times, Remington Rand, the appliance manufacturer Servel, and even Wrigley’s spearmint gum all briefly sponsored the program. 

On the August 17, 1936 broadcast, an announcer explained that Time controlled the program content: “The maker of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum has no more control over The March of Time than they have over the editorial policies and magazines in which they advertise.” But Wrigley dropped its sponsorship after six months.

As one observer noted:

Wrigley’s advertising manager explained that “a manufacturer advertises to establish friendly relations with his prospective customers, and even though we try to point out the fact that we did not make the news, nevertheless some of them seemed to figure we were to blame for the news.”¹⁷

BBDO produced the program until 1939, when it went on hiatus. Another advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, took over production from 1941 to 1945, when the show’s radio run came to an end. Because recording technologies had improved for actuality audio, the necessity for re-enactments declined. 

While the theatrical newsreel version of The March of Time continued until 1951 and is today better known, the radio program has been largely forgotten. One reason is that the journalism profession changed its standards; March of Time’s extensive use of fictionalization and impersonation undermined its claims to accuracy.

Historians of Henry Luce’s journalism empire tend to treat radio’s March of Time as an embarrassing footnote better forgotten than valorized. But during its heyday, it was praised as an important contribution to the education of audiences about the news — despite the fictionalization and impersonations.

As the radio critic Max Wylie proclaimed in 1939, the March of Time provided “vision through sound” and brought “before the public accurate information in memorable and provocative style.”¹⁸

JB: Thank you again to Professor Cynthia Meyers for dropping so much knowledge about radio re-enactments, including all the audio she uploaded to YouTube! You can read her original paper on March of Time here.

And go check out more of her work at profcynthiameyers.com.

P.S. There are dozens of episodes of March of Time for the listening in an online library here.

Legit this post has footnotes:

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Maybe you’ve heard this one…

If you had anything to do with podcasts a decade or more ago, at their frothy peak of hype in the US, you might have had an encounter like the one I’m about to describe. My encounter happened in 2017, following the successful second season of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, a show I freelance edited at the time.

Memories of the meeting are a bit hazy, like the foggy day in San Francisco when it occurred. The gentleman worked with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and he had reached out about making a podcast series on the history of data. 

He’d just flown in that morning from meetings in some faraway place. He wanted to know how many people, at a minimum, it took to make a show about big ideas. He wanted to know what it cost. Warning him I didn’t really know the big picture, I gave him my best estimate.

“That seems like a lot,” he said.

I asked him more about the format of the show he envisioned. As I recall, he said that he (or maybe one of his bosses?) had a lot of ideas and observations, so he thought he could record them, and that would be the basis of the show. No script, just off the cuff brilliance.

Our meeting wasn’t going well. I tried for a beat to explain the challenges of making what basically sounded like a series of voice memos into a successful podcast. But he wasn’t interested. 

He confessed that he had already approached some production companies for estimates and was shocked at the quotes they gave him. It seemed like a scam, he complained — and was disappointed I didn’t share his view that more zeroes should come off the price tag.

Fortune’s wheel

Most of us who came from the nonprofit public-radio world were never versed in what you might call the business arts. It’s only after years of observation that I figured out one should redirect or deflect questions about numbers until more trust has developed, and the potential client understands the realities of the profession they’d like to make use of. This process takes patience and skill.  

A few savvy producers understood that early on and are now rich. The rest of us could have used some help. Industry rate guides are great, and I refer to them often. But I’m talking about psychological help: when it comes to matters of money, you want to be propped up by something impressive; by a potent chunk of external validation just casually displayed. 

You want Fortune Magazine, May 1938.

The author’s vintage copy.

This bad boy, like all the Henry Luce-published Fortunes of its heyday, was printed on luscious paper stock and packed with original artwork and photography. Much of the May 1938 issue is dedicated to the US radio industry. The articles emphasize the modern coolness of radio production and the jargon of the studio. Mainly they emphasize the bottom line, that making radio is expensive, but also profitable.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this kind of industry publicity. The monthly Fortune got its start at the onset of the Great Depression, in 1930, at the cost of a dollar an issue — the equivalent of $19 today. And it was certainly worth the price, if you were one of the few who could afford it. 

The issue I ordered (for a reasonable fished-from-grandpa’s-garage eBay price) weighs in at 970 grams on the kitchen scale — almost a kilo. It’s fortunate — so to speak — that the publication’s thickness makes it hard to roll up and whack a person, because it could do some damage.

And so, the editors want you to know, would your bill for a network hit in 1938.

The toothbrush scenario

Ten thousand dollars in 1938, factoring for inflation, is equal to approximately $234,000 today. And that’s not counting the fee paid directly to the network for time on its schedule. The networks could demand that much because radio worked: it enthralled the nation by delivering mass entertainment to people’s homes for free, bringing them dramas and jokes and music and news.

But there were only 24 hours in the day, and fewer hours still when most people listened. The big networks, NBC and CBS, sat atop those hours collecting higher and higher tolls every year. Sponsors did not just buy ad spots back then — they had to shoulder the entire cost of the program that bore their name.

The most expensive show that Fortune lists is the Chase & Sanborn Hour, hosted by comedian Edgar Bergen and — winking to the audio medium — a ventriloquist dummy in a top hat named Charlie McCarthy. The show’s total weekly cost including network fees was $35,900: in today’s money, its food-industry sponsor was shelling out $840,755 per week for brand awareness.

Keep in mind that network radio at this time was entirely live, so each show was basically one-and-done. If performances were recorded, that was only for posterity and the sponsor’s library. There was no syndication, though sponsors could and did sell radio-related merch.

The Fortune article starts with a tongue-in-cheek emblematic scenario that’s incredible once you understand the numbers involved. A toothbrush manufacturer wants to sponsor primetime network entertainment as a way to make a dent in the market. The hapless toothbrush guy is talked by his advertising agency into approving ever more costly radio bills starting with $2000 weekly (almost $47,000 today) for the show’s star talent; and $1000 for two scriptwriters. Then there are supporting comic actors, a sound-effects team, and musicians: an 18-piece orchestra plus conductor. Toothbrush guy also needs to pay for a program director and an announcer to set up the show and shill the sponsor’s brand. In the end, with the network fees, he’s paying close to $13,000 ($304K+) a week for a show he doesn’t really like — but he says nothing and signs all the checks, earning the moniker “Fairy Godfather.”

Talk about good times! Fortune estimated that US broadcasting was worth in aggregate about $140 million in 1938 money — with a net profit yearly of $28 million across the networks and 700+ commercial stations. That’s the equivalent of more than half a billion dollars today, which wasn’t bad for a new industry that emerged during a long-running depression.

Radio Workers (1940), p. 23. Some things never change.

Money for words

For more concrete answers to the question of money for radio production back in the day, I recommend Erik Barnouw’s Handbook of Radio Writing. Barnouw, whom I wrote about here, had been a radio program director for various ad agencies but came to hate the work. He quit and started teaching at Columbia, then went on to write some foundational histories of American broadcasting. He also became head of the Radio Writers Guild for a time.

Barnouw’s Handbook, published in 1939 when he was fresh out of the radio business, starts off with the practical stuff right away: how much can a writer make in this industry?

He warns his readers that contract gigs are only for proven, experienced writers who know how to churn out good scripts week after week. And the pay range is huge.

One of several rate charts in Handbook of Radio Writing, p. 5

When I first encountered Barnouw’s charts, I had a sinking feeling. I could easily imagine a first-time client being shocked by the top end of the figure he cites for serialized scripts. And I mean shocked by the number as printed in 1939, not adjusted for inflation.

Of course, there are big differences between reported, nonfiction podcasts and original radio dramas. But at their cores, both media require a real fluency in writing for the ear and telling complex stories on deadline.

The prospect today that a top-notch ghostwriter could earn $1250 per episode? OK, at least it’s four digits — maybe try get that figure higher. But in 1939, that figure was the equivalent of twenty-nine thousand frickin dollars.

Here’s another way of putting all this: the cost expectations for audio production are much lower now than they were during the Great Depression. If anyone reading this today is getting $29K per episode as off-mic production talent, please click the button below — I want to meet you.

A crowded wonderland

What Fortune did so well, behind all its talk of numbers and money, was sell dreams to people in positions to pay for them. In May 1938, that dream was to partake in the glamor and power of radio.

Commercial network radio would go on to dominate mass media in the US for another ten years after this issue came out. By the late 1940s, the network bosses had developed television, regulators got in line, and the talent (those that could) left radio behind. Much of the US dial became the province of DJs, right-wing talk and nonprofit public media.

But it’s still important to remember that people once paid big money for talent in radio, and not just to make more money. People paid because they wanted access to a mystical power only audio had to offer.

Fortune commissioned Mexican-American artist Miguel Covarrubias to bring that part of the story home without words. His work Radio Talent, spread across two pages, is the real reason why I sought out this issue. The reporting on radio and money was just a bonus. 

Covarrubias captures how strange it is that all these voices — the actors, the announcers, the singers, the comedians, the playwrights, the President — crowd out of the sky and into our ears. I’m impressed that a business magazine commissioned such a freaky image.

It was an old friend from high school, Anthony McSpadden — now broadcast director at Austin’s classical station KMFA — who posted an image of Radio Talent on my Facebook feed a while back. 

“I have a print hanging in my studio at home,” he wrote. “Absolutely love it.”

I should find out what it costs to get my copy framed. And not wince at the quote.

The original drawing for Radio Talent sits at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. See puppet Charlie McCarthy leading the ghostly charge?

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Your nutrient solution: newsletters

The term “broadcasting,” as you probably know, was borrowed more than a century ago from broadcast seeding, an agricultural method of scattering mixed seeds on a prepared field rather than planting them in the ground.

If you think of words and music as seeds, broadcast really does work as a metaphor. Sounds go out into the ether, some are heard, and a very few take hold and generate meaning in the minds of listeners.

With podcasting, we take packets of seeds and hide them deep within an RSS feed or streaming service, hoping sunlight (audience) will find them.

After a year of publishing this newsletter, I can compare notes between the media ecosystem I know best and newslettering. As I’ll get into below, some of energy around newslettering reminds me of podcasting more than a decade ago. But the two worlds are different in significant ways.

First, let me say that I really love writing this newsletter and reading many others. Most days, my inbox is filled with pieces that are well-reported, original, and/or useful. It’s amazing so many people are doing this work day in and day out, and we should all support the writers that we can. 

I’m a member of Project C, a community of independent newsletter writers, and I’ve learned so much from this crowd. Much of what I’ve figured out is thanks to them.

To extend the agricultural metaphor of broadcasting, publishing a newsletter is more akin to hydroponics, a technique the USDA defines as “growing plants using a water-based nutrient solution rather than soil [but] an aggregate substrate, or growing media.” (media!)

Let me try to explain what I mean.

But first, why I started this…

Continuous Wave has been my attempt to articulate the connections between broadcasting’s past and media’s present, one post at a time. I want more people to read the excellent media scholarship about radio and podcasting. And to experience snark.

My long-term ambition is still to publish a book. The book market, I don’t need to tell you, is really daunting right now. It’s also possible I have acquired delusions after helping to build the audio annexes of many best-selling nonfiction authors. They make publishing look easy. 

But mainly I just needed to force myself to write on the regular. I am someone who works better with deadlines and at least some external reward. This project has worked out for me in that regard.

… and what happened when the clock exploded

Podcasting did not enter my life as a public radio reporter and editor until after the financial crisis of 2008-9. Shows got cancelled, and I was among many radio people laid off.

With no other venue (RealAudio, anyone?) some of us started producing podcasts. I made one from my kitchen. Still, it took us radio orphans a while to shed the behaviors we learned under time constraints of the broadcast clock. 

When Roman Mars and I made this episode in 2011, his show 99% Invisible was still a four-minute+ radio module with an extra podcast version — and I was so excited to make that version. Maybe it could be eight whole minutes long. Eight minutes was the outer horizon of anything I’d made.

Our collective release from the broadcast clock evoked a burst of under-employed creativity and enterprise. In 2014, that got turbo-fueled when Apple Podcasts got baked into the iPhone and more consumers could find podcasts easily. 

In a cycle that unconsciously followed the beginnings of American radio decades earlier, no one thought much about how podcasting would be sustained in the long run. There was a ton of magical thinking and “dumb money,” which we gladly accepted.

I sense a similar creative burst is going on with independent newsletters now, and so is the magical thinking. As l navigate this online world, I have to make choices all the time about doing this the easy way or the hard way. It seems I’ve picked the hard way.

Joining the Hiiv

My first, and probably most consequential decision when starting out was to refuse to publish on Substack, even though that platform gives you a lot for free and will juice your numbers right away.

Partly I dislike the aesthetics of Substack. I wanted to feature all of the wonderful visual material in the radio archives, and that platform is not great for original design. But also I’d been reading dire economic and social arguments against being on Substack. 

And — this is petty, but also prescient given developments to come — I resented how Substack’s favored House of Journalism, The Free Press, never seems to give producers credit on its podcasts.

So I went with Beehiiv, which is the home of many newsletters by writers and journalists I admire. If we’re being honest, though, I have struggled with it. (I am a newbie to both web design and the email communications world, so the following complaints will surely show my ass.) 

Beehiiv’s site design features are complicated to use, and as a solution, they mainly offer the dreaded video tutorial. Instead I tend to just make mistakes, get frustrated, and call on customer service. I should probably house this publication on a funkier (and cheaper) platform, but the cost and time to learn a new thing keeps me here for now.

Secondly, Beehiiv is very enthusiastic about giving users the ability to monitor subscribers and communicate with them on a granular level through something called “segmentation.” 

If I wanted, I could write different versions of this post, tweaked for every subscriber. I could A/B test subject lines and send times to maximize my open rates. These practices are standard for newsletters that have their shit together, I gather.

But for me, an immigrant from the land of broadcast who just wants to write, having the ability to see who subscribes and who opens my posts, and when? That power is both addictive and disturbing, and largely a waste of time. 

Subscriber churn over time at Continuous Wave.

BEATen down

When you open the back-end of Beehiiv, as with many products these days, it offers you a dashboard, like a cockpit. Or the automated controls for a hydroponic garden.

I am trying to learn, and not just resist, newslettering’s nuanced delivery system. But there is one place where I really hit a wall. And that’s the type of writing that this ecosystem seems to encourage.

Newsletters are often scanned in a hurry by people on their phones. I have been known to do this, too. 

So a lot of newsletters offer a certain prose style I call BEAT. Which stands for:

Bossy. 

Earnest. 

Algorithmic and

Tiresome. 

BEAT.

It’s the writing that gets your limited attention. Direct. And it’s earnest. Truly.

It’s the telegraph. We collectively re-invented the telegraph, y’all!

And yet: BEAT often repeats the same thing over and over again. This is partly for the search engines (RIP). Once BEAT makes a point, it goes back around and does it a few more times. Saying the same thing. With many CTAs. Bossy yet earnest Calls to Action.

👉 Like its prose-cousin, “LinkedIn Cringe,” BEAT favors the use of emojis and bullet-points. So it’s easy to scan. Especially on your phone. Oh yeah, I already said that. No matter. You probably missed it the first time. 😈

I have tried BEAT writing. And LinkedIn Cringe. They do seem to get results!

As a podcast and radio editor, I am well aware of the fact that you adjust your communication style to what works best in your given venue.

But also, you know what? This is my newsletter, and that style is not me.

So beat it, BEAT.

And then, I met a “friend”

Last week we hothouse farmers got an announcement: Beehiiv users can now plug an AI system, Anthropic’s Claude, right into that dashboard via what’s called a Model Context Protocol, or MCP.

I don’t have a subscription to Claude, but my partner (CW’s art director) does. I have been avoiding any AI use — do I need military, drone-targeting technology to write a quirky newsletter about radio history? 

Then again, I’m supposed to be exploring this strange new land. Like many humans, I hate asking for money. Claude wouldn’t care. So I plugged it in and asked for help planning a fund drive.

Claude, needless to say, was thrilled to be of assistance.

I gave it access to my newsletter. Within seconds, Claude was praising the whole thing: my writing, my incredible research, my unmatched reporting, my independence and spunk. Unlike the recriminating Beehiiv dashboard, with its many knobs and dials, Claude knew exactly what I should do.  

It offered a fund drive strategy and then it asked, “Would you like me to draft an appeal letter?” Sure, Claude, why not? It generated a letter, which I set aside.

Here is the worst thing about that encounter: I felt great. Like, for the whole day.

Some time prior to this flirtation with Claude, I’d been having calls with subscribers who volunteered to give me feedback. No surprise, but CW readers are super-talented, original and creative people who all share an interest in audio history. They said so many nice things and had great ideas. 

But only Claude, a non-sentient agent, had me walking on air. Why?

The next day I took a closer look at the appeal letter Claude drafted. The structure of it was OK, actually useful. But the prose was 100% BEAT, just coated with an eerie sheen of Barton.

I know I should have given Claude more specific prompts to avoid that outcome. I know AI could be a publishing buddy who could help me get organized, allowing more time to focus on original writing and research. I can’t really shame anyone else for trying it out, and I think its use will become widespread as newsletter authors run out of steam. The head of Beehiiv expects Claude will become the sole interface for many newsletter publishers on that platform. 

So yes, I now have access to a sophisticated tool to run my hydroponic publishing system, adjusting the nutrients and light and temperatures until every single flower blooms in flawless color. 

But hothouse flowers are grown to be cut. I’ve put Claude back in its box. I’m a broadcaster at heart, so let’s see what spring can do without it.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Screenshot of Brooke Gladstone and Micah Loewinger of On the Media, Sept. 9, 2024.

Fiorello to station: drop dead, j/k

The crowd in Central Park cheered as Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC’s On the Media, proclaimed: “Not many media companies in the US can count 100 candles on their birthday cakes.”

We were at a festival at SummerStage to commemorate “WNYC’s century of survival,” as the evening’s emcee Brian Lehrer put it — survival, because for its first many decades, the station was owned and abused by the city of New York, until it finally became an independent public radio flagship in the 1990s.

The job of Gladstone and her co-host Micah Loewinger, in between trivia quizzes like “1924 or Nah?” and musical performances by Freestyle Love Supreme and Laurie Anderson, was to present a 15-minute sketch that encompassed not only the history of the station, but of radio broadcasting in the US, since the two are intertwined.  

