Perturbation & Comfort

President William S. Paley of Columbia Broadcasting System last week put his annual stockholders' report on the air-- in direct competition with Kay Kyser's dance orchestra on NBC--and it delighted Columbia executives that Mr. Paley had a bad case of microphone fright. Hovering around him in his office at Columbia's Madison Avenue studios in Manhattan were two production men, two vice presidents, one engineer, two page boys. There were duplicate microphones in case one broke down, a precaution not usually taken with either Jack Benny or President Roosevelt.

Mr. Paley read, quickly and nervously: "The broadcasting industry should unite on a definite program of service, of progress and of protection. . . . The newly organized National Association of broadcasters [which last fortnight picked Louisville Newspaperman Mark Foster Ethridge as temporary president] . . . may well be the instrument. . . . Broadcasting, of course, should be subject to all legislation and regulation governing business in general [but] . . . regulation should be limited to the bare necessities of the case and should never go beyond that. . . . There should be a minimum of regulation."

Reason for Mr. Paley's perturbation was that the Federal Communications Commission (chairman: Frank McNinch, Franklin Roosevelt's "Trouble Shooter") began last week the investigation of radio which broadcasters have expected ever since Mae West's "script tease" in December. In charge of a committee to look into charges of monopoly was Paul Walker, a man whose name few people knew before he presented a report on American Tel. & Tel. last fortnight (see p. 61).

A few hours before William Paley went on the air, David Sarnoff, president of RCA, met his stockholders in Radio City's Studio No. 8-H, world's biggest. For the last few years RCA meetings have been furious affairs, with abuse, denunciation and a certain amount of gloomy prophesying. But last autumn RCA declared its first common stock dividend, and last week Mr. Sarnoff's stockholders confined themselves to asking how about Frank McNinch and Paul Walker. Said Mr. Sarnoff: "We have nothing to conceal, nothing to hide."

Mr. Sarnoff's figures also comforted stockholders. On a total gross of $112,639,000, RCA's net last year was $9,024,000. For the first time Mr. Sarnoff told how much of that was made by NBC: $3,700,000 on a gross of $41,000,000. (CBS profits last year: $4,297,000.)

Most comforting of all to stockholders who had been reading the woeful financial pages lately, was the news that both NBC and CBS had a larger advertising revenue in March than either of them had ever had in one month before. NBC figures: $3,800,000; CBS: $3,000,000. Radio advertising is mostly contracted for in 13-week lumps, which protects the networks from any really precipitous fall in earnings. But not even the most melancholy stockholder, considering what has happened to advertising in most newspapers and magazines in the last six months, could refrain from concluding that in radio, at least, business is good.

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