Radio Politics

William M. Butler, Campaign Manager of President Coolidge, announced that his candidate would not go on the stump, but would campaign by radio from the Capital. The radiocasters threw up their hands in supplication and distraction.

"That makes it unanimous," they cried. "Now they've all said they would do it."

Indeed the radiocasters were in a quandary and the campaign managers had put them there. The entire trouble is that the political managers are not scientists. An official of a large radio company, unnamed, gave out a press statement in which he said: "They are faced with the disappointment right there, for that cannot be done except in very limited instances.

"In broadcasting on a national scale, we will have to fall back on the land wires of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. as a basis. These wires will receive the speeches from the microphone, where it is set up, and take them to the cities from which they are to be broadcast, whereupon the local stations in those cities will put them on the air. In other words, the main wire channel is limited to what the American Telephone and Telegraph Company can provide. It has a service to maintain, and cannot throw overboard every thing to give right of way to broad casting.

Then the radio man came forward with a sound suggestion -sound as politics and sound as radio wisdom :

". . . A speech which is aimed, for instance, at the industrial centres of the East would have little application to the campaign that will be made among the farm sections of the West.

"It should, therefore, be confined to the local stations of the East. Arguments addressed to the farm issues, similarly, should be localized in that region. Where the broadcasting can be confined to one locality the problem will be greatly simplified. . . . Unless the broadcasting of politics is kept within reasonable bounds, the public will tire of it as soon as the novelty wears off. . . .

"If the campaign managers will take the advice of those of us who have studied the problems of broadcasting, they will not attempt to put on the air long-winded political speeches. I have no hesitancy in saying that the ordinary political speech, as we have known it for years to be delivered from platforms in political campaigns, will not go at all with radio audiences. They will tune out in the middle of it and get some station that is sending jazz or a symphony concert."