In pre-produced short videos, the OTM crew and some colleagues at WNYC wore funny hats, adopted accents and talked into antique microphones and telephones. It was amateur theater at its best.

Brooke Gladstone plays longtime WNYC manager Seymour N. Siegel, with WNYC senior producer Rex Doane as Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia.

I was watching in the audience that evening, both stunned and delighted. Stunned because as a freelance consultant, I had researched and drafted the first version of On the Media’s script for this event. 

Delighted because Gladstone, Loewinger and their executive producer Katya Rogers had turned my baggy and overly-complicated draft into a snappy tale of technological wonder, absurdity, irony, budgetary woes, fire department PSAs, devastating news audio, and even a touch of sentiment.

This performance was only possible because of the work of WNYC’s then-Director of Archives Andy Lanset and his team, who had spent years on grant-funded projects like the NYC Municipal Archives and the New York Public Radio Archives. They preserved sound and images, and wrote about the many fascinating people that built or appeared on WNYC over the century. 

The OTM presentation starts at 24 minutes in, if you want to watch:

What you speak into when broadcasting

My only note (because my brain just has to) is that we didn’t build in enough time during the run-of-show for audience reactions. After all, thanks to our studio-sequestered lives, radio and podcast producers often have only a second-hand feeling for “the room.”

This crowd of WNYC super-fans — who lined up hours ahead of time to get into the free show — applauded, laughed, even booed (at the mention of Mayor Rudy Giuliani). They became part of the show, and I was probably only one of a few who noticed what those unanticipated moments did to the timing cues.

Still, it was an awesome experience, and a large part of why I later started this project, Continuous Wave. I’m still chasing the high of scenes like the one we created around this archival image:

Grover A. Whalen and engineers in the radio booth at the Silver Jubilee, June 5, 1923. (NYC Municipal Archives).

In the center you see WNYC’s father figure, NYC’s Commissioner of Public Works Grover Whalen, giving a demo broadcast before the station even existed (the city rented some time on WJZ).

This photo mesmerized me when I ran across it in WNYC’s archives. 

I was mesmerized not so much by the dapper Whalen — though he sports a fine moustache — but by the two guys on either side, who present early examples of Radio Producer Face. Who knew that Producer Face has never changed?

Below is a screenshot of archivist Andy Lanset playing Whalen, with Micah Loewinger as engineer Raymond Asserson, the man who would later build WNYC’s first transmitter from second-hand parts purchased in Brazil.  

Andy Lanset and Micah Loewinger at the Silver Jubilee via the miracle of green screen (WNYC)

It’s your party, etc.

As this newsletter turns one year old, it makes me think of how WNYC had always leveraged its major anniversaries. 

On the municipal station’s 10th birthday, perhaps not coincidentally, the mayor announced that it would be allowed to remain alive. On its 20th, it got a shout-out from NBC’s “Dean of Radio Commentators,” HV Kaltenborn. On its 30th, it got a march. 

There were more observances: the 75th anniversary of FM broadcasting capabilities. A whole series of archival greatest hits on the station’s 90th.

It can create a virtuous cycle: A place that celebrates and reminds people of its continued existence is also in a better position to get grants to preserve its history. Which makes ongoing commemorations richer and more profound.

Let me be clear, however: commemorations should not be expected to boost staff morale — especially these days. Just a few weeks before its 100th anniversary celebration in Central Park, New York Public Radio announced a huge round of layoffs, the second round that year. The mood at the afterparty I attended with newsroom veterans was grim.

No, media birthdays are about something else, something existential. They plant a small flag against the force that’s been devouring electronic media (now all of media) since the beginning. That force is entropy, the constant falling apart of all our attempts at permanence.

The more I learn about American broadcasting, the more I see entropy as its twin, the dark-matter shadow of a powerful medium. Its history, just like podcasting’s today, is littered with dead brands and production houses that once thrived and are now forgotten: The Yankee Network in New England; Mutual, a cooperative radio network; DuMont Television.

And soon, we must add to the heap CBS News Radio, cancelled before it gets the chance to observe its 100th birthday. (Though it’s worth noting that radio news did not really get going at the network until the mid 1930s, as historian Michael Socolow points out.)

Past incarnations of CBS had been assiduous about throwing anniversary parties with special programming — especially the 50th and the 75th. How is the network’s 100th going to be anything but cringe?

March 25, 1978

History belongs to those who care

I can’t help but think that the relative ease of CBS severing its last link to its origins has to do not only with current management, but with the network’s longer-term dereliction about preserving its past.¹

Unlike its rival network NBC, CBS never donated its audio archives to the Library of Congress or some other place that could preserve its historic recordings, scripts and internal documents.

Instead, much of what remains of the radio side of CBS history was preserved by accident, bootlegging, or a combination of both. (Murrow’s papers reside at Tufts University. The Paley Center for Media has digitized a fair amount of audio and video, but you have to visit in person and pay a membership or museum admission fee for access).

I’m not saying that CBS News Radio would now be OK if the network had behaved more like WNYC with its archives. If we’re being honest, that’s a tall order even for WNYC now. 

But the fact remains that WNYC, with its terrible odds from day one, at least made it to age 100 and counting. It knows the story of where it came from and how it got here.

So my advice, unsolicited, to the doomed staffers of CBS News Radio? Throw yourselves a 100th birthday party anyway. The bigger, the better — maybe George Clooney would kick in? 

Have a drink for Ed Murrow, light a cigar for Bill Paley, wave your arms like Norman Corwin directing a masterpiece — go for broke and re-enact the network’s inaugural broadcast of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s opera The King’s Henchman. 

That history belongs to you, not the bosses who just flew in with bodyguards. Leave them off the invite but call in the old-timers and find some funny hats.

Give entropy a day off. It feels nice.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

First off, be honest. Until you opened this post, were you even aware of the name David Sarnoff?

Don’t feel bad if you answered “no.” Sarnoff, who strode the Earth like a colossus for much of his 80 years, started to be forgotten soon after he left us in 1971. This was a confounding irony to his biographers, both those who were commanded to make him look great during his lifetime, and those who tried to pick apart the many lies and exaggerations he left behind.

David Sarnoff in 1907 (The Hagley Museum and Library)

Radio and TV boy

It’s undeniable that Sarnoff remains a major figure in US history, someone who lived the kind of life that’s hard to imagine today. He was one of the first, and certainly the most effective, advocates for the idea that electromagnetic waves could transmit sound, and later images, into ordinary people’s homes. And then he made that impossible-seeming idea a reality.

David Sarnoff created the first US broadcasting network NBC, and via its parent company RCA, he played a major role in the technological development of television — especially color TV. 

New NBC centennial logo

NBC turns 100 this year. The celebratory videos it has released thus far are heavy on the Seinfeld and SNL of it all. They don’t mention the network’s origins in radio, or Sarnoff. 

I’m sure much more is to come, but this made me wonder: WTF, NBC? This is your dad! A guy born in 1891 in a dirt-floor shtetl in Belarus who went on to turn radio from a janky Morse-Code-based technology into a force that transformed war, finance and culture.

It’s a force that also transmitted 14 seasons of The Apprentice into American homes, thus creating the conditions for a public figure whose need for self-aggrandizement perhaps best matches David Sarnoff’s. 

But that other guy? He is a mere shadow of the original.

It’s intriguing to think that someone like DJ Trump was bound to emerge from the daddy issues Sarnoff left behind at NBC, the network he created but never really understood. Still, that’s not where we’re going today. 

As I’ve read about David Sarnoff, I’ve become fascinated by his story — not the real one, which in many respects he obscured and rendered unknowable — but the exaggerated version, the legend. That version has become the unattainable template for all our modern tech billionaires, rocket bros and merger kings. 

David Sarnoff was the first swinging-dick corporate media titan — someone whose dick-swinging was based on genuine accomplishments, a lot of hype, and a childhood of grinding desperation and hustle.

So let’s talk about that childhood, since in a very real way, we all live in the world that emerged from it.

Harvard’s copy of David Sarnoff: Radio and TV Boy

The “undoubtedly suspect” Sarnoff legend

I found the book David Sarnoff: Radio and TV Boy in the Harvard University Library. Maybe some graduate student has written a worthy thesis about the series it was a part of, called Childhood of Famous Americans. The volume on Sarnoff came out in 1972, the year after his death, and I think it’s a good a way as any to understand the man and the legend.

This children’s book is full of the same Sarnoff-ian anecdotes that future historians would have to fact-check. Here’s how it begins:

This anecdote is at least partly true: “David's first memory was of building blocks, a gift from his mother and the only childhood toy he recalled ever receiving,” his biographer Kenneth Bilby wrote in 1986, remembering a conversation with Sarnoff during which he said, “I guess I was hermetically sealed off from childhood.”

That’s because at age five, Sarnoff was picked to study the Talmud and sent to live far away with a rabbi uncle. He lived in a lonely village north of Ukraine for almost four years, where he memorized and recited texts in Hebrew and later Aramaic. 

The legend of Sarnoff starts here, with how many words he supposedly memorized per day: 2000. “The figure, which Sarnoff repeated often, is undoubtedly suspect. If we assume he had to follow this regimen six days a week, 52 weeks a year, he would have committed 2,496,000 words to memory,” writes Tom Lewis in an endnote to Empire of the Air (which later became the basis of a Ken Burns documentary).

When Sarnoff was nine, he emigrated with his mother and brothers to New York. He learned English (his fifth language!) quickly, but had to drop out of school after the eighth grade to support his family. He sold Yiddish-language newspapers around the Lower East Side, and then managed to buy a newsstand (and later told a suss story about a nice social worker giving him the money, as opposed to the usual way unbanked immigrants of the time had to finance new ventures: a debt to some criminal gang).

Young Sarnoff handed over the newsstand operation to his brothers so he could get a job during the day. And that’s how he bumbled into a place called the Commercial Cable Company.

The mysterious wireless

Sarnoff says he got fired from his first job because he asked for time off to sing in temple during the Jewish high holy days. But soon he found another office-boy gig at the North American offices of the Marconi Company. 

The Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi had, just a few years earlier, claimed to send an experimental wireless signal across the Atlantic. But the American branch of his business was almost bust, as Sarnoff found out when he was sent to collect loans so the office could make payroll.

Finally, Sarnoff got to meet the boss, Marconi himself. Marconi had a lot of mistresses around town and sent Sarnoff on errands to bring them flowers and chocolates. But he and Sarnoff also found time to talk about the mysterious wireless.

“The story of Marconi’s meeting with Sarnoff is well documented and not exaggerated; Marconi himself referred to it on several occasions,” Tom Lewis writes (374). Sarnoff went on to man wireless posts in Nantucket and Brooklyn, but the next chapter of his biography is the weirdest yet.

The Boethic

In 1911, Sarnoff volunteered for a six-week post as a Marconi operator on a seal-hunting vessel called the Boethic heading for the Arctic Sea. This was a dangerous gig, and a little irresponsible since Sarnoff was by now supporting his family with his salary. But perhaps he jumped at it precisely because he’d been adulting since age five.

Sarnoff kept a journal during this time, describing things like a journey on foot across the ice to inspect another hunting-vessel’s equipment. He and his companion, a doctor, insisted that they needed to cross back to their ship before nightfall.

As you can imagine, this incident is the highlight of Radio and TV Boy.

Will they survive?? Yes, a search party from the ship finds them just in time. 

Thirty-six thousand Arctic seals were not as lucky. Thanks to wireless communications between ships in the fleet, the hunters — including Sarnoff — were able to locate many herds and slaughter them. Sarnoff would keep the taxidermied body of a seal fetus as a souvenir on his mantle for years.

The Titanic

All this (probably real) ice adventure led seamlessly to the next chapter of Sarnoff’s legend, which his former colleague and biographer Carl Dreher calls “bunkum.” This is the myth that Sarnoff personally coordinated the rescue of those aboard the doomed Titanic, all from the perch of a new wireless station atop Wanamaker’s department store in New York. As Radio and TV Boy tells it:

“The fact is that Sarnoff was not on watch. The Wanamaker stations kept store hours. Even if he had been on watch, he could not possibly have heard signals from the Titanic, which sank a thousand miles away and hours before he got into the act,” Dreher writes (28). 

But Tom Lewis admits, you gotta hand it to him. “Of all the wireless operators…Sarnoff alone had the prescience to embellish his role as the sole wireless link between the Titanic and the mainland. In that single incident, he saw better than anyone else the power of the new medium” (107).

A Radio Corporation is born

Marconi’s American branch became profitable after Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912. It required shipboard wireless operators on watch at all times, and more stations on shore. 

The Navy took control of US radio when the country entered World War I in 1917. After the war, the military was reluctant to give up its control. The alternative looked like chaos.

But in late 1919, lawmakers (and an assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin D. Roosevelt) hammered out a deal with the big tech companies of the time: AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse. They would share patents under a new entity called the Radio Corporation of America. British-owned Marconi would sell its assets to this new entity.

Among those assets was David Sarnoff, now a manager and soon to be head of RCA.

“Graphic Display of David Sarnoff’s Life,” 1960. (The Sarnoff Collection at The College of New Jersey)

Here it is possible to jump ahead to some of the things Sarnoff did in the decades to come:

• He established NBC as a “public service,” but basically abandoned it to commercialism (with the exception of his beloved NBC Symphony Orchestra);

• He poured millions of RCA profits into the development of television, over the objection of the company board, in a bet that did not pay off for more than 20 years;

• He set RCA lawyers to ruin the business prospects of his old friend Edwin Armstrong, the inventor of the FM receiver, and yet was horrified when Armstrong died by suicide in 1954;

• In the 1940s he helped set off the “battle of the speeds,” a format war between CBS Records’ LP and RCA Victor’s 45;

• He served in the Army Signal Corps during World War II but then hung around the continent while his company languished after VE-Day, waiting for a promotion to the rank of general; after he got his promotion, he made everyone call him General, causing NBC programming genius Pat (“Sigourney’s Dad”) Weaver to be stripped of duties after calling him “General Fangs” behind his back;

• He watched as his old frenemy William Paley organized a mass-defection of NBC talent to CBS in the late 1940s, remarking that, “A business built on a few comedians isn't a business worth being in.”

• He engineered the succession of his son Robert Sarnoff to the head of RCA, and Robert tried to turn it into a conglomerate with diverse interests in things like frozen food, with disastrous results.

• David Sarnoff died of complications from shingles (get your vaccine!) before he could see the final outcome for RCA: it was sold in 1985 back to General Electric.

None of that grown-up stuff is appropriate material for a book like TV and Radio Boy. As I read it, I could feel my inner fourth-grader getting bored after the Titanic part ended.

The book even struggles to make interesting Sarnoff’s early, prophetic vision for radio, known as the “music box” memo. That was written in either 1916 (his version) or 1920 (more likely).

Of course, it wasn’t impractical, even at a time when “broadcasting” was not a word most people knew. Many of Sarnoff’s prescient tech dreams came to pass, and every Silicon Valley titan should ransack his archives for ideas — he and his researchers also predicted the rise of computers and the Internet. His place in history should be assured.

But during his lifetime, no matter how often the world lauded David Sarnoff — and he had a full-time staff in search of honorary degrees and awards — it was never enough. He was an outsider who never got the respect he was due.

If that tendency reminds you of someone? Like I said, the Freudian hangovers must be gigantic over at 30 Rock. But look what unresolved issues get you in the end:

David Sarnoff in 1954 (from the “Jump” series by Philippe Halsman), The Sarnoff Collection at The College of New Jersey.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Note: This post was originally for Continuous Wave’s email subscribers only, but I’ve decided to post it publicly. The excerpts below are from a remarkable artifact of broadcasting history, a slim booklet of speeches given at the end of 1941, just before the US entered WWII. It was a terrible time for most people on this planet, and it was about to get worse.

This little booklet from CBS is worth re-reading now. It is reminder that words are not empty, that the act of witnessing matters more than we know, and that people within flawed institutions can still speak clearly and set the standards by which will media be judged by history — including in ways we cannot anticipate now.

What follows below is a little context for the booklet itself, and then three excerpts from speeches given that night.

This is London, in New York

One of the pleasures of digging around in the backwaters of radio history, I’m finding, is that pretty much everything is available at a reasonable price.

And so that’s how, after reading about it in a footnote, I ended up with my own copy of the historic booklet “In honor of a man and an ideal…” published December 2, 1941. The 35-page folio is printed on beautiful, cream-colored stock, stapled inside a gray deckle-edged, thicker paper cover. And on the back of my copy is a little extra something which I will reveal below.

But first, I want to share some of the words inside this small but mighty booklet. It contains speeches by three guys that readers of Continuous Wave have already met: the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, CBS head honcho Bill Paley, and Edward R. Murrow, then in charge of CBS’s European news operations, who was just back on furlough from nearly a decade covering the rise of fascism and war.

It’s a very strange time as a US citizen to read what they said before a ballroom of hundreds of media luminaries at the Waldorf Astoria in New York nearly 85 years ago. It was a moment, all too rare, when people came together to acknowledge the power of the witness — that unloved, vital role in society.

The least we can do is witness the resolve of these men, whatever their imperfections, and whatever would befall them — and us — later. Also, let us pay our respects to good writing, and possibly some ghostwriting, by radio people!

A testimonial dinner

First, a little context to set the scene: During the Nazi Blitz, which began in 1940, the London headquarters of CBS had come under bombardment many times, and Murrow and other reporters had experienced many near misses with falling shells. Through it all, the CBS audience had become mesmerized his articulate, restrained reports, always live and often from a rooftop overlooking the besieged city.

By the time he showed up in a white bowtie and tux at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Ed Murrow had been reporting on the Blitz for more than a year. It must have felt surreal to be back in the States, though he returned by ship and thus had some time to adjust to life beyond the siege.

All that same year, Murrow’s boss Paley had been under constant pressure to air the anti-war rallies of the “America First” movement, an isolationist wing of politics which took as its mascot the increasingly antisemetic Charles Lindbergh.

So throwing a big party for the network’s star correspondent must have felt like both a relief for the network and a strategic imperative. No one there knew that in just a few days after these remarks, the Japanese would attack the US at Pearl Harbor and the country would end its long debate about whether and how to join the world’s raging conflict. The excerpts below, then, are from a very particular moment in time, but also to my mind, unusually timeless, especially for journalists.

