Word: barnouw
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Radio and television broadcasting is cheap-jack today, it was yesterday, and so it will probably remain. Its history is pockmarked with compromise, indecision, and capitulation before the law of the fast buck. If Erik Barnouw's three-volume history proves anything, it is that when responsibility for "the public interest" is borne by privately-motivated individuals, the public only gets the product that promises the easy profit...
...such a co-operative plan proved impossible. Only the AT & T commercial toll offered a method by which radio stations could independently finance themselves, and, indeed, accrue profit. Two years later, advertising agencies paid performers high salaries, broadcasting was a national institution, and wavelength competition was cut-throat. Says Barnouw: "The crisis atmosphere...engulfed radio broadcasting in the mid-1920's. (It stemmed from) small v. powerful stations; patent allies v. competitors; patent allies v. antimonopolists; telephone v. manufacturing groups; copyright owners v. users; educational v. commercial interests; political ins v. outs...
...congealing mess, and took steps towards upgrading broadcast material and goals. In 1928 it requested 164 stations to present a case for their continued existence. Unfortunately, pending cases produced massive political pressure by those Congressmen who made agreements with the defendants and those who made money from station advertising. Barnouw quotes a 1935 Harvard Business Review summary of the FRC's career: "...while talking in terms of the public interest, convenience and necessity the commission actually chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters." Thus was the status quo preserved. Long commercial breaks between individual programs became commonplace...
...Great Hour," scripted by Erik Barnouw, president of the Radio Writers' Guild, and edited by Playwright Robert E. Sherwood, will feature the voices of President Truman, Movie Stars Gregory Peck, Robert Montgomery and Ida Lupino and Commentator Quentin Reynolds...
Bruegel intended his Temptation of Saint Anthony (see cut) as a topical sermon. The rotting fish atop the head in the center of the picture, says Editor Barnouw, represented the Church of Rome, which Bruegel considered viciously corrupt. The half-submerged head itself was the Christian world, its mouth on fire, and in the background floated a menacing turretful of Turks. Hermit Saint Anthony turns his back on the nightmare. Ignoring the crossbowman above him, he takes comfort in the psalm: "In the Lord put I my trust . . . for lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow...