Word: ratner
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...critics who snipe at radio must be hitting pretty close to home if Veteran Radioman Ratner wraps himself in the folds of Old Glory [TIME, Nov. 10] ... just because someone puts the finger on a particularly obnoxious commercial or an especially sloppy soap opera...
Veteran Radioman Ratner, 43, is in a good spot to hit back at radio's detractors: he is the new CBS vice president in charge of promotion and advertising. He is a veteran scrapper (as a University of Michigan freshman, he once outwrestled Ed "Don" George, who became a topflight U.S. heavyweight...
...critics hit at radio," says Ratner, "because they claim to be shocked at the programs; actually they're shocked at what the U.S. people are. Radio fits the contours of the people. The masses like comic books, Betty Grable in the movies, broad comedy and simple drama on the air. It's vulgar, fast, simple, fundamental -and that's what...
Since radio, in Ratner's opinion, represents "the judgment of the majority of adult Americans," it must be right. The intellectuals who object to soap opera had better go read a book and leave radio to the masses...
...Ratner has no formula for pleasing both "classes and masses," other than to "take the serious stuff and put it into mass language." But radio is gradually closing the gap anyway, he believes: "The professor is discovering Jack Benny and the ditch digger is discovering symphony at the same time. Radio gets into people's houses and cross-fertilization begins...