Archibald MacLeish (center) with Orson Welles and CBS director William Robson rehearsing the poet’s 1939 radio play “Air Raid” (CBS)

Speech excerpt 1: A Superstition is Destroyed by Archibald MacLeish

…I am talking to you, Ed Murrow. And what I have to say to you is this — that you have accomplished one of the great miracles of the world. How much of it was you and how much of it was the medium you used I wouldn’t undertake to say — though others have used the medium without the miracle resulting. But however that may be, the fact is that you accomplished it. You destroyed a superstition. You destroyed, in fact, the most obstinate of all the superstitions — the superstition against which poetry and all the arts have fought for centuries — the superstition they too have destroyed. You destroyed the superstition of distance and time. 

I am sorry if I seem to speak in metaphors for there was never a time when I wished more to speak in literal and precisely meaning words. What I wish to say to you is this: that over the period of your months in London you destroyed in the minds of many men and women in this country the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here; the cowardly and brutal superstition that the enslavement of mankind in a country where the sun rises at midnight by our clocks is not enslavement by the time we live by; the black and stifling superstition that what we cannot see and hear and touch can have no meaning for us.

How you did this, I repeat I do not know. But that you did was evident to anyone. You spoke, you said, in London. Sometimes you said you were speaking from a roof in London looking at the London sky. Sometimes you said you spoke from underground beneath that city. But it was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the observation cars of another country that your voice was truly speaking. And what you did was this: You made real and urgent and present to the men and women of those comfortable rooms, those safe enclosures, what these men and women had not known was present there or real. 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 the dead were our dead — were all men’s dead — were mankind’s dead — and ours.

Speech excerpt 2: An Ideal Survives by William S. Paley

…Tonight we’re celebrating both the survival of an ideal and a man’s service to that ideal. It’s because in part of the world freedom of speech still survives and freedom of the air is an inseparable part of it, that Columbia is able to maintain a free and open forum of public discussion without being obliged to further the ideas or the aspirations of any special group, in government or out. It is because of that same freedom of the air that we are able to bring you the news — uncolored, unbiased, with no thought of moulding your ideas to fit a pattern of our choice. 

Indeed the sole purpose is and must be to tell you the news, the meaning of the news, the interrelation of events and ideas. Thus, honestly and intelligently informed, you are left wholly free to take such attitudes and such actions as your own judgment dictates. 

Columbia has striven always to preserve that part of this great freedom which has been in its custody. So have many other broadcasters, and long before we began to serve this human need, the great press services and honest newspapers of America dedicated themselves to the same task. Our common duty to preserve this freedom and to use it solely in the public interest, is a duty not to ourselves but to you.

Edward Murrow in his natural environment. (Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland via Wikipedia)

Speech excerpt 3: A Report to America by Edward R. Murrow

…If there is a difference between me and other Americans, it is simply that in these critical years I have been there and you have been here. It is for you to judge whether this gives me the advantage of perspective on problems at home or whether it makes me a less competent witness. Perhaps I can say to you that as an American in London, reasonably well informed as to what has been afoot in the world, it seems to me that Americans at home already have made some basic decisions and have some fairly simple further questions to answer — and mind you when I say that the questions are simple, I am not trying to tell you that the answers are necessarily either simple or easy. 

Certainly America has answered the most fundamental question of all — it wills democracy to survive. I am told that over here you no longer debate whether the destruction of Hitler and the isms that he trails in his train are essential to Democracy’s survival. So it seems to me that the debatable area narrows itself pretty much to these two questions —

Must Britain survive in order that democracy may survive? If the answer is no, we have only the devices of insulation to consider. If the answer is yes, the question is — How far, and perhaps even to a greater degree than some over here are willing to admit, how fast shall America go?

Almost I wish that I were so endowed that at this point I could stand before you as a prophet rather than a reporter; but I shall stick to my role and tell you only that to some of the most thoughtful observers to whom I have talked in Britain…it has seemed that if Britain should fall in spite of material aids, speeches, editorials, and knitted garments, it will be necessary to consider a new Britain, driven by ruthless conquerors, into taking her place in the forefront of our enemies. 

These people — and they are lovers of war no more than you or I — have been heard to ask, “If Britain goes down or becomes too exhausted to care, will America not become the most hated nation on earth?” It is not our ability to resist the hatred that troubles them; instead they ask insistently, “Can America withstand the competition both economic and ideological?” Today there is a shuddering recognition that it is the strength of national socialism that it forces those who fear it to imitate it; and those who go down before it to embrace it.

Too Little and Too Late was nearly the epitaph of Great Britain. That much we know. There is no decision that America can make that will be without a price, but for a wrong decision in the present, the future will take its inevitable revenge.

###

I’d say those were some decent speeches. If you want to read them in their entirety, as I mentioned, the booklet is online here. After the jump, you’ll find something extra that came with my personal copy of this artifact. Never say history can’t also offer you exclusive content.

EXCLUSIVE FOOD EPHEMERA

The Internet is not especially cheering right now, as you probably know. My browser is full of grim tabs that I know I must read, in some kind of effort to destroy the “superstition of distance and time” MacLeish refers to — but it’s replaced by a kind of miserable futility that doesn’t have a proper name yet.

So as a small reprieve, I offer you the recipe that is scrawled in pencil on the back of the copy of “In honor of a man and an ideal” that I got in the mail (shout-out to Willis Monie Books of Cooperstown, NY!).

Honestly, I love that this fancy booklet of important Media Dude speeches was later vandalized as a scratch pad for what appears to be a fruitcake recipe. Here are the ingredients:

• ½ cup shortening

• ½ teaspoon almond extract

• ½ teaspoon vanilla

• ½ cup corn syrup

• 1 ½ cup enriched flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ½ teaspoon cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon cloves

• 1 egg

• ¾ cup anything you have on hand

There are no instructions for assembly or baking. Not gonna lie, these aren’t all necessarily ingredients I would choose to put in a cake (though “anything you have on hand” is intriguing). It’s possible that wartime rationing was a factor. Anyway, let me know if you decide to try this recipe — and of course, what you had on hand.

This research is only possible with your support

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

“Always the goat”

On May 15, 1931, Miss E.S. Maury sat down to write a letter to the editor on behalf of the Negro History Club of Plainfield, NJ.

“Why should we always be the goat?” she asked. “Other races have gone through the same metamorphosis that we are experiencing; somehow or other, we seem different in every way to all other races that are or have ever existed.”

This was sarcasm, directed at the most popular radio show in the United States at the time: Amos’n’Andy. The show broadcast for 15 minutes every weeknight over the NBC network. More than half of all radio listeners, it was estimated, tuned in — some 40 million people, eager to hear the ongoing saga of two men who had migrated from the South to Chicago. 

The characters were Black, but the men who wrote and voiced the program were white: Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, who claimed personal expertise in “Negro dialect,” though their version was filled with malapropisms. Their speech patterns, E.S. Maury wrote, made no sense.

“When will people realize that there is no Negro dialect? Any one who has ever been South knows that all the people of a given section speak the same dialect irrespective of color. But Amos’n’Andy have their own dialect. No section of the South speaks as they [do],” she said.

Her letter was one of many responses to a campaign by the Black-owned newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier to get Amos’n’Andy taken off the air. That campaign did not succeed, but it’s worth revisiting given the Continuous Wave theme of the month: harm. (See my previous post on Soviet propaganda here).

The Courier letter-writers used the word “harm” a lot when talking about what Amos’n’Andy had wrought on their daily lives. Their children were being mocked, their businesses denigrated, their evening routines ruined as the world seemed to stop and listen to a show that they felt humiliated them. 

For editor Robert Vann, the sheer gall of it all was enraging. 

“The men portraying the characters are white. The company employing Amos'n'Andy is white. The people reaping the financial gain from the characterizations are all white,” he pointed out in an editorial. “But the people who are getting the black eye out of it all are the Negroes of this country.”

The Pittsburgh Courier, June 27, 1931.

Amos’n’Andy was more than a radio show; from its earliest success, it spawned movies, toys, and even candy bars. In the 1940s, it became a weekly sitcom, and in the early 1950s, a short-lived but notorious television show with Black actors (which is how many people today remember it). 

But the early radio program is what had the biggest impact on the future of audio. Broadcasting was less than a decade old when the show arose in the mid-1920s — almost everything else on the air around it was amateur music, vaudeville theatrics, and scholarly lectures. Despite its outward resemblance to a minstrel stage show, Amos’n’Andy was a serialized, character-based drama, the first format like that on air, from which everything else would follow, from soap opera to sitcom.

That confronts us with an ugly truth: Every person now who tells stories in audio has to grapple with the existence, and the success, of this foundational program. What does it mean that the first Americans to succeed at holding widespread listener attention, day after day, were racial imposters? And which voices had to be suppressed for the Amos’n’Andy phenomenon to thrive and grow?

End-paper image from All About Amos’n’Andy, 1930.

A word about images

That vintage image of an Extremely White Family enjoying A&A is bad enough, but click on the links above, and you will find Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll with their faces slathered in black greasepaint, yukking it up in silly hats. I am not posting those photos here — because those images really do cause a lot of people, including me, pain. But I also think they make the show too easy for us to dismiss, and thus not think about further. 

Look, I am white and grew up in the American South — in fact, in a city with two streets named Amos and Andy. Although I don’t remember ever seeing the Amos’n’Andy TV show, I am quite certain my grandparents listened to the radio version and enjoyed it, judging from a family argument I witnessed in which minstrel figures like Sambo and Aunt Jemima came up, and they defended them as “figures of love.”

That made me feel ashamed, and that sense of shame re-emerged when I approached this topic. I tried to listen to old recordings of A&A and found them awful. But also, E.S. Maury was right — no one actually spoke the way people did on that show. I couldn’t understand half of what the characters were talking about.

When I finally got into the Amos’n’Andy scholarly discourse — there is a lot! — I found it encouraging that there is so much analysis of this program. Whether we like it or not, the legacy of Amos’n’Andy is much messier, more instructive, and ultimately more disturbing than its greasepaint surface implies. 

Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden in the 1920s.

Funnies on the air

Like many American men in early radio, Freeman Gosden had been trained as a “wireless” radio operator for the Navy during World War I. He’d grown up in a neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia adjacent to a Black neighborhood. He said he based the guileless, kindhearted character that eventually became Amos Jones on Black men he knew in Richmond. 

Charles Correll came from Peoria, Illinois, and was an outgoing theater ham, singer and pianist. He would play the deeper voiced, somewhat lonely but expedient Andy Brown.

The original concept of the show started with a call for pitches. A manager at the Chicago Tribune-owned station WGN (“World’s Greatest Newspaper”) thought of exporting the popular serialized format of comic strips to broadcasting. Gosden and Correll were the station’s in-house “artists,” and they worked up a pitch.

Both had performed some minstrel shtick on the theater circuit, but it wasn’t their main act. However, their radio pitch centered around two “blackface” characters. Why?

“We chose black characters because blackface comics could tell funnier stories than whiteface comics,” Correll told an interviewer late in life. 

Here it’s useful to bring up this essay, which argues that white minstrel performances, both in America and in Europe, served as a “rite of reversal,” a carnivalesque event in which “the participants relieve tension by pretending to be what they are not.”

The “tension” that Gosden and Correll faced, they were quite clear, was the possibility of failing as merely themselves on the radio. They felt they could take more risks as faux-Black characters. They never tried to hide the fact that they were white, but they figured they could discard their Black vocal masks and try something else if this effort failed. 

But as we know, it didn’t fail, and soon the brand-new radio network NBC scooped up the duo in 1928 with a yearly contract for $50,000 each. The sponsor, the toothpaste Pepsodent, wanted a more traditional minstrel show but, as radio historian Elizabeth McLeod writes, “Correll and Gosden vigorously opposed this idea… They well realized that they owed their success to their innovative serial-drama technique.” (45)

Sheet music photo from the mid 1920s.

While Miss E.S. Maury and others were signing petitions and sending letters against Amos’n’Andy to the Pittsburgh Courier in 1931, Gosden and Correll kept on doing what they did every day: retreating to the two-man, imaginary Black netherworld where the show lived in their heads.

McLeod has done an epic amount of original research on the radio version of Amos’n’Andy, consulting thousands of scripts, doing interviews, and listening to recordings — all with the clear purpose of rehabilitating the early show’s reputation. She points out in this published exchange that several Black characters Gosden and Correll created for Amos’n’Andy were professionals who did not speak in dialect. McLeod argues that for the time, this represented a sonic defiance of the color line.

“No one forced Gosden and Correll to incorporate such characters,” she writes, calling this choice “subversive.” 

But another scholar of the radio show (I told you, there is discourse!), Melvin Patrick Ely, doubts A&A accomplished anything against segregation in the South, or anti-Black discrimination in the North:

Crossing the line

Those words “racial fantasy-world” are key, I think. Gosden and Correll were using their voices to construct a parallel racial universe. They learned as they went along where its real boundaries lay.

In December 1931, Amos’n’Andy ran a brief story line which required the two performers to use their “white” voices as police detectives interrogating an innocent Amos as a suspect in a murder. Amos must maintain his composure in the face of mounting insults and threats.

These episodes, Elizabeth McLeod writes, “were by far the rawest and most racially charged scenes in the entire series. They resulted in an official complaint to NBC and [sponsor] Pepsodent by the National Association of Chiefs of Police… In presenting these scenes, Correll and Gosden crossed a line they would not cross again.” 

Given the timing, just after the peak of the Pittsburgh Courier’s crusade against the show, one has to wonder if they took the risk in the first place thanks to pressure from the Black public. We’ll probably never know — but if so, that was the only tangible result of the newspaper’s crusade. The Courier’s petition to radio regulators fell on deaf ears. One look at these guys and you can probably guess why.

Such a base purpose

Some of the letters to the Pittsburgh Courier reveal that the Black community was not united in its opposition to Amos’n’Andy. The show did have Black fans, and Gosden and Correll were careful to cultivate them, headlining charity picnics like one put on in 1931 by the Chicago Defender, whose publisher was an old friend.

The letters that most haunt me are not so much about the show, but about the trajectory of radio overall. These correspondents grasped how the medium was shaping up against them. That the one thing you couldn’t be on the radio now was Actually Black.

In the 1920s, some Black-oriented programming could be heard on outfits like the Harlem Broadcasting Corporation (see here, p. 252) which leased time on stations in New York. Other businessmen tried buying their own stations in the 1930s, but to no avail. As the industry consolidated during the Great Depression, broadcasting became one of the most exclusionary workforces in the country.

Some of those Black entertainers, including Ruby Dandridge and Ernestine Wade, were hired in the late 1930s by Amos’n’Andy. The cast started to be integrated. But the money never was. 

Gosden and Correll, who by now split their time between Hollywood and Palm Springs, became less involved in the show. It went weekly on CBS in the 1940s, and Ely describes how its jokes and stereotypes actually got cruder with new (white) writers on board.

As for Gosden and Correll, Ely notes that “when the pair talked with two black reporters in [1942], Gosden was reduced to confessing that his current data on the African American character came from a ‘colored boy working for me.’” (199)

Enter TV

In the late 1940s, the duo got millions of dollars to license their characters to CBS for a television adaptation, and they stayed involved through a long audition process for an all-Black cast. As production got underway, Gosden tried to school Spencer Williams, the actor cast as the cigar-chomping Andy — and also a man who had directed nine (!) feature films of his own. 

“He wanted me to say ‘dis here and dat dere’ and I just wasn’t going to do it,” Williams told Ebony in 1961. “He said he ‘ought to know how Amos’n’Andy should talk,’ but I told him Negroes didn’t want to see Negroes on TV talking that way. Then I told him I ought to know how Negroes talk. After all, I’ve been one all my life.”

Williams says Gosden left the set and never returned. Meanwhile, the NAACP had been mounting its own campaign against the sitcom, one that took advantage of growing civil rights leverage in post WWII America. Filming for Amos’n’Andy lasted only two years, after which CBS bowed to pressure and canceled it.

While Gosden and Correll kept their millions, Spencer Williams lamented that after playing Andy, he could not get another role in Hollywood. He told Ebony he was living off his pension as a veteran. The actor who played Amos, Alvin Childress, was faring worse at the time, though he’d later get TV roles.

Meanwhile, Amos’n’Andy remained in syndication for several more years. Not a penny of the royalties went to the cast — nor would CBS allow them the right to tour on their own as the still-popular characters.

Spencer Williams as Andy.

I know this whole dismal tale is a lot to unpack, and I feel like I’ve only just gotten started. There are plenty of links in this piece to scholarship, and some further ones to explore below. But what I most value from all this research has been reading about the Pittsburgh Courier campaign.

Those nearly 100-year-old letters remain a powerful testimony to how broadcasting could have done better, if it had had any conscience. Maybe it’s comforting to think we’re different now, but I see plenty of evidence that the same cycle is always ready to roll with the debut of each new media technology. Harming a vulnerable group does not seem like a side effect of technology, but a stepping stone.

Meanwhile, here are a few timeline-cleansing recs for further exploration of some of the themes in this post:

• To hear the Black press and history brought to life, check out Nichole Hill’s show Our Ancestors Were Messy.

• Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line is an epic study of African American literary history through the lens of sound.

• Film critic (and my fellow Nieman Fellow) Beandrea July has a profound podcast and accompanying newsletter called Annotations, featuring conversations with other critics about some of these vexatious issues of representation, as well as movies they love. I recommend this episode.

• NYU assistant professor Chenjerai Kumanyika’s essay Vocal Color in Public Radio remains one of the best explorations of pressures to vocally “code switch” in narration. He also has a new podcast called Unruly Subjects.

• I am eager to see Spencer Williams’ films, some of which were set in my hometown! Spencer Williams Dallas Film Festival now, please.

• Speaking of films, the Academy Award-winning Sinners is set in 1932 — right in the Great Migration era that spawned the plot lines of Amos’n’Andy. Here is a great syllabus coming at that movie from every angle.

• Finally, did you know the BBC had a blackface minstrel show on its air until 1978? I did not. David Harewood explores that and other unpleasantries in a documentary.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

The infernal feed

Spend a minute on Apple’s top podcast charts and you will see a lot of shows that arguably cause harm to this world. I’m not going to enumerate them, and you can judge the harm according to your own moral standards. On aggregate, though, it clearly seems like this corner of the audio world is a profitable place for those who traffic in misogyny and racism, quackery and conspiracy, grift and bullshit.

That’s depressing, of course — but the medium is not the message. It just shows that audio has power, and naturally, not only the virtuous want a piece of it. 

I’m fond of a mordant book called The Infernal Library, which asks why so many of the 20th century’s dictators started out as wannabe writers and editors. The author, Scottish-born Texan Daniel Kalder, took it upon himself to read Hitler’s terrible tomes, Lenin’s screeds and Mussolini’s editorial diatribes as a literary genre (unaffectionately, dic lit). Kalder undertook this awful task, he says, because we need to better understand the relationship between media and monstrosity.

“Many people regard books and reading as innately positive, as if compilations of bound paper with ink on them in and of themselves represent a uniquely powerful ‘medicine for the soul,’” he writes. “However, a moment’s reflection reveals that this is not even slightly true: books and reading can also cause immense harm.”

Over the next few posts, I want to do with radio/tv/podcasting what Kalder has done with dic lit — pick apart some bad examples to better understand the foundations of their diabolical success. There are two big reasons to do this: As a listener and viewer, it’s good to know how you are being worked on. And if you are a producer, it’s good to avoid becoming a moral monster. Because the very things that make propaganda a success are temptations for us all.

Today we’ll consider the work of Soviet “Americanist” Valentin Zorin, and in particular, one film he made about my hometown.

Valentin Zorin on the levee in Dallas, 1978. The watermark is for a Russian streamer of old Soviet film and TV, “Nostalgia.”

Americanist abroad

Zorin was one of the Communist empire’s most famous news commentators, a fixture on Soviet television akin to Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley — though Zorin wasn’t an anchor. He was a foreign correspondent for long stretches in the United States, bringing his Marxist expertise on US capitalism to bear on political and social issues. He was proud of the fact that he’d interviewed (or at least interacted with) every US president from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.

I first ran across Zorin’s documentaries while working on a podcast series set in the late Cold War, and I became obsessed. Later, I convinced Harvard history professor Jill Lepore, whose show The Last Archive I edited for Pushkin Industries, to do an episode about Zorin with me. If you want a salty take on the man, I do recommend listening.

Zorin’s main series for Soviet state TV (the only kind of TV) was called America in the 70s. He and his film crew went to Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, New York, Boston and many other cities. Most of the films that are now online are not subtitled in English (the films about New York and Boston are, kinda — translated by enthusiasts). 

These films are an incredible glimpse of the US through the eyes of a professional stranger on an “unending anthropological mission,” as one scholar of his work put it to me. And all them were a huge deal when they aired in the USSR. But they are not just artifacts. How Zorin talked about the US matters still, because his analysis seem to have influenced the current leadership of Russia, including and especially, Vladimir Putin.

Screenshot from The Puzzles of Dallas

In 1978, Soviet TV aired Zorin’s documentary The Puzzles of Dallas. I grew up in Dallas — while Zorin was in town filming, I was probably running around the playground, pretending to have Farrah Fawcett hair. 

It’s truly a Looking-Glass experience seeing my childhood realm through the eyes of a didactic Leninist. It’s also fascinating because he gets many things right — something that Jill Lepore points out about successful propaganda in general: for it to work, it must be a “cocktail of truth and lies.”

The Puzzles of Dallas is full of well-worn observations of the sort many a writer (including yours truly) have proclaimed about the town: that it worships shiny buildings and huge freeways; that it loves spectacle and bling; that it seems perpetually insecure about its status and its soul.

In the Soviet cinematic style, each one of Zorin’s points about Big D is illustrated with visual metaphors. His cameras linger on the weedy banks of the Trinity River, the ramshackle commercial strip of Black South Dallas, the shiny but incomplete Reunion Hotel still being constructed downtown. When I posted a link to the film on social media, folks in Dallas were amazed by this Russified time capsule of a city that is constantly changing its looks. 

But then my astute friend, the local history blogger and archivist Paula Bosse, noticed something: not every image in The Puzzles of Dallas is actually of Dallas.

Dallas.

Not Dallas.

The first image is from South Dallas. The other, which goes by in a flash, appears to be Harlem, perhaps some unused footage from Zorin’s film Two New Yorks. Maybe it was added to make the less crowded, but very real poverty of Dallas look … poorer.

But there’s more. Zorin’s film contains a lot of footage of Dallas tycoons such as Stanley Marcus, who’s seen inspecting new fashion items at his flagship store Neiman-Marcus. And then there’s local oil billionaire H.L. Hunt. We see Hunt at home, in his office, and on the way to his office (not only did Hunt famously drive an old car, but he parked on the street to avoid paying fees at his own company’s garage).

Zorin’s footage of Hunt seemed suspect to me on several counts: not only was Hunt a rabid anti-Communist unlikely to let a Soviet film crew near him, but he’d died in 1974, three years before Zorin came to town.

Finally I figured out that Zorin lifted all this footage — as well as the scenes with Stanley Marcus and many others — from a 1968 BBC documentary called The Plutocrats: Rich, Super Rich, Texas Rich. Filmmaker Adam Curtis loves that doc and has posted several minutes of it here, and they are frame-for-frame what Zorin used to illustrate Hunt, with nary a mention of the Beeb.

Still of H.L. and Ruth Ray Hunt, from The Plutocrats

In fact, I would guess that almost a quarter of Zorin’s Dallas documentary is lifted from this already ten-year-old BBC production. How could he get away with this? 

This is where you start to see the one necessary condition of the magic spell Zorin cast: Information asymmetry. Zorin knew many things his Soviet audience could not. This was long before the Internet, and besides, the USSR was an authoritarian state that restricted travel and access to outside media. Zorin could be certain that almost no one in his audience would have seen the BBC doc. And if the BBC complained, who cared?

(By the way, Zorin’s shoddy ethics extended to his film’s soundtrack which, I figured out with the help of Shazam, was supplied by Western artists who presumably never got a kopek). 

Cultural learnings of America

Information asymmetry is one of the most devious tools in the propagandist toolkit, because it’s pretty subtle unless you know a lot about the topic at hand. It depends on non-acknowledement and obfuscation. Plenty of casino games are based on information asymmetry. So is espionage. 

Think also about characters like Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary caricature of a post-Soviet correspondent. He roams America, getting xenophobes and bigots to expose their stupidity, while spouting non sequiturs like, “I am Kazakh. I follow the Hawk.” 

Cohen knows something his American victims don’t, which is that he is completely pranking them. Valentin Zorin was no Borat, but he had a similar advantage over his hosts. He knew much more about Americans than they knew (or chose to know) about him, and he gained their trust only to betray it later in ways that shocked and baffled them. 

It seems from newspaper coverage that Zorin left a trail of broken hearts in his wake once his American subjects later saw or read what he said about their towns. 

“I could not have put together a show that would demolish Kansas City with the meanness of spirit they did,” one of the Soviet film crew’s local guides told the New York Times after Zorin’s doc implied that native son Harry Truman built fake voter rolls with names in the local cemetery.   

Cultural Learnings of America(n Conspiracy)

In Dallas, Zorin managed to get a representative of Hunt Consolidated, a company run by the descendants of H.L. Hunt, to show him around the town. This fact blew my mind when I read it, because for about 15 minutes of the film, Valentin Zorin spins an elaborate tale about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Behind it all, Zorin claims, was none other than Hunt himself.

The Kennedy stuff is where Zorin really starts to lose me — and it’s not because I have some secret admiration for Hunt, who was a ham-fisted propagandist himself. No, it’s just that, like everyone who grew up in Dallas, I have been overexposed to Grassy Knoll content and find it tedious (Erykah Badu excepted). 

Still, here’s my attempt to summarize Zorin’s theory: He says the rising power of the “oil bloc” in the South and Southwest, as represented by Hunt, were in a power struggle with Northern industrialists represented by President Kennedy. So they decided to do away with him when he came to their home turf, thus anointing a regime friendlier to their interests in the form of Texan Lyndon Johnson. Oh, and also Hunt hired Jack Ruby to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Obviously.

But though he says Lee Harvey Oswald’s name, Zorin never mentions Oswald’s years in the Soviet Union, or his marriage to a Soviet citizen — information you might think his viewers would find interesting. That makes it pretty hard for me to trust anything else he has to say. 

Soviet storms castle

Remember how I said Zorin got a representative of the Hunt company to show him around? I’m guessing that was all so he could get this sequence: Zorin ascending the endless lawn of Mt. Vernon, the plantation replica Hunt built for himself alongside local reservoir White Rock Lake. It’s almost as if he were going to interview the powerful oilman himself, whose status as dead is somehow never mentioned.*

[*CORRECTION: My bad, Zorin’s narration does mention 10 minutes prior to this sequence that Hunt “died not long ago.”]

Once news of The Puzzles of Dallas got back to Dallas, the Hunt people were of course flummoxed by what their charming Russian visitor alleged about their old boss. 

Mute on

Because Zorin’s Soviet audience was so closed off, it was rabidly curious about the outside world. That gave his documentaries an almost hypnotic power. Media historian Dina Fainberg writes that Zorin’s films were shown repeatedly on Soviet TV, but people took what they wanted from them.

Back in 1970, long before he came to Dallas in person, a much more strident, studio-bound Zorin appeared as host of a show called Masters Without Masks, all about US capitalists and their skulduggery. And who did he unmask not once, but in at least three episodes? H.L. Hunt. And what did he use to illustrate Hunt’s perfidies? Uncredited footage from the 1968 BBC film The Plutocrats.

The Puzzles of Dallas was not a new exposé on Zorin’s part — it was a rerun.

Valentin Zorin in 1970, with BBC footage of H.L. Hunt in background.

Dina Fainberg got to interview Zorin a few years before he died in 2016 at the age of 92. And she told me he insisted that he felt real affection for America. She heard that same insistence from many of the old Soviet correspondents she met.

“I think they genuinely liked American people. They were critical towards the United States as a system, as a political system, as a political culture. And they saw through all sorts of things. But they liked Americans, and empathized with them, and made an effort to understand them,” she said.

I believe her, and I know it took incredible survival instincts to make it as a Soviet journalist in the West. There were countless things Zorin couldn’t say on air that maybe he wanted to say — but it also seems true that the more stuff he didn’t say, the more comfortable he got just saying versions of what he’d already said. In that way, he resembles all too many other “news commentators” today, who don’t think it’s necessary to explain how they formed their opinions.

All the ethical practices they teach in journalism school are designed to counteract the temptations of information asymmetry. Stuff like: make sure assertions of fact have multiple sources — and cite them if they’re really important. Issue corrections when you get something wrong (by the way, I will do this here!). Above all, whenever possible, give the people you are talking about the chance to speak for themselves.

The only Dallas residents we hear from in Zorin’s doc are those interviewed by the BBC, plus a few students on the campus of SMU who were studying Russian. Unfortunately, their Russian is not great, and it feels like this segment was included for laughs. But if Soviet viewers indeed had the sound off, they might have missed that. All they would have noticed was a faraway eruption of something without a name in Russian: Farrah Fawcett hair.

Я не знаю, y’all.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Empathy Machines

Note from Julia: I would call a large percentage of audio producers congenitally modest — if not in private, at least in public. Producers are not behind the mic; they are behind the people who are behind the mic, which makes production work doubly unseen and often overlooked. It takes a certain type of person to be OK with that. 

In addition, it’s not always a great idea to be outspoken about the industry you work inside (which makes this project…uh, let’s not think about that). Anyway, this is all to explain why I think academics play such an important role in audio culture. Academics are beholden to very different power structures, and they listen with an ear towards longer-term patterns, histories, and dynamics. When they turn to our work, they don’t necessarily describe it the way we would, but it’s very enlightening to read what they have to say. 

You might be surprised to learn that Bloomsbury Press has been publishing a series of books under the rubric of “Podcast Studies.” An excerpt from the latest title is our guest post today. The book is called Empathy Machines: This American Life, Podcasting, and the Public Radio Structure of Feeling. Author Jason Loviglio, a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, has long had his ears on audio culture in the US. Here, he takes as a starting point an anonymous Post-It note on a suggestion board that sprung up at the 2016 Third Coast International Audio Festival. It said, “Become empathy machines!”

“My ambition in these pages is to suggest an origin story for the contemporary urgency for more audio empathy machines and perhaps to understand why this appeal may not be sufficient to the challenges we confront,” Loviglio writes in his introduction. “The appeal of empathy machines, however, has served as a map for the traffic in feelings coursing through public radio and its podcast progeny over the last three decades.”

Loviglio traces the prioritization of listener emotion, starting with the establishment of public media, through audience research in the 1980s and 1990s, the experiments of alt.NPR in the 2000s, and the creation popular shows such as Invisibilia and Planet Money. But the main focus of much of his book is on This American Life, the juggernaut narrative program that recently observed its 30th anniversary.

Loviglio is not here to write a love-fest, nor a scathing review — he’s doing nuanced, complicated literary criticism. Our field deserves much more like it. I hope after reading this excerpt, you’ll read the rest of the book and the others in this series from Bloomsbury. Then drop your modesty, if you indeed have it, and pitch the editors another entry to go on the shelf with these!

Here’s Jason Loviglio:

Radio Magic

In 1999, Glass’s then-wife thought it important to tell Mary Wiltenberg, an intern new to This American Life, that in order to understand Glass and the show, she needed to know that Glass had only ever had two jobs in his life: a birthday party magician, starting at around twelve years old; and a radio producer, starting at around 19 years old. This anecdote sheds light on Wiltenberg’s early struggle at TAL, documented in not one, but two illustrated books by Jessica Abel, Radio: An Illustrated Guide and Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Audio.

As part of her application process for the internship, Wiltenberg pitched a story about a successful labor action by Black and white sharecroppers in southeastern Missouri in 1939. Executive producer Julie Snyder told her that the story was “great,” but “not what we do.” Wiltenberg came back with a different story, which was eventually featured in the episode Do-Gooders (#126, 1999), about an affluent older couple who try and fail spectacularly to revitalize a run-down working-class small town, Canalou, Missouri. Their well-intentioned efforts to work towards the civic good backfire, ending in gunplay and hurt feelings: a fiasco…

Fiascos represent a very specific form of surprise that TAL producers are especially fond of. In fact, in 1997, they dedicated an entire episode to stories on the theme, entitled simply Fiasco! (#61), a theme so compelling they remixed it several times over the next fifteen years. In Canalou, the fiasco represents a bemused take on the idea of urban renewal, class mobility, and liberal interventionism, a better fit for the show’s “apolitical” ethos than an inspiring story of class unity across racial lines.

The no-good-deed moral is dramatically underscored in the episode’s next act, which examines the disastrous results of international humanitarian aid in Rwanda, when international do-gooders supported the Hutus, who were in the process of slaughtering the Tutsi by the hundreds of thousands. It’s a horrible story, on a scale that strains against its thematic inclusion with the Canalou Fiasco. A brief reference to Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved hundreds of Tutsis, and was the hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda, adds a much needed but flimsy counterweight to the program’s main thrust that attempts to help others are doomed to failure. Importantly, this exception to the rule acts alone. Glass compares Rusesabagina admiringly to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, citing his pragmatism and lack of idealism.

The story of Glass’s two jobs, first as a magician and then as a radio producer, helps to frame this chapter’s analysis of This American Life, which centers the role of narrative enchantment, alchemy, and affective play in the first decade or so of the show. Because of Glass’s well-documented didactic and formulaic approach to storytelling, these themes come to us largely pre-captioned. Because he spent years “cutting tape” as an editorial assistant at NPR prior to Your Radio Playhouse, the presentations are immaculately edited and structured. Because he spent his youth doing card and rope tricks at birthday parties, he cannot resist the lure of the flourish, the “ta-da” that communicates “delight,” “amusement,” and “surprise” as counterpoints to empathy.

The play of these opposing affects frames the show’s early years and sets a tonal precedent for the American style of podcasting, while simultaneously hinting at its emotional and political limits and contradictions. These early themes represent the warp and woof of the show’s production of “liberal feeling” or, as an early listener to the podcast version of the radio show put it, the magic of “staying in tune with the world in the tiniest way possible. ”It’s utterly pleasurable [sic]… it feels like you’re doing something good, staying in tune with the world, in the tiniest way possible and yet without being frivolous about it. It’s unlike anything else out there.”

“Staying in touch with the world in the tiniest way possible” required not just discipline, but an internalized ambivalence that had been wrought through the alchemy of taste into narrative formula. Riding the line between frivolity and ponderousness was like a magic trick, an exercise in dexterity, deception, and affective economy. It required an audience willing to suspend belief, hungry for homeopathic moments of “good,” the better perhaps to forestall larger commitments. 

Perhaps nowhere in American life at the end of the twentieth century was this formula more compelling than in stories about strangers, a category of people for whom empathy could be measured out in moments of surprise, delight, and amusement.

Ira Glass hosts the 2014 Peabody Awards (Wikimedia Commons)

The words “magic” and “magical” occurred over 800 times across the show’s transcripts and “magic” is mentioned at least once in 219 episodes, or about 27 percent of the entire TAL oeuvre. The word magic evokes a sense of unguarded wonder and refusal of critical distance that is very much in tension with the fending, world-weary archness mentioned above. It is in this tension that TAL manages to have it both ways, a kind of magic trick of its own. 

A 2017 episode entitled Magic Show (#619) makes implicit, then explicit, the point of the anecdote about Glass’s two jobs, magician and radio producer. The repetitive structure of Glass’s storytelling — anecdote-observation; anecdote-observation — is mirrored in his recollection of magic tricks as a matter of disciplined formal repetition: “I did my act so many times it got kind of carved into me.”

A family friend drives home the point in an interview: “You think you’re doing something different [now]?” she asks him. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying when you hear me on the radio, it reminds you of my magic act?” Glass responds, seemingly taken aback. It’s the same showmanship she observes, the same “spiel.” Glass performatively resists the idea in the interview but proceeds to liken magic and storytelling, particularly the appeal of the “psychology” of the well-turned surprise. Elsewhere, Glass has admitted that “there was something about [putting on] shows [as a child] that got me into media, and that was what got me to radio. Every trick had a principle behind it,” Glass recalls about his magic show, “and it was cool to think about the principles.”

