BROADCASTING AS A MEDIUM OF ART

Broadcasting as a medium of art The artistic potential of any medium is determined by the unique form it offers and forces on the artist and by its capacity as an effective vehicle of communication in its own right. The form of any art includes the circumstance through which it reaches its public. William Shakespeare's stage was little more than an open platform on which any action he cared to represent could be compassed provided he gave his actors the necessary words to indicate the place, circumstance, and atmosphere of the action. But his plays would have been null as practical drama without the circumscribing enclosure of the Elizabethan circular theatre auditoriumthe wooden Owhich gathered the audience around the platform, sealing them off from the outside world and concentrating their attention on the performance. As active auditors they became an integral part of the drama, and one must be constantly aware of them in the very writing, structure, and timing of the plays. Shakespeare's art was born of the discovery of the potentialities of the actoraudience relationship. The art of radio In a similar way the art of radio began to be discovered when those engaged in broadcasting became aware of the nature of the medium in which they were working and of their special relationship to their audience. The discovery took time. (The artistic potential of radio was not explored until the 1930s.) Radio was the only medium in which performers were invisible to their audience. Broadcasters tended at first to adopt the manner of the stage or the pulpit: thinking in terms of a mass audience, the inexperienced broadcaster gave his voice and style an artificial inflation totally unsuited to the new medium. His actual audience was composed of small groups and individuals, usually at home or in informal circumstances, often doing other things at the same time. The basic art of radio consisted in adapting manner and style to these new circumstances. Few programs could expect to take their audiences for granted. News broadcasts were among the exceptions, and news broadcasts in most countries came to be delivered in a fixed, impersonal manner, the newsreader suppressing his personality as far as possible and adopting a team voice. Most other spoken radio formats required using the voice in such a way as to hold the attention of the listener, and this in turn meant recognizing the nature of the microphone as a medium. The public's span of attention was found to be limited. The news summary was allotted five or 10 minutes, while a talk might last 15 minutes or in special instances up to 30 minutes. Much consideration was also given to the appropriate styles for various audiences, depending on the classes of listeners to whom broadcasts were addressed. The art of radio emerged in Britainand in certain other countries adopting the same public service approachas a medium nominally addressed to everyone but actually resembling a kind of broad-based national journal with special sections addressed to specific interests and tastes, some more demanding on the intelligence than others. The popular radio talk (a form of spoken journalism, or essay, often excellently composed and delivered) was shorter and more informal in style than that of the serious or purely educational talk. Broadcasting offered unique opportunities for bringing the nation's highest intelligences into the living rooms of so-called minority audiences (often amounting to millions) who were prepared to listen to concentrated exposition and argument. From this, particularly in Europe, developed channels specializing in minority interests for part or all of the day. The listeners supported the service by paying an annual license fee. In the United States, on the other hand, privately owned broadcasting companies got their revenues from advertising and tied their programming to the advertiser's desire to reach the widest possible public. In Japan there were both public and commercial broadcasting services, the former being financed, as in Europe, by license fees from owners of receiving sets. In the Soviet Union broadcasting was recognized, in the words of Pravda, as one of the most powerful weapons of the cultural revolution. Under Stalin virtually all receivers were wired to local exchanges so that the listener could choose only among approved programs. The service had to be regionalized because the U.S.S.R. included populations speaking about 80 principal languages. Aside from news and commentary, the broadcasts were generally cultural rather than directly propagandistic. The development of radio as an art form was thus dependent on the way it was organized and financed. There were rich new fields to be opened up in drama, light entertainment, and documentary programming, conceived specifically for the medium, while at the same time some traditional art forms (notably stage drama and music) were transmitted with success. Fiction and poetry reading also became a staple part of sound broadcasting.