Word: fcc
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After compiling 4,559 pages of testimony for guidance, the Federal Communications Commission last week got ready to shift many a tenant of the U.S. airwaves. So doing, FCC laid some bets on the Buck Rogerishness of the postwar world...
...most fascinating possibility of all in the civilian walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie, which had not been allowed out in public before, got a ten-megacycle highway to stroll in. If a plane can now talk to the ground, and a tank commander to his tanks by walkie-talkie, FCC reasoned, why can't a store direct its delivery trucks while they are on the move? Or, suggested the New York Times, instead of an aproned farmer's wife yoohooing to her husband in the field to come in for lunch; why not just give him a call...
...decided to apply the same system to radio. He lined up big-name sponsors for such a project, including his old partner, Chester Bowles, now OPA boss; the University of Chicago's Robert M. Hutchins; Businessman Beardsley Ruml. He laid his plan before the Federal Communications Commission (retiring FCC Chairman James L. Fly is expected to join the group). This week the group is incorporating as Subscription Radio...
...asks the FCC to assign it three channels for frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting. On these, three types of programs would be broadcast: 1) uninterrupted classical music; 2) continuous popular music; 3) shopping news and educational programs. Subscribers would pay 5? a day ($18.25 per year) to listen. Nonsubscribers would be kept from listening by a "pig squeal" which would be broadcast along with the programs, "jamming" all sets but those of the Benton subscribers, whose radios would tune out this squeal by a special apparatus. Benton proposes to let other broadcasters use the attachment for a small royalty...
Last week, as FCC still mulled over the plan, the New York Times attacked it: "The pig whistle injects a poll tax on radio - the payment of a fee in order that the public might enjoy what is already free and their property - the air. This is hardly a liberal conception of the 'freedom to listen.' " This could open "the doors to a whole series of exclusive squeals, each representing a different fee to the listener...