Glass developed the analogy between magic and storytelling across many episodes, paying particular attention to the tension between expectations and surprise and to the moments of “delight” that occur when the two collide. Unpeeling expectations to find layers of surprise, Glass is at his best when most transparent, laying bare the tricks behind the flourishes. 

“The Magical Mystifier,” as he called himself at age 12, Glass reflects on the many ways performing magic is itself an occasion for surprises, reversals, and moments of insight. “I thought I was the one who was in charge of the situation during the magic show,” Glass admits. But the joke was on him, he understands, in the episode’s first big epiphany: perhaps his adult audience had been indulging him a bit years ago. “I thought I…was controlling everybody’s minds with my mind and my magic,” he shares with sheepish wonder. 

But his ability to enchant as a storyteller quickly became part of the media narrative in the early years of TAL. A New York Times interviewer gushed that “there are two people in America who so deliberately mesmerize: Ira Glass and Philip Glass. And they’re related (first cousins once removed).”

Magic served as a controlling metaphor in other stories on a theme, like romantic love (Math or Magic?, 2023); the power of names (Name Change, 1997); the power of language (Magic Words, 2014); the failure of language (Say Anything, 2003); celebrity (New Year, 1996); libraries (The Room of Requirement, 2018); and elsewhere. But it proved most useful as a way to evoke a theory of feelings: the appearance, as if by magic, of a rippling through and among strangers of a surprising affective state, a moment of shared feeling. Perhaps nothing better captures the notion of the public radio structure of feeling than the idea of a magic moment in which a story about strangers pulls a listener out of themselves for a temporary spell of empathy. Stories that evoked such moments for listeners often featured storytellers having magical moments of their own. In another episode (To Be Real, 2017), he realizes that for professional magicians like David Blaine, the goal is not “creating a fake world,” but instead to get to “real, raw emotion,” in himself and in his audience, an ambition he plainly shares as a storyteller.

In Act II of “To Be Real,” Glass talks to a magician named Derek DelGaudio, whose act concludes with a bit in which “he walks up to people [in the audience] and stares in their eyes and tells them something about themselves.” It’s a moment, Glass says, in which “the magic is all in service to this very human thing that’s happening.” DelGaudio calls one audience member “a good Christian”; another, “a ninja”; then “a ray of sunshine”; “a wallflower”; and so on.

“Watching him do this,” Glass marvels, changes the experience of being in a room of strangers. “It makes you look at them differently…it stops feeling like a room of anonymous strangers.” The last woman he encounters he calls “a failure,” which sends a ripple of “awwws” through the room and makes the woman cry. DelGaudio “choked up” as well: “I called them a failure in front of a bunch of strangers,” he says, as if surprised by his own trick and its affective impact. Glass seems impressed by this new kind of magic, which dispenses with pretense in order “to get to something utterly real, un-faked, and emotional.”

This remarkable scene, and its unacknowledged cruelty, helps to contextualize the role of “magic” as a way of thinking about feelings in TAL, their temporality and their circulation through social bodies. The standard unit of measure for feelings on the show is the moment. They are produced in and by stories in the moment of telling. In that way, the magic trick is an apt metaphor, as they are produced, serially, in moments, typically before a room full of strangers. In the case of DelGaudio’s act, a room of strangers transformed by the simple act of naming (“a good Christian, a ninja, a ray of sunshine”). As in the Driveway Moment, such moments are both moving and arresting. They stop the narrative to make way for a narrator’s extra-diegetical insight, which is designed as a caption for listeners’ own emotional response. In their affective power, they stop time, or at least stop us in time, the better to feel moved.

Such moments are often represented as moments of human connection, of empathy or fellow feeling. Here, a room of strangers comes together in the shared moment of recognition that one of their number is “a failure,” which seems like a violation of some basic agreement about how strangers behave to one another. But for Glass, it’s an epiphany, an occasion for an ironic kind of empathy: “It’s the sort of moment, watching it, all you can think about is her and her life and what that must be about.”

It’s an unusually stark example of the at-times ruthless formula that produces stories on a theme. The strangers theme is a bit of a procrustean bed, now stretching this story to fit the criteria, now lopping off a bit of that story that doesn’t quite fit. This stretching and trimming can be likened to sleight-of-hand, making things appear not quite as they are, or to editing (i.e., the cutting and splicing necessary to produce a desired effect). Nowhere in the piece on DelGaudio is there any evidence to support that the magician was correct in his designation of each audience member (“a ninja, a good Christian, a failure”). His power came not in accuracy but in putting feelings into social circulation, producing affect out of thin air, and joining strangers, temporarily, into intimates.

JB: Thanks again to Jason Loviglio for sharing this excerpt from Empathy Machines. For a 20% discount on the book, go here and enter the code EMPATHY20.

📕📗📘📙📔

The great globe itself

Sometimes we have these outbursts in my corner of the media world. The past few weeks, it’s been about the new “podcast” category of the Golden Globes. The winner, announced January 12, was a popular video-chat show. But the outburst concerned the fact that almost all the finalists were also video-chat shows. 

“They are identical in form: the host(s) and guest(s) spend around an hour congratulating each other on their kindness, funniness and general wonderfulness,” complained The Economist.

“If we want high-quality, narrative-driven audio to survive…if we want podcasts that aren’t just celebrity chat shows with cameras, we have to reward them for existing. Awards matter. Recognition matters,” declared Jacob Reed. 

The New York Times also ran an op-ed. This all seems like a lot of media attention for a seemingly minor issue while all around us rage protests, protests, protests, siege and protests. The point is, though, that podcasts also cover things like siege and protest, but Hollywood is now using its flattening powers to brand the form as just light gabbing.

The Golden Globes are never going to be The Peabodies. Professional anxieties fueled the controversy — anxieties that streaming video platforms have redefined, if not partially obliterated, the imaginative world of listening. Critics complain video dominance is already making audio sound bad. Long-time readers of Continuous Wave recognize the historical pattern here and already know how US networks made a Faustian bargain with TV in the early 1950s, after which radio emerged as a weakened and entirely different form.

Is that what’s going on today, another Faustian thing? If so, the Devil is getting a bargain. And anyway, why won’t these two forms, audio and video, be content to live side by side and serve the complementary audiences who love each one? Of course, the answer is about money, sure — but I think there’s something else at play, something unperceived. Not surprisingly, I also think that old books can shed a useful light on that.

So what follows is deep cut on video versus audio. Bear with me as I try a theory out on you. It’s the theory of magic versus circus.

From Le Voyage à travers l'impossible, 1904

Magic becomes media

My best friend (to my mind — he is dead and we’ve never met) Erik Barnouw started in radio in the 1930s as an ad-agency scriptwriter. Later he became a professor, media historian and filmmaker. But his very first job as a teenager was to catalogue the library of the magician John Mulholland. And Barnouw’s 1981 book The Magician and the Cinema applies his experience with magical lore to modern media.

Barnouw argues that movies, in particular, owe their existence to magic shows. As early as the 1790s, magicians were using tricks with light, projection and, yes, smoke and mirrors, to create the machinery of illusion that led directly to the development of cinema. 

But then, the popularity of film escaped their control. “The transfer to the screen of the magician’s most sensational illusions — disappearances, bizarre transformations and beheadings — proved ultimately catastrophic for magicians,” Barnouw writes, pointing to the financial ruin of French “trick film” magician George Méliès. “The magician found he had been helping to destroy his own profession.”

Once you start looking for the legacy of the magic show in modern media, you see it everywhere. But that legacy resides in the recorded arts. Recordings are, when you get down to it, a type of magic trick — and often presented to the public first on that basis.

In his book Perfecting Sound Forever, Greg Milner evokes the Edison Company “tone tests” of the 1910s and 1920s. These were popular demonstrations of recorded music. A singer would stand before a live audience and accompany a recording of herself after the lights went down. The audience would try to judge if they could hear a difference. Generally they could not, to their astonishment — but subtle trickery was involved. The singers on Edison’s roster had learned to flatten their tonal range to match the recording’s. Milner says it was preternaturally smart of Thomas Edison to latch onto “authenticity” as a selling point for his wax cylinders, because that assumption is now imbued in every recorded song we hear.

At the same time that tone tests, movies and magic shows were roaming the land in search of dollars, another popular entertainment was raking them in: The traveling circus.

(via Digital Commonwealth)

A big production

The circus is much less about fooling your perceptions than grabbing your heart. You watch in semi-terror as a rider stands on their hands atop a galloping horse, or as an acrobat spins high in the air, held aloft only by the grip of their teeth on a stirrup. Even if the performers rehearse relentlessly and have skilled techniques, the risks they take every day are real — and have to be for the show’s appeal to work.

Network broadcast production resembled the circus because it was both continuous and live. Both entertainments required stringent planning and execution. Circus historian Mark St. Leon described what it took to pull off a “big top” show of the type popular in the 1920s, right around the same time that radio was getting its start.

For some personalities in early radio, the big top was not just metaphor — it was job history. Estella Karn, the longtime show runner for host Mary Margaret McBride, had actually run away from home in her youth and joined the circus (as an advance press agent, the person who rode ahead of the show to plaster the next town with posters and ads to drum up ticket sales).

When Karn first met McBride in the early 1920s, the two would go together to the offices of Billboard magazine, which at the time had a mail service for traveling performers. “I met snake charmers, sword swallowers, fire-eaters, operators of shooting galleries and weighing concessions as well as mellow-voiced spielers,” McBride wrote years later. 

McBride was a print journalist who broke into radio in 1934 on a WOR midday show intended for housewives. She persuaded the station to hire Stella Karn, who knew that radio was show business, and that show business involved risk and spectacle. It was Karn who suggested that McBride try an ad-libbed interview format, which almost no one on air dared to do in those days, for fear that guests would either blow through the time restrictions or say something inappropriate.

But the sound of people talking normally, even confessing their secrets, proved irresistible. Karn had bigger plans: for McBride’s tenth anniversary on air, she booked the occasional circus venue Madison Square Garden, and the show promptly sold out. For the 15th anniversary, they broadcast live from Yankee Stadium. On both occasions, Stella Karn wanted her host to ride in on an elephant, but she refused. 

McBride wrote that one time a comedy duo tried to bring a trained bear into the studio, but the minute Stella Karn saw it, she commanded it to leave. She then punched it on the nose to defend her host. In 1962, when Readers Digest printed McBride’s retrospective on Karn, that was the moment they wanted to illustrate.

Did this actually happen? We’ll never know.

While generally lacking in animal abuse, broadcast radio did owe much of its cultural impact to moments of disaster and risk, from live prize fights to exploding airships. Even literary playwrights took advantage of the suspense built into live performance. Radio historian Neil Verma hears it in the work of Norman Corwin, whose scripts challenged actors and required a virtuoso read. 

Don’t lose your head!

Pick a side?

When you apply the circus vs magic theory to modern media, you start to focus less on the delivery system than how a particular show appeals to us. As a podcast story editor, I’m definitely on Team Magic (and next week, we’ll meet someone with an even more direct connection). We editors aren’t only about removing distractions, confusion and bad facts. We want to deliver something that immerses the mind — a heightened illusion of reality, one that manages to make us forget it is all pre-recorded. 

But I have to admire the honesty of the more straightforward circus spectacle. Humans are just weird. We long for stuff that excites and frightens us. The circus acknowledges that truth, and then simply delivers those feelings. Of course, circus-type motivations are not great when applied to journalism (even worse when journalism encourages you to bet on news outcomes). They vibes are even worse when they seem to consume government officials. 

The appeal of the circus, however, can explain why a film-illusion shop like Netflix might want a little podcast sideshow on their platform. It’s because conversational shows are not scripted — certainly not to the level of your Stranger Things or even Tiger King. Two people talking spontaneously feels a little risqué in the airless world of streaming TV — exactly the same way it did back in the 1930s, when almost every word on the radio was read off a piece of paper.

The problem is not with either circus or magic show. The problem, as Erik Barnouw warned in The Magician and the Cinema, is that we don’t always know in our mediated world what we’re in thrall to. Barnouw thought audiences had much more skepticism about magic tricks back when they were presented as part a traveling show.

“Media images are no longer seen by the public as optical illusions offered by magicians, but as something real. The unawareness is equivalent to defenselessness,” he says. 

And then he quotes Ingmar Bergman, who once wrote: 

Unlike a sad awards show, it kind of makes you think.

🤔

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Note: This post was originally for Continuous Wave’s email subscribers only, but I’ve decided to post it publicly. The excerpts below are from a remarkable artifact of broadcasting history, a slim booklet of speeches given at the end of 1941, just before the US entered WWII. It was a terrible time for most people on this planet, and it was about to get worse.

This little booklet from CBS is worth re-reading now. It is reminder that words are not empty, that the act of witnessing matters more than we know, and that people within flawed institutions can still speak clearly and set the standards by which will media be judged by history — including in ways we cannot anticipate now.

What follows below is a little context for the booklet itself, and then three excerpts from speeches given that night.

This is London, in New York

One of the pleasures of digging around in the backwaters of radio history, I’m finding, is that pretty much everything is available at a reasonable price. And so that’s how, after reading about it in a footnote, I ended up with my own copy of the historic booklet “In honor of a man and an ideal…” published December 2, 1941.

The 35-page folio is printed on beautiful, cream-colored stock, stapled inside a gray deckle-edged, thicker paper cover. And on the back of my copy is a little extra something which I will reveal below.

But first, I want to share some of the words inside this small but mighty booklet. It contains speeches by three guys that readers of Continuous Wave have already met: the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, CBS head honcho Bill Paley, and Edward R. Murrow, then in charge of CBS’s European news operations, who was just back on furlough from nearly a decade covering the rise of fascism and war.

It’s a very strange time as a US citizen to read what they said before a ballroom of hundreds of media luminaries at the Waldorf Astoria in New York nearly 85 years ago. It was a moment, all too rare, when people came together to acknowledge the power of the witness — that unloved, vital role in society. The least we can do is witness the resolve of these men, whatever their imperfections, and whatever would befall them — and us — later. Also, let us pay our respects to good writing, and possibly some ghostwriting, by radio people!

A testimonial dinner

First, a little context to set the scene: During the Nazi Blitz, which began in 1940, the London headquarters of CBS had come under bombardment many times, and Murrow and other reporters had experienced many near misses with falling shells. Through it all, the CBS audience had become mesmerized his articulate, restrained reports, always live and often from a rooftop overlooking the besieged city.

By the time he showed up in a white bowtie and tux at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, Ed Murrow had been reporting on the Blitz for more than a year. It must have felt surreal to be back in the States, though he returned by ship and thus had some time to adjust to life beyond the siege.

All that same year, Murrow’s boss Paley had been under constant pressure to air the anti-war rallies of the “America First” movement, an isolationist wing of politics which took as its mascot the increasingly antisemetic Charles Lindbergh.

So throwing a big party for the network’s star correspondent must have felt like both a relief for the network and a strategic imperative. No one there knew that in just a few days after these remarks, the Japanese would attack the US at Pearl Harbor and the country would end its long debate about whether and how to join the world’s raging conflict. The excerpts below, then, are from a very particular moment in time, but also to my mind, unusually timeless.

Archibald MacLeish (center) with Orson Welles and CBS director William Robson rehearsing the poet’s 1939 radio play “Air Raid” (CBS)

Speech excerpt 1: A Superstition is Destroyed by Archibald MacLeish

…I am talking to you, Ed Murrow. And what I have to say to you is this — that you have accomplished one of the great miracles of the world. How much of it was you and how much of it was the medium you used I wouldn’t undertake to say — though others have used the medium without the miracle resulting. But however that may be, the fact is that you accomplished it. You destroyed a superstition. You destroyed, in fact, the most obstinate of all the superstitions — the superstition against which poetry and all the arts have fought for centuries — the superstition they too have destroyed. You destroyed the superstition of distance and time. 

I am sorry if I seem to speak in metaphors for there was never a time when I wished more to speak in literal and precisely meaning words. What I wish to say to you is this: that over the period of your months in London you destroyed in the minds of many men and women in this country the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all; the ignorant superstition that violence and lies and murder on another continent are not violence and lies and murder here; the cowardly and brutal superstition that the enslavement of mankind in a country where the sun rises at midnight by our clocks is not enslavement by the time we live by; the black and stifling superstition that what we cannot see and hear and touch can have no meaning for us.

How you did this, I repeat I do not know. But that you did was evident to anyone. You spoke, you said, in London. Sometimes you said you were speaking from a roof in London looking at the London sky. Sometimes you said you spoke from underground beneath that city. But it was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands and the observation cars of another country that your voice was truly speaking. And what you did was this: You made real and urgent and present to the men and women of those comfortable rooms, those safe enclosures, what these men and women had not known was present there or real. 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 the dead were our dead — were all men’s dead — were mankind’s dead — and ours.

Speech excerpt 2: An Ideal Survives by William S. Paley

…Tonight we’re celebrating both the survival of an ideal and a man’s service to that ideal. It’s because in part of the world freedom of speech still survives and freedom of the air is an inseparable part of it, that Columbia is able to maintain a free and open forum of public discussion without being obliged to further the ideas or the aspirations of any special group, in government or out. It is because of that same freedom of the air that we are able to bring you the news — uncolored, unbiased, with no thought of moulding your ideas to fit a pattern of our choice. 

Indeed the sole purpose is and must be to tell you the news, the meaning of the news, the interrelation of events and ideas. Thus, honestly and intelligently informed, you are left wholly free to take such attitudes and such actions as your own judgment dictates. 

Columbia has striven always to preserve that part of this great freedom which has been in its custody. So have many other broadcasters, and long before we began to serve this human need, the great press services and honest newspapers of America dedicated themselves to the same task. Our common duty to preserve this freedom and to use it solely in the public interest, is a duty not to ourselves but to you.

Edward Murrow in his natural environment. (Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland via Wikipedia)

Speech excerpt 3: A Report to America by Edward R. Murrow

…If there is a difference between me and other Americans, it is simply that in these critical years I have been there and you have been here. It is for you to judge whether this gives me the advantage of perspective on problems at home or whether it makes me a less competent witness. Perhaps I can say to you that as an American in London, reasonably well informed as to what has been afoot in the world, it seems to me that Americans at home already have made some basic decisions and have some fairly simple further questions to answer — and mind you when I say that the questions are simple, I am not trying to tell you that the answers are necessarily either simple or easy. 

Certainly America has answered the most fundamental question of all — it wills democracy to survive. I am told that over here you no longer debate whether the destruction of Hitler and the isms that he trails in his train are essential to Democracy’s survival. So it seems to me that the debatable area narrows itself pretty much to these two questions —

Must Britain survive in order that democracy may survive? If the answer is no, we have only the devices of insulation to consider. If the answer is yes, the question is — How far, and perhaps even to a greater degree than some over here are willing to admit, how fast shall America go?

Almost I wish that I were so endowed that at this point I could stand before you as a prophet rather than a reporter; but I shall stick to my role and tell you only that to some of the most thoughtful observers to whom I have talked in Britain…it has seemed that if Britain should fall in spite of material aids, speeches, editorials, and knitted garments, it will be necessary to consider a new Britain, driven by ruthless conquerors, into taking her place in the forefront of our enemies. 

These people — and they are lovers of war no more than you or I — have been heard to ask, “If Britain goes down or becomes too exhausted to care, will America not become the most hated nation on earth?” It is not our ability to resist the hatred that troubles them; instead they ask insistently, “Can America withstand the competition both economic and ideological?” Today there is a shuddering recognition that it is the strength of national socialism that it forces those who fear it to imitate it; and those who go down before it to embrace it.

Too Little and Too Late was nearly the epitaph of Great Britain. That much we know. There is no decision that America can make that will be without a price, but for a wrong decision in the present, the future will take its inevitable revenge.

###

I’d say those were some decent speeches. If you want to read them in their entirety, as I mentioned, the booklet is online here. After the jump, you can find a little extra material that came with my personal copy of this artifact. Exclusive content only from Continuous Wave!

EXTRA FOOD EPHEMERA

The Internet is not especially cheering right now, as you probably know. My browser is full of grim tabs that I know I must read, in some kind of effort to destroy the “superstition of distance and time” MacLeish refers to — but it’s replaced by a kind of miserable futility that doesn’t have a proper name.

So as a brief respite, I offer you the recipe that is scrawled in pencil on the back of the copy of “In honor of a man and an ideal” that I got in the mail (shout-out to Willis Monie Books of Cooperstown, NY!).

Honestly, I love that this fancy booklet of important Media Dude speeches was later vandalized as a scratch pad for what appears to be a fruitcake recipe. Here are the ingredients:

• ½ cup shortening

• ½ teaspoon almond extract

• ½ teaspoon vanilla

• ½ cup corn syrup

• 1 ½ cup enriched flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ½ teaspoon cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon cloves

• 1 egg

• ¾ cup anything you have on hand

There are no instructions for assembly or baking. Not gonna lie, these aren’t all necessarily ingredients I would choose to put in a cake (though “anything you have on hand” is intriguing!). It’s possible that wartime rationing was a factor. Anyway, let me know if you decide to try this recipe — and of course, what you had on hand.

🧁🧁🧁

Colorized/modified image of William Paley (center) completing a hook-up to West Coast network stations in 1929. (TheRadioHistorian.org)

The shadow falls

[UPDATE March 20, 2026: By now, many of us have also had time to absorb the news that CBS Radio is shutting down, among other devastating layoffs just announced. —JB]

By now, many of us have had time to absorb the depressing drama unfolding at 60 Minutes, the 57-year-old CBS News flagship show. After months of reporting, editing, fact-checking, and legal-reviewing a segment on the brutal treatment of Venezuelan immigrants sent by the US government to a prison in El Salvador, the show had to pull the piece at the last minute. This was on orders of the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, who was acquired in October 2025, along with her Substack/podcast empire The Free Press. 

Weiss said she was holding the 60 Minutes report for comment from the White House, among other things, although the administration had previously declined multiple requests to go on record. The report aired anyway via a streaming partner in Canada, and now Americans can watch a number of bootleg copies. It’s not clear as of now when or whether the segment will ever air on CBS. [UPDATE 2: it aired Jan. 18, 2026.]

The men released from El Salvador face post-traumatic stress and unemployment. The rest of us face various degrees of shame. Plus an avalanche of takes: That the US is starting to mimic the treatment of media in early Putin-regime Russia. That Bari Weiss is both incompetent and doomed. That she’s ably performing the job she was hired for, and CBS News has been neutered. That this is all a maneuver by the network’s new owner, who’s heir to one of the world’s largest tech fortunes and needs federal approval to further expand his empire. That George Clooney is bad.

The takes make me feel cynical, and the journalistic situation makes me feel terrible for the hard-working reporters, producers and editors at 60 Minutes. And this all makes me wonder what will become of the network CBS, which turns 100 next year — though who knows if anyone in the building will notice amidst all the mergers and acquisitions of late.

But the 60 Minutes affair harkens back to some foundational psycho-dramatics at the company. So here’s my question on the eve of its centenary: Is CBS haunted? Because it’s starting to seem that way, especially if you go back to the earliest origins of CBS, before it even had that name.

A network is born

On September 18, 1927, listeners of 16 radio stations, from the East Coast through Ohio to Chicago, got to hear a special live program emanating from WOR in New York. The new Columbia Chain, a rival to the just-established NBC network, was making its debut. The highlight was the performance of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

The debut was not auspicious.

The Columbia network turned into a money pit for its eponymous sponsor, Columbia Phonograph, which quickly lost $100,000 (in 1927 money!) before pulling out. In desperation, the network’s founders turned to wealthy friends in Philadelphia for fresh investment. And one of those friends eventually turned to his in-laws, the Paleys.

The Paleys ran a successful cigar-manufacturing business and had used radio sponsorship to boost sales of their most famous brand, La Palina. Now the family had the option to buy a major stake in the struggling Columbia venture. So they did, and restless heir William “Bill” Paley became president of the network, soon to be renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paley had just turned 27, and he rolled into town with his own valet.

Paley quickly established a reputation as a shrewd media mogul, in part because of ballsy investment deal with Paramount Pictures that, thanks to the changing fortunes of movies and broadcasting during the Great Depression, paid off handsomely.

The seconds

Paley’s reputation was also reinforced by the competent seconds-in-command he hired. He had an eye for people who could accept blame for decisions their boss made, while giving him credit for things that turned out well. All of these men waited for their promised reward — which they did get in compensation, but never in appreciation. 

Paley’s first right-hand was the former newsman Ed Klauber. Paley’s biographer Sally Bedell Smith is fascinated by this unpopular but crucial figure in CBS history.

Klauber became, as Smith writes, Paley’s gatekeeper. He had an adjoining office. He walked Paley home every night. Paley treated him like “a servant,” Smith writes, but paid him extremely well. “Paley chose to ignore Klauber’s cruelty because of his usefulness. Paley preferred to avoid confrontations, and Klauber eagerly took them on, allowing the boss to remain comfortably above it all.” (119)

But Klauber hired good people, including Edward R. Murrow, whom he eventually placed in London to cover fascism’s rise. As Murrow’s team reported on the violence in Europe, they riveted the nation. Their prestige changed Paley’s previously ambivalent view of public affairs programming.

Ed Klauber suffered a heart attack in 1943 and found himself soon out the door at CBS. Paley was by then abroad, overseeing the Psychological Warfare Radio Unit (which is a fascinating story for another post). When Paley returned to civilian life, he summoned the company’s audience-research guru Frank Stanton to his Long Island home. In an oral history with Columbia University, Stanton recalled having to borrow a car to drive out there.

(In the same oral history, Stanton describes, after becoming president of CBS, visiting previous right-hand-man Ed Klauber in his “dark and dingy” apartment. “He sat there and said to me, ‘Don't let Bill do to you what he did to me.’ I didn't have to ask what it was.”)

Frank Stanton on the cover of TIME, Dec. 4, 1950. He led an effort for CBS to develop color TV.

Why do I have to die?

By all accounts, Stanton was a competent and popular second-in-command, especially when he went to the mat for CBS reporters, refusing a Congressional subpoena in 1971 to give up sources and raw interviews. Stanton held the job of CBS president for a quarter century, until his own mandatory retirement policy forced him to step down at age 65. Although older, Bill Paley refused to follow the same policy himself, hanging on to the boardroom for years to come. A series of company leaders arrived with fanfare and left in frustration as they found their work undermined.

I’ve previously quoted this piece published soon after Paley’s death in 1990, but I’m going to quote it again because it underlines the tragedy at the heart of CBS’s growing corporate weakness.¹

In 1949, Frank Stanton’s CBS published the most rad-looking business brochure ever created.

Tenth-century soap

It’s ironic that way back in the 1920s, Paley chose to rename his media company the Columbia Broadcasting System. He was, of course, thinking of the system he intended to build and did build, the network of stations the company owned or persuaded to become affiliates. But even as CBS grew into an empire that shaped popular culture and politics, as a company it could never become a sustainable system with Paley around. And he was around for a really long time. Yes, he let others plant the seeds of journalistic enterprise, and that flourished with protection. But CBS became a monarchy with an increasingly unstable king — an outcome that made the network’s original, stormy debut broadcast weirdly prophetic.

The opera heard in 1927 on the proto-CBS was called The King’s Henchman. Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the libretto. To be clear, the Metropolitan Opera had commissioned the piece, not Columbia — and it was a big hit, which is why it wound up being performed for radio in the first place.

The plot, based on a story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is ridiculous — but come on, it’s an opera. So: King Eadgar sends his henchman Aethelwold to find out whether a far-away princess is beautiful enough to be his wife. The princess happens upon Aethelwold sleeping in the woods and uses witchery to get him to fall in love with her. The two marry, but eventually the king comes to visit and finds out the princess is both hot and married to his former employee. She, in turn, is angry when she finds out that all along, she could have been queen instead of an ex-henchman’s wife. In his mortification for having deceived his beloved and for seeking happiness above his station, the henchman does himself in. 

These are the last lines of the play, sung by a chorus as the corpse of the henchman Aethelwold is sent out to sea:

Hearest thou the wind in the tree? 

He that spoke but now is no longer in the room.

Did people really say “no longer in the room” back in the 970s? I kind of doubt it — but surely they did in the 1920s, that decade of repressed trauma, xenophobia, Prohibition, racial segregation and violence, and technological upheaval. The titans of industry then rising along with their stock prices needed minions to carry out their commands, but sometimes those minions had their own plans. By plucking the story of a wayward henchman from the ancient chronicle, Millay was onto something.

Today we live in another era of courtiers. They want us to make their jobs easier by denying what we know to be true and repeating their lies instead. Not that it will really help them in the end, since their king-boss cannot be satisfied and could care less about us or them. 

Still the henchmen issue orders, go on podcasts, write memos, compose memes and NDAs. They talk and command and threaten, but only history will decide if their words will retain meaning or dissolve, like the wind in the tree.

Library for the people

This post is brought to you by librarians — yes, all of them. But especially the ones at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

These particular librarians have to wade through hordes of smug Congressional staffers disembarking at Capitol South Metro to get to work each day. Technically, the librarians share they same bosses as the staffers, and these bosses (Congresspeople in search of cameras) have the power to shut down the Library of Congress for weeks on end. This behavior, of course, is abusive, but librarians show no signs of being timid. When someone visits their windowless domain, they might, after retrieving all the requested items, suggest an extra unknown treasure. Because they want more people to know about it.

That’s how, earlier this year on a research trip to the Library’s Recorded Sound Research Center, I found myself listening to the voice of a young Arthur Miller in a sound truck. One of the reference librarians, Harrison Behl, insisted I check out this 15-minute documentary about Wilmington, NC, narrated by Miller. The year was 1941. Miller tells the story of a city on the verge of war via a kaleidoscope of scenes: a gospel song rewritten and sung as a strike song; an old lady reminiscing in a rocking chair; the rumbling of ships under construction by workers who’d just arrived. 

Much later, Arthur Miller married you-know-who (Wikimedia Commons)

Last week, after the Eye of Sauron had moved on from its latest 43-day federal government shutdown, I returned to the Library to learn more about the story behind this doc, and others like it.

A documentary series before its time

Back in 1941, Miller was a playwright barely able to make his rent, so it made sense he might try his hand at radio. But his little doc sounded like nothing else on American radio at the time. It had field tape, cross-fades, music, and a quiet, understated pacing. Miller wrote and narrated the piece, but a team at the Library of Congress created the sound.

And that sound, as I said, was not like other stuff on the air at the time. As I’ve written, radio didn’t really become a tape-edited medium in the US until well after World War II, when magnetic tape technology became viable. Almost everything before that sounded studio-bound and scripted. But this series — out of a library no less — was totally different. How did that even happen?

Here’s the short answer: Antifa.

The poet’s gauntlet

On October 19, 1939, Archibald MacLeish stood before an audience at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and talked about the crisis of war. Nazi Germany had just invaded and defeated Poland (with help from their secret friend, the Soviet Union).

Against that dark backdrop, MacLeish — already one of the best-known poets in the US — was worried about the appeal of Nazi propaganda. After all, American fascists had packed Madison Square Garden earlier the same year. 

“We can either educate the people of this Republic to know and therefore to value and therefore to preserve their own democratic culture, or we can watch the people of this Republic trade their democratic culture for the ignorance and prejudice and the hate of which the just and proper name is fascism,” he declared.

Who was the “we” who should be educating the people of this Republic? Librarians. MacLeish was passionate that libraries had to be active civic institutions, not passive book-lenders. And he had recently been appointed the Librarian of Congress, a move by President Roosevelt that pissed off a lot of librarians, since the poet wasn’t a member of their profession.

Part of the reason MacLeish got the job was his crossover success in radio, which the administration considered very important. His 1937 verse play The Fall of the City was an epic production of CBS’s Columbia Workshop program, an allegory of fascism that starred Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles and more than 200 extras making crowd noises. Now MacLeish was going to drag sound production inside the intellectual and political fortress of the Library.

He applied for a grant to set up a recording lab. Its main purpose was to duplicate and preserve the many wax cylinder and discs of music moldering in the Library’s vaults. But MacLeish also wanted the Library to make radio — so he got a second grant to pay engineers and writers who’d record and describe what was going on around the country. That’s how Arthur Miller eventually joined the crew.

Memo from Archibald MacLeish

MacLeish was able to attract an all-star team to this “experiment,” the Radio Research Project (not to be confused with a totally different outfit at the time called the Office of Radio Research). The RRP’s first project would be a series of scripts that would bring to life historical artifacts and stories inside the Library’s collections. Called Hidden History, the series was produced and aired on NBC’s Blue Network.

But the restless Radio Research men wanted (as usual, they were all men) to make “documentaries,” much like the New Deal photographers and filmmakers around them. The project’s spiritual leader was a young folklorist from Texas, Alan Lomax. He and MacLeish shared a romantic ideal that Americans would better appreciate their own democracy if they could hear the full regional diversity of accents, songs and stories the country contained.

At first, the RRP team talked about organizing a series of live-remote conversations around the country — basically interviewing people, then writing scripts where the subjects would “perform” themselves live. The team quickly realized this would be ridiculous, not to mention incredibly expensive.

Instead, as Library of Congress Audio-Visual librarian Alan Gevinson writes, the team “began to consider using field recordings as the basis for a series of documentary pieces. Recording engineer Jerome Wiesner, Lomax wrote, ‘assured us that it would be possible to edit field recordings in the Laboratory in such a way so as to eliminate material that would not be pertinent to any story we might wish to tell and to tie smoothly together speeches, interviews and conversations, so that the listener would never be aware that the editing had been done.’”

Library of Congress acoustic engineers John Langenegger (background) and Jerome Wiesner inspecting a fresh-cut disc.

Celluloid sound

The guy running the RRP, Philip Cohen, had been a Rockefeller fellow at the BBC, which had long been on a mission to record the voices of people around the UK. So he basically copied the field recording set-up pioneered by producers like Olive Shapley over there.

The main recording technology of 1941 was still the humble lacquer disc. The Library of Congress equipped its sound truck with two disc recorders and a microphone on a long wire connected back to the truck, where an engineer would be listening in and flipping blank discs to keep the recording continuous. Or the disc recorders could be carried into music halls or homes, a feat I hate to imagine.

Even worse to imagine was how producers might edit those recordings later. The process, called “slip disc,” involved multiple disc recorders going at once (Harrison recommends this book for an explanation of how that process worked).

The Library of Congress’s RRP engineer Jerome Wiesner had no patience for this way of doing things. He was going to use a new technique to merge audio and film-recording technologies: The Recordgraph. The Recordgraph recorded sound on a long, continuous loop of celluloid “safety tape.” The recording stylus could record up to a hundred lines on a single loop of tape, like those ancient Dictabelt recorders. You can see a restored Recordgraph in action over at this guy’s shop video. As with a lot of these early tape recorders, it seems so unwieldy that you know people must have been desperate if they were using it.

And the Library of Congress was desperate, because it was ambitious. Its sound truck traveled around the continent, recording people talking and singing. After producers got back to home base, they transcribed their field recordings and wrote scripts. Then the engineers would dub selects from the field-recorded discs onto the Recordgraph’s medium, called Amertape. If the producers wanted to make internal cuts to some long-winded speech, the Amertape could be cued up, cut with scissors, and then taped back together.

“I remember running across boxes of AmerTapes when I worked in the [National Audio-Video Conservation Center] Recorded Sound vaults in Culpeper, and they are weird. Like seeing a marsupial wolf or giant ground sloth: familiar and weirdly foreign at the same time,” Harrison wrote to me.

via UK preservationists Poppy Records.

In the 1940s, thanks to MacLeish, there were studios at the Library of Congress for recording narration. Even though my librarian buddy Harrison is way ahead of me down this rabbit hole, neither of us have found any description of exactly how the engineers mixed all the documentary elements together for the final product. However they did it, it was dubbed back onto a master disc which was then duplicated and sent out to radio stations. The series of six 15-minute documentaries was called “This is History.” 

They’re all a little lacking in plot, tbh — and historians looking at the original transcripts of the raw tape found that some of the more controversial and interesting scenes in the field recordings never made it into the final cut. But these documentaries are still a remarkable example of what radio people could have been doing a lot earlier in the US if they’d had any encouragement.

Production notes from This is History doc (Library of Congress).

The LoC’s Radio Research initiative only lasted for only a year and a month. By 1942, the United States had been attacked and joined the war. MacLeish left to run the US Office of Facts and Figures, trying to bring a “strategy of truth” to wartime propaganda. The Library of Congress apparently donated its Recordgraph to the Marines. 

These six short documentaries aired on a few stations, but not the big networks, thanks to their ongoing ban on recorded sound. Soon enough the whole radio-from-the-library experiment was mostly forgotten. But not the people who took part.

Alan Lomax would soon become a major force in American popular music. And the engineer Jerome “Jerry” Wiesner, the one who futzed with Amertape and casually invented documentary techniques years ahead of everyone in commercial radio? He left the field to work on radar development, then became a science adviser to the Kennedy administration, then a computer wonk and an arms control negotiator, and finally an influential president of MIT. 

Archibald MacLeish, still kicking in 1971, wrote some verse on the occasion of his old engineer’s big new job.

A good man! Look at him

there against the time!

He saunters along to his

place in the world's weather,

lights his pipe, hitches his pants,

talks back to accepted opinion.

For further exploration:

Here’s the Library of Congress blog post about Arthur Miller’s documentary, with full audio at the end, of the doc itself! [link]

The Library has also digitized so, so many Radio Research Project scripts, notes and memos. Come join me and Harrison in the rabbit-hole — you can probably leave, though not guaranteed. [link]

I found a 1942 article by Jerome Wiesner on the set-up of his sound lab. The scan is a little blurry but worth the read. [link]

📔📕📗📘

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

The spirit of ‘76

Once there was a place on Independence Mall in Philadelphia known as the Living History Center, built for the US Bicentennial in 1976. I never visited the museum, but much later, I worked in its ruins.

Little did these workers know the cigarette butts of stressed radio personnel would soon fill this playful space. (Philadelphia Daily News/Temple University Libraries)

When I showed up for my first day of work at WHYY in the late 1990s, the local NPR/PBS combo-affiliate station was building itself a new headquarters atop the main site of the Living History Center. While the new facilities got built, the radio side of the company remained housed in the museum’s former cafeteria. I entered the station from the back parking lot through a plywood construction tunnel. The news director greeted me in the lobby (a plywood vestibule) and brought me to a warren of rooms and studios crammed with desks, chunky computers, and reel-to-reel machines. 

Rancid Chinese-takeout and cheesesteak wrappers overflowed the trash bins. Everyone bustled past one another, ripping scripts off the dot-matrix printer, rushing them to the control room for the afternoon newscast. Terry Gross’s office sat pristine and remote at the end of a narrow corridor. But even Fresh Air’s hallways were piled with tape reels in boxes. Many reels did not even have boxes, just a piece of paper with the famous interviewee’s name in Sharpie. I’d started in radio at a sleepy Iowa university station, and this was not the vision of glamor I imagined at a major-market house of broadcasting.

Soon I learned to decode the station’s chaos and even enjoy it. When we did marathon coverage of local election returns, it was all hands on deck as we worked together into the night, calling races on air and slapping high-fives in the hall. 

But for every fun late night, there were a dozen dreary ones cutting tape for the morning newscast. When the station started to digitize, things got worse as software and equipment constantly crashed. There was a lot of frustration and grumbling. I had once dreamed of reporting powerful stories for the network, but we hardly even had time for mediocre features. The local news hole emptied itself daily and needed to be refilled with voices and more voices. 

At the time, I blamed the newsroom’s woes on WHYY’s bosses for understaffing the place — which, of course they did. But now I better understand the cognitive dissonance baked into all production, both broadcast and podcast. It takes hours and hours of effort to produce a thing that dissolves in an instant. “For air” is not a metaphor — it is an actual description of the work. Everything we make = nothing but air.

A slide from Sounds Profitable’s 2025 report on US podcast creators

For every three who start

I bring all this up because of a new report called The Creators: Understanding the Modern Podcast Creator Landscape. It was just released by the audio and podcasting industry group Sounds Profitable. The report’s author, audience research guru Tom Webster (podcasting’s own Paul Lazarsfeld, you might say) ran a survey of more than 5000 podcast consumers, with a focus on those who had tried making podcasts themselves. What he found is that among those who try creating, there’s also a fair amount of quitting. 

“For every three who start, one stops,” his report notes. “Why aren’t more of them sticking with it?” Among the groups most likely to start, and then quit, podcasting: members of the LGBTQ community, and people over the age of 55. Among those not likely to start a podcast in the first place? Women.

I am a member of some of those demographics at least — and while I haven’t quit working in audio, you might say my decision to write online here is a form of soft quitting. Many people have asked me why I don’t make this project into a podcast. It’s because I know how hard audio production can be. Continuous Wave is a thing I can create on my own, without recording interviews or mixing audio or hang-ups about how my voice, much less my face, is faring today.

The longer I pursue this quixotic project, however, the more I realize the deeper reason why I’ve chosen the page and not some grand new ambition for audio: I don’t want to end up like Bertha Brainard. 

Bertha Brainard in 1928 (Wikipedia)

Bertha Brainard was a foundational genius of radio programming in the US. Many of the formats she helped invent are still with us today. She started in the early 1920s at WJZ in Newark, NJ. After the station moved operations to New York, she convinced management to bring Broadway theater to the air. For listeners, she would sit offstage and describe the cast, costumes, and plot of a production — then lightly narrate a live-remote broadcast of the performance itself. She was one of the few female announcers on the radio in a major market, but she also created her own program.

When the network NBC formed and took over WJZ, Brainard became a program manager, and later head of the Program Board. She talent-scouted comedian Jack Benny, crooner Rudy Valee, and sitcom writer and actress Gertrude Berg, among many others. During auditions, she’d cover her eyes so the visual charms of performers wouldn’t cloud her judgment of who belonged on the radio. In her spare time, she created experimental shows like The Magic Key of RCA. She was able to accomplish all that she did, it seems, by making her whole life her job.

From Radio Review, Dec. 13, 1929.

A new type of producer

All the profiles of Brainard noted how hard she worked. When Woman’s Journal ran a piece on her in 1928, the author mentioned that Brainard lived across the street from NBC, and contrasted her role with that of theatrical producers:

In 1939, the New York Times revealed that Brainard commuted from a suburb so she could have a swimming pool for exercise. But who knows when she had time to use it.

Brainard was famous nationwide — as media historian Donna Halper writes — because she was one of the only high-profile, highly-paid woman executives in broadcasting. Her success and influence sprang not only from her taste, but from recognizing the purchasing power of the female audience. In her job, she juggled the demands of talent and advertisers, of network censors who wanted safe radio, and execs who wanted new, lucrative hits. 

Brainard’s programming sensibility became the soul of NBC’s Blue Network, the less profitable, more culture-oriented chain of stations (including WJZ) that NBC absorbed in its earliest days. But in the early 1940s, federal regulators ruled that NBC’s double-network business was anti-competitive. So in 1943, leadership sold off the Blue Network to a Lifesavers candy mogul, who re-launched it as ABC. 

Not long after, Brainard left NBC. I’m not sure whether that sale was a factor, but it couldn’t have helped. At some point in 1945 or maybe even earlier, Brainard disappeared from NBC on a leave of absence, a fact only disclosed when the network announced her retirement to the trade press in early 1946. 

These announcements also noted that Brainard had married her former NBC colleague Curt Peterson. She did not have much time to enjoy that marriage, or anything else. She died of a heart attack on June 11, 1946, just shy of her 56th birthday.

When history calls

Of course, people die in all professions. People die for all sorts of reasons. But Brainard’s story hit me hard when I read it, because I recognize in her career my own generation of radio-to-podcast producers. Like many of us starting a decade or more ago, Brainard not only invented her job but many aspects of the medium. The intensity of making a whole new and popular thing can be intoxicating and all-consuming. But that intensity never lets up. It will outlast you and everything you make.

Here I want to show you the dedication page of Radio Writing, one of the first guides to audio production, and the first place I encountered Brainard’s name.

From Peter Dixon, 1931

You sense in those few words such admiration for the fire she brought to a role that was both important (Radio history) and impossible (so busy making it). As we get older, that fire starts to scorch. 

At least three of the people I worked with in WHYY’s newsroom are no longer alive — and they did not die of old age. I know that’s statistically meaningless, but it’s meaningful to me every time I remember that I cannot just call them up or check their doings on social media. All I have of them is a memory of the stress we shared long ago in a cramped, non-profit local newsroom, making so much stuff that was never enough.

Of course, I would jump at the chance to make my own audio history podcast, if I could hustle up the support and team it would take. The need for more support, as Tom Webster said in his webinar on the creator survey, is probably the main factor in the “creator churn” he found, though he wants to do more research on the reasons.

Let me offer one, at least for my demographic: life. At some point, people my age look around and have to weigh the demands of their calling against all the other things they know that matter. Making history is great. But then, all too soon, you become it.

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin/Temple University Libraries

Charles Addams, cartoonist and creator of “The Addams Family,” once illustrated his conception of audience research.

Is anybody out there?

I read the comments. What choice do I have? I work in podcasting, a media realm that for all its “metrics” and “listen time” data, is still mostly akin to leaving a message under a rock and hoping that someone finds it. Comments on stuff I’ve edited are at least proof that someone found what we made, and maybe even listened to and enjoyed it.

Read enough listener comments, and you start to see the patterns: Most are complaints about the ads. Unfortunately, we produce a free product that got stuck as free 100 years ago, a problem on par with climate change in terms of realistic solutions. Other than the ads, many complaints are about the presence of women’s voices. Thus far, podcasting is “solving” for that in the worst possible way.

But you can find useful feedback. I once worked in a place with a podcast whose host liked to show his enthusiasm by interrupting his guests’ answers during interviews. Listeners piled on, and he figured out how to hold his tongue. 

Still, there’s a central mystery at the heart of audience feedback: the audience. What is it, really? The people who bother to make comments are only a small part of it. We producers spend a lot of time making our work, and we want to know how it is received by everyone. How are these conversations and stories reconstructed inside the minds of a wider cross-section of the people who encounter them?

Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer brochure, Library of Congress.

Enter the analysts

In the beginning, broadcasters were shocked when the phones in the studios would ring after a program, or the volume of letters and telegrams the station would get from listeners. Then, as radio became more and more popular, broadcasters started to elicit those phone calls and letters. They used them to get advertising support, which was the only way US stations could keep operating.

But soon those advertisers wanted better data about who was listening, how many, and why. The anecdata from phone calls and letters didn’t cut it any more, so radio had to invest in actual research. Media historian Susan J. Douglas has a brilliant chapter in her book Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination about how radio had to figure out its audience.

As Douglas explains, audience research at first was crude and biased: starting in 1930, a polling firm would call a random sampling of listeners in a geographic area and ask what programs they’d heard in the past two hours, and if they could remember the sponsors. But people misremembered what they’d heard, and when. Not to mention, many Americans still did not have phones, so the overall sample data was skewed.

These were the kind of worries that faced a person with a new kind of job: head of audience research for CBS. Frank Stanton, who came to the network in the early 1930s with a PhD in psychology from Ohio State, soon met a brilliant Viennese social scientist named Paul Lazarsfeld, who was in the United States on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. With some more Rockefeller money, the two joined forces with Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril and eventually started the Office of Radio Research (ORR). 

Little Like-Button Annie

Frank Stanton was the kind of guy who liked to build things, so after a chat with his ORR colleagues, he took on the task of constructing a contraption that could measure listener reactions in real time. They called it the Program Analyzer. But people at CBS soon called it Little Annie.

The Reporter, April 11, 1950

Little Annie was based on the same basic technology as a polygraph machine. (By the way, historian Jill Lepore has a fascinating book and podcast episode about one inventor of the polygraph, William Moulton Marston, who was interested in more kinds of poly- than just graph, if you catch my drift).

Anyway, here’s Frank Stanton in an oral history for Columbia University describing how his program analysis machine worked:

Yes, this was perhaps the first “like” button, one provided in a dim room along with cigarettes. 

Stanton’s employer CBS soon started doing controlled audience research all the time, creating a bigger version (Big Annie) to poll more listeners at once. They’d put out the call for volunteers over the air to render their judgments on programs in development, filling up regular “program clinics” in the network’s Manhattan headquarters.

For The Reporter magazine in 1950, Thomas Whiteside sat in on one of these sessions. Each participant seat was assigned a number for easier identification of who produced each like and dislike.

A crucial next step after the listening session was the follow-up interview with each participant to ascertain the reasoning behind each reaction. Whiteside then found out what was going on with Number Four.

The invented audience

Whiteside’s bemused account shows the paradox inside audience research: the whole concept of audience measurement quickly starts to evaporate when you get into the particulars. “The object of this scrutiny — the audience — was itself an invention, a construction that corralled a nation of individual listeners into a sometimes monolithic group that somehow knew what ‘it’ wanted from broadcasting,” Susan Douglas writes.

Still, audience research did create a lot of insights into how mass media was processed inside the brains of Americans. Another Viennese social scientist, Herta Herzog (who was Lazarsfeld’s wife for a time) was a master of this aspect of research for ORR. Her reports, like On Borrowed Time, about the “gratification” of soap opera listeners, are brilliant reads. She understood how much listening could be an emotional act. Just think about true-crime podcasts as you read some of her analysis:

Herta Herzog (of McCann Erickson) speaks at the Third Annual Conference of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) at the Plaza Hotel, New York (ca. 1965).

It’s no surprise that in the 1940s, the research prowess fostered by radio followed the money into television, and specifically, to ad agencies. McCann-Erickson not only bought the Stanton-Lazersfeld Program Analyzer, they hired Herta Herzog as well. Fun fact: she’s widely thought to be the basis of the character Dr. Greta Guttman, a psychological researcher who talks about the “death wish” in the first episode of Mad Men. But better to watch the real thing as Herzog talks about her work in this 2010 interview with the BBC’s Adam Curtis. In the film, she’s back in Europe, 99 years old, and sharp as a tack.

So Herzog was one major inventor and refiner of the focus group interview, the backbone of market research (except for Doritos). Her innovation itself centered around listening: asking questions in both a methodical way for later analysis, but also building trust and responding to the cues of conversation.

Still, as a producer, I find some of the insights gleaned from those Little Annie “like/dislike” sessions fascinating. Most podcasts can’t really afford a full-on market research of the type radio got back in the day. And that research did reveal some sonic techniques favored by producers that listeners, when probed, admitted they did not like. CBS News Editor Paul White wrote about one of those production habits in 1947: the tendency to rely on a chorus of anonymous voices to create a sense of narrative “excitement.”

No, Little Annie, do not take my montage sequences away! I am sure there are more truth-bombs of this nature in the old CBS Research archives, if they even exist. But besides being antique data now, in reality, there’s only so much that granular research can do for a show.

The radio drama Suspense was probably the network’s most audience tested. Listeners made it clear they strongly preferred a snappy opening, an obvious protagonist, and little digression from the main plot line — and those changes did increase the show’s popularity. Still, as Frank Krutnik points out, all the audience research in the world could not replace the work of the creative team behind Suspense. 

Audience feedback can make a good thing better, in other words, but it cannot make a bad thing good.

Nor does it really challenge broadcasters to be better. This was the key insight — an unwelcome one — from the third major Viennese intellectual who briefly joined the Office for Radio Research: the musicologist, social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno was a refugee from the Nazi regime who was supposed to bring some critical rigor to audience research, especially when it came to the effects of music on listeners. Instead, as a dedicated Marxist, he mainly railed against the implicit (and explicit) goal of audience research at places like CBS — namely, to sell stuff. More interestingly, Adorno nailed the one-way deal broadcasters had with listeners. The listener got free programming larded with commercials. They got to respond to that programming in only one of three ways: they could write or call in, change the channel, or turn off the radio. Adorno thought commercial broadcasting had made its audience so passive and bamboozled that it was pointless to ask them what they wanted.

Adorno did not come to play. Soon he parted ways with the Office of Radio Research and decamped to sunny Los Angeles, leaving his fellow Viennese refugees a little mortified, though they swiftly recovered. But Adorno’s brief invitation to think bigger “was significant for communication research precisely because he was rejected,” writes media studies professor Josh Shepperd in his history of educational radio, Shadow of the New Deal (p. 148). Going forward, he notes, academic audience research would be tied not to theory but “to grant writing, advertising, metrics, and public relations discourses.”

Meanwhile, as the audience, we’re still trapped in the veil Adorno described. We now exercise our right to “like” stuff all day long. Those reactions are instantly turned into data so our personal algorithms can be used to sell us yet more stuff and predict our future purchases. We are heard and seen across comment boards, via avatars and arguments — and in large parts of Asia, danmaku “bullet” subtitling, probably something that will take over the world’s screens soon enough.

We are followed and counted all day long while left to feel, in our hearts, that we count for very little at all.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

The missing link

Note from Julia: I named this newsletter not in tribute to the engineering explainers that crop up in any search for the term “continuous wave” (though, of course, sound-science is based). No, the name exists because what we lack in audio production culture is continuity — and this history project tries to address that problem, post after nerdy post. When we don’t know what came before us, or why things turn out the way do, then the same patterns keep repeating themselves, always disguised as something new.

US audio culture fell into major discontinuity starting in the mid 1950s, when television either ate or discarded the network “Golden Age” live radio productions. Soon enough, radio was the realm of recorded music and a smattering of news — great for pure emotions and information, not so much for stories or characters. And poetic, risk-taking creativity? Forget it.

But in a cycle that is now becoming familiar to podcasters, spoken-word audio still kept finding an audience. As the big networks abandoned radio, counterculture acted as a reservoir, especially at nonprofit stations like Pacifica’s KPFK in Los Angeles. The station’s volunteers spawned new types of creative work in audio, especially Firesign Theatre, four guys who banded together and produced a spate of best-selling comedy albums in the late 1960s through the 1970s. Even if you haven’t heard a Firesign album, their influence has permeated far and wide, from Ren Faires to Hip-Hop samples to DIY religion.

I remember seeing Firesign albums around in my youth, perhaps while hearing one of their routines partially recited by a boyfriend or two. Firesign’s humor, often called surreal and sometimes compared to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, was full of sonic twists and barbs, plus multi-layered jokes and references that rewarded repeat listens. Of course, I had no idea how many of those references, and Firesign’s production techniques, were adapted from and influenced by vintage radio. It turns out that the troupe (Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, Phil Austin and David Ossman) are one big missing link between narrative audio’s past and its present. This I learned from a fascinating new book by Jeremy Braddock, Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. 

Braddock, who teaches in the department of Literatures in English at Cornell, has graciously agreed to share the following excerpt of his chapter on Firesign’s second album, which came out in 1969 and was, as you will read, the Firesign album perhaps most directly connected to radio’s past. The first side is a series of skits which start off (allegedly) in a moving car sold by one Ralph Spoilsport of Ralph Spoilsport Motors. (If you want to listen to the audio Braddock describes below, click here. And you can find links to all of Firesign’s radio influences and sources over at Jeremy’s newsletter).

Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, David Ossman, and Peter Bergman at CBS Columbia Square Studio, July 1969.  Photo by Frank Lafitte.  Courtesy of Sony Music Archives.

And now, here’s Jeremy Braddock:

Contradictory Space

After the slam of a car door, the acoustics immediately become warm and nonreverberant. We are with the protagonist as he drives off, hearing him talking to himself, he discovers that the car’s climate control is able to conjure different total environments while paradoxically remaining, for now, a car. There’s winter wonderland, spring fever, and the eventually chosen “tropical paradise,” which will be (cue thunderstorm) the album’s first reference to Vietnam. After about nine minutes, the car will have disappeared entirely but not before it is the site of another astonishing contradictory soundscape. A series of road signs, dramatized verbally, approach and recede from the listener via volume swells and move across the sound field from center to right. It produces an uncanny effect of movement on the highway, even as one subset of these “signs” contradicts this sense of movement by staging a version of Zeno’s paradox (Antelope Freeway one-half mile, one-quarter mile, one-eighth mile, one-sixteenth mile…one two-hundred and fifty-sixth mile…), a contradiction of space and time together.

Starting with the first side of 1969’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All, the hallmark of every Firesign Theatre album was the way each surreal, densely plotted narrative was realized in meticulous sonic depth and detail.  Both were self-evident products of what Brian Eno would later call “in-studio composition.” With a contract that traded mechanical royalties for unlimited time in the studio, Firesign was able to write and record iteratively and deliberately. In a way that resembled Geoff Emerick’s work with the Beatles, their new Columbia engineer, Bill Driml, was open to breaking with established protocols, collaborating with the artists, and experimenting with new sounds. And, as they well knew, they were also availed of the state-of-the-art affordances of the CBS Columbia Square studio, newly installed with eight-track recording equipment.

Located at the corner of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood, Columbia Square was where The Byrds had recorded “Eight Miles High,” “2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song),” and “C.T.A.—102,” and it was where Moby Grape had recorded their first album and where Brian Wilson had recorded vocals for the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and Pet Sounds. These were all recordings that had experimented with quasi-narrative “architectural” effects. Namechecking “Yellow Submarine,” David Crosby said, “If we can put anybody on a trip where they feel the same things that we felt going up in that airplane then we’ve succeeded.”

But in a way that was not true for the musicians, the new Firesign album also directly invoked the longer history of Columbia Square.

Columbia Square showing the CBS Studios in Hollywood, 1938.​  University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society. (Public domain)

What would it have sounded like?

Built in 1938, the International Style building had been overhauled by CBS in 1961, anticipating what an in-house journal called “the advent of stereophonic sound and its completely new process of recording.” It now complemented, and in some ways surpassed, the label’s legendary 30th Street studio in New York. The opulent Columbia Square had not been originally designed for recording but was rather a state-of-the-art facility made for radio broadcasting.  As Neil Verma has pointed out, radio studios were at that time typically far more acoustically complex than those built for recording music. For more than two decades, Columbia Square was home to fabled programs from Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and The Orson Welles Show to Suspense, Gunsmoke, and The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. The great playwright Norman Corwin regarded Columbia Square as radio’s “Mecca…There was not anything quite corresponding to its splendor in New York.” 

With free rein to explore the premises, the Firesign Theatre discovered abandoned technologies and devices from the radio days throughout the building: there was the enormous echo chamber (which had since been used on musical recordings), a plethora of sound-effect devices for live Foley (doors, guns, wind machine, a board for footsteps), and the Hammond B3 organ made famous by Suspense. The most important discovery was a set of forsaken RCA ribbon microphones that were ideal for on- and off-mic voicework. These gave How Can You Be a spatial depth that [Firesign’s first album] Waiting for the Electrician did not have and were used on all the group’s subsequent Columbia albums.

So while the mesmerizing Zeno’s paradox/talking-road-sign sequence of How Can You Be required several up-to-the-minute technologies, not least the stereo movement abetted by the new eight-track tape machines, it also hearkened directly back to the eerie sound world of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “The Hitch-Hiker,” which first broadcast from Columbia Square as an episode of The Orson Welles Show in November 1941. “The Hitch-Hiker” tells the story of Ronald Adams (Welles), a man driving across the country from Brooklyn to California. Setting out from his mother’s house in Brooklyn, he passes a hitchhiker on the Brooklyn Bridge, sees him again on the Pulaski Skyway, and then continuously as he proceeds across the country — events Adams conveys, with increasing anxiety, entirely from the driver’s seat of the car. The story becomes so deeply enmeshed with Adams’s psychology that the effect of the play is, as Verma observes, to confuse the space of the outside world with a state of mind; the “acoustic cocoon” is transformed into a place of paranoid projection.  A final plot twist reveals that most of the story’s events have occurred “outside of natural time.” In a way, these are all things that happen to How Can You Be’s protagonist, too.

Firesign’s Phil Proctor would later explain:

This is a succinct characterization of what would today be called media archaeology, a field of inquiry producing technical genealogies and countergenealogies, as well as what the scholar Thomas Elsaesser dubbed a “poetics of obsolescence.” Above all, its diverse strains are guided by “a strong sense/consensus that one should be ‘doing media archaeology’ rather than merely using it as a conceptual tool.” 

Elsaesser also aligns media archaeology with the parallel development of “counterfactual history,”  which could also be a dignified name for some of How Can You Be’s most notorious gags — spoiler alert: the president of the United States is named Schicklgruber — as well as a means of evoking another element of radio’s “golden age” patrimony, namely, its historical entanglement with disinformation and propaganda. In the 1938–39 Manual of German Radio, Schicklgruber himself (I mean Hitler) wrote that “we should not have conquered Germany without . . . the loudspeaker.”  And by that time, Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, had already remarked that “radio is to propaganda what the airplane is to international warfare.”  Nor was radio propaganda an exclusively fascist concern. While the United States remained officially neutral, British international broadcasting worked to cultivate feelings of solidarity and sympathy between the two countries, something that had been another object of study at the Princeton Listening Center. 

As the US entered the war, American commercial radio networks adapted their conventional genres and created specialized broadcasts to serve the war effort. The networks, in Gerd Horten’s words, “willingly disseminated government propaganda and successfully united much of the American public behind the war effort.”  And although many, including Welles, had contributed, the undisputed laureate of American antifascist radio had been Norman Corwin. “We Hold These Truths,” his sesquicentennial celebration of the Bill of Rights, aired simultaneously on all four national networks in December 1941, eight days after Pearl Harbor. After many further programs, in May 1945, On a Note of Triumph celebrated the end of the war with another national broadcast; Columbia Masterworks released a six-disc recording before the end of the year. Both broadcasts had originated from Columbia Square in Los Angeles:

The Firesign Theatre knew the pieces well, both from the disc recordings and from print collections of the scripts (which helpfully included Corwin’s genial production notes), and they were drawn to his later experience as a writer blacklisted just three years after the war. One vector for Phil Proctor’s query — what would it have sounded like? — was therefore to wonder about the fate of Corwin’s gregarious antifascism and its “mystical vision of citizenship” in the Vietnam era. 

Annoyed by his car’s “tropical paradise” sound world, the protagonist of How Can You Be selects the climate control’s “land of the pharaohs” as a means of escape. This choice elicits a pyramid, which may be in the Egyptian desert or on the back of a US dollar bill (or both). As the protagonist runs inside, the pyramid becomes “the only nice motel in town.” Ostensibly, we may all still be in the car, but the car is never mentioned again. Instead, the motel’s lobby becomes the site of an eight-minute Corwinian pageant in which the truisms of democratic citizenship are repurposed for the age of the imperialist war in Vietnam:

The pageant, as can easily be seen, mimics Corwin’s rhetoric as well as his floridly extroverted style. The “Little Guy” is a signature Corwinism, a stagey update of the Popular Front’s “common man.” Updating it for late 1968, the Firesign Theatre revealed the way Corwin’s hortatory patriotism had been used to exploit the Little Guy while concealing the inegalitarian reality of the war (after first extending their first album’s critique of Native American dispossession). When at length the sequence concludes, the protagonist finds himself cheerily coerced into enlisting in the army (“Get in step with the voices of the feet already dead in the service of their country!”), after which he appears briefly to become African American and then disappears from the story entirely — a set of sonic figures signifying the true demographics of the Vietnam War.  Black soldiers accounted for nearly one fourth of the fatalities in the early years of the war. David Ossman, who would later collaborate with Corwin on a fiftieth-anniversary broadcast of “We Hold These Truths,” began his working notes for How Can You Be with the unfinished statement: “The problem with Norman Corwin…”  (The problem with the Firesign Theatre, meanwhile, was audible in their blackface answer to the problem of Corwin.)

With the protagonist now totally absent, the final seven minutes of the side involve a World War II vignette that concludes with a travesty of a USO-style singalong, which is titled, borrowing the SDS’s slogan from Chicago 1968, “We’re Bringing the War Back Home.” This performance is then revealed to have been the conclusion of a film broadcast on the Late Late Show for a Saturday Night, which is followed by a channel-surfing sequence of TV broadcasts that return us at length to Ralph Spoilsport, now selling weed rather than cars, who seamlessly segues into the final 150 words of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses as the sound of cars on the highway morph into an oceanic chorus of “yeses,” “Yes I will yes yes.” 

The car has long since disappeared, the protagonist has gone, and the listener is left with the euphoric sounds of a gender-ambiguous speaker’s unconditional surrender. At the end of an actual broadcast day in 1969, listeners would have heard the national anthem.

Copyright 2024 by Jeremy Braddock.

Working script from How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All. The Firesign Theatre Collection, Library of Congress.

JB: Thanks again to Jeremy Braddock for sharing a small portion of his mega-trove of audio history. Now be sure to go and get Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums. Braddock also writes about more treasures and ephemera in his newsletter Giant Slide 19 Holes Underground Parking, including all the radio sources and influences cited above, here.

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.

Sound on the tubes

Radio has been depicted on screen for a long time. Take Death at Broadcasting House, a 1930s murder mystery based on a novel by BBC insider Val Gielgud, and featuring the terrifying Blattnerphone recorder as a crucial plot device. 

Broadcast TV is littered with fictional characters who work in radio, such as Frasier’s eponymous Dr. Frasier Crane, host of a call-in show on nonexistent KACL-AM. Several characters on the 1990s cult hit Northern Exposure had cameos or programs on the also nonexistent Alaska station KBHR. The 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati gets a lot of love from former employees of AM Top-40 stations for its accuracy. And for a surreal rabbit-hole, check out NewsRadio, which features a young Joe Rogan.

Radio provides an ideal “situation” for the TV situation comedy (a form ironically, of course, invented by radio in the 1930s). Radio stations have hustle and bustle, high stakes, weirdos and above all, exotic equipment — especially the alluring microphone.  But more than a decade into podcasting, TV has not really figured out how to depict it. And that is a problem for those of us in audio production.

Certainly, I know scripted TV is not the place to search for realism — that most characters never use the bathroom or pick their noses or whatever. Most professions are likewise oversimplified and overdramatized for the small screen.

Use the right equipment for the job

But imagine if, on all the popular TV emergency room dramas, the doctors and nurses used chunky toy stethoscopes instead of normal ones. And then in the real world, insurers and patients refused to pay emergency room bills, because after all, the Fisher Price Medical Kit is available on eBay for only $15. That’s sometimes what it feels like audio producers are up against, offering realistic budgets and trying to make a living in a world where we are usually portrayed as dopey amateurs. On TV, podcasting is the career choice of losers and obsessives, people who do senseless things yet achieve powerful results with just a few scraps of badly-used equipment (and usually, one guesses by deduction, inherited wealth). 

There can only be three

TV also seems to have settled on the correct number of people needed to produce a podcast: three, at maximum. With a few exceptions, all these people are on mic, and none do background support such as engineering, story editing, or mixing. The number of minutes these characters spend preparing for interviews, booking guests, or marketing? Generally speaking, zero. They barely spend a minute making their shows.

You could argue most of that back-end stuff is boring to depict. But Silicon Valley made coding funny. The Office made phone calls funny. Surely, Pro Tools crashing as a result of another iOS upgrade could be a great plot device. Studio outtakes? Unmuted tracks in the published .mp3? Don’t get me started. And there’s so much drama in those Google Doc script notes that the producer thought they deleted but then the host actually saw! Anyway, my point is, TV shows that successfully feature jobs at least make an effort to research the actual pain-points and joys of that profession.

OK, enough complaining. Instead, let’s see if there’s something we can learn, against the odds, from our TV avatars. How, given the production methods depicted on screen, might these fictional podcasts sound? And what could they (and by extension, perhaps we) do to improve production?

[Caveat: I might have missed some stuff, because do not have time watch every episode where these pod-characters appear and pretend to podcast — though you are welcome to help buy me more time.]

Now, please follow along with me as I give unsolicited consultations to TV’s biggest fake pods.

Steve Martin in Only Murders in the Building

Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

Podcast assessment: Confusing but charming

Your three hosts roam Manhattan waving your iPhones in the general direction of people being interviewed. Two of your hosts insist on recording themselves only in voice memos, but one host likes to use a stand-up microphone with a script, ensuring a very inconsistent sound. The scripts themselves are pretty decent, so that does make up for the total lack of continuity. If you had a mix engineer, maybe you could address your self-inflicted field-tape issues, but you don’t — no one appears to edit, mix, master or upload your true-crime show. At least you have an awareness of the marketplace, thanks to mean-girl competitor Tina Fey. But then she dies, just like everyone else around you, in service of the plot. I would recommend adding a few media defense lawyers to your team.

Maron (IFC)

Podcast assessment: Accurate but understaffed

You’re a podcaster in real life, the Marc Maron who just ended his conversational show WTF’s long run. So your cramped garage studio is road-tested and realistic. Your mics are quality, the setting intimate and sound-baffled with clutter. You are an agent of chaos, yet you monitor your own levels on a laptop as you record. However, you appear to have killed off your real-life producer. Maybe your cats do that job? I notice that the IMDb production credits for Maron number in the hundreds. Perhaps the TV simulacrum-Marc could afford an operational sidekick.

Octavia Spencer in Truth Be Told

Truth Be Told (Apple TV)

Podcast assessment: Luxe

Your host is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who lives in an enormous old Bay Area house that has never caught on fire. To your credit, you have a producer and a mixing board in your home studio (and also, of course, a murder board!). You and the producer both wear headphones to monitor levels when you record (extra props for the pop filter), and you appear to use viable, multi-track software for mixing. You voice your narration beautifully (because you are Octavia Spencer), but you keep your script in a three-ring binder on the table beneath you. That will create a lot of extra noise when you turn the page. Not to mention, you’re looking down and constricting your vocal tract. Overall — and I know this is a big ask since you ceased to exist after three seasons — I’d recommend hiring an editor, fact-checker and lawyer to review the cold cases you’re re-opening in the service of having endless family and marital dramas.

Bodkin (Netflix)

Podcast assessment: Have not received the sound file

You have a lot going with your production team: an angry Irish investigative newspaper reporter who actually has an editor, and an assistant producer who carries around research in a binder (are binders are making one last stand in TV podcasts?) and who even wears headphones in the field at times. Your would-be host, however, does a lot of stand-up narration without headphones, often while pacing. Finally he does the whole “narrating atop a wind-swept bridge into a Zoom H1 without a windscreen, probably because it would confuse viewers with its Muppet-like hairiness” move. But then he throws it all away. Overall: this works for me! Also, Bodkin pod(kin), check out my newsletter bestie Samantha Hodder’s assessment of your moves here.

Boyd Holbrook in The Morning Show

The Morning Show (Apple TV)

Podcast assessment: Who are we kidding?

You’re Bro Hartman, a bro whose podcast emanates, starting in Season 4, from a network skyscraper in New York City. Due to your proximity to the dying embers of daytime broadcast TV — which apparently features endless meltdowns, on-camera defections, sudden resignations, and near plane-crashes — your podcast must also match the high-pressure, live environment. Therefore, it is in fact what we used to call in the business “a broadcast.” Your engineer only pops his head out of the control room during ad breaks to shout stuff like “twenty seconds!” — just like real TV directors do. Unlike TV anchors, however, Bro don’t need a teleprompter or any notes, because he is a podcaster. You and your sidekick effortlessly fill the hours with spontaneous “banter” that your audience considers appointment viewing for mysterious reasons. When you are off the air, you do not prepare for the next day’s show, but rather sit around loudly sipping juice boxes and making sexy eyes at female network bosses. Great work if you can get it, which no one can, because this job does not exist.

Nobody Wants This (Netflix)

Podcast assessment: Not bad for science fiction

You and your sister record your wildly popular, real-talk sex-empowerment chat show in various extremely large LA kitchens and living rooms. You sit together, headphone-free, and wave around hand-held microphones with abandon. Did you know there’s a reason why you never see podcasts recording with hand-held mics? Nonetheless, when your rom-com Rabbi boyfriend listens to the show on his laptop, the audio is perfect! Amazing how you pull that off since (I am tired now) you have no producer or sound engineer. At least you have a business manager who gets you ad revenue and pursues acquisition. As this manager frets that your sisterly drama will blow up an acquisition meeting with Spotify (ha ha), she sighs and then offers the only self-aware statement I’ve heard during all my weary travels through this mirror podcast world: 

“Oh my God. I’m gonna have to sell my eggs.”

Kristin Bell and Justine Lupe in Nobody Wants This