The third week in May was a very important one for American media, which for the most part these days means television. This is, after all, the age of television. The big question that week was whether the season-ender of
”Dynasty” on Wednesday night would outdraw the season finale of
”Dallas” two nights later. Bets were made, arguments were propounded and the deep meaning of it all explored.
”Dallas” won. Not by much, mind you, but win it did, drawing a rating of 27.5 to 25.9 for ”Dynasty.” That Friday evening, May 17, 1985, 23,347,000 television sets were tuned in to ”Dallas.” Figuring on three people per set (probably a bit generous), that means that 70 million were watching
”Dallas” that night, about 4 million more than had watched ”Dynasty”
the previous Wednesday.
So that`s what America was doing those nights? No, actually, it wasn`t. Except for the Super Bowl or the sixth and seventh games of a World Series, there are always more people not watching television in America than watching it. Those not watching could be doing many other things. Some may be working, bowling, reading, contemplating nature, doing chores around the house, boating, fishing, making music, making love. But the one thing that more people are doing than watching television at almost any given moment is
–listening to the radio.
To the what? To the radio, that`s what. This may be the age of television, but consider this: During the same hour those 70 million people were watching ”Dallas,” about 100 million were listening to the radio. In fact, even on that Friday night, one of the big television-watching nights of the year, almost as many people were listening to the radio as were watching all network television programs–”Dallas” and its competitors–put together. Nearly half a century after its ”golden age” and a generation into
”the television age” radio not only has survived, it`s thriving, it`s growing, it`s prospering. ”Back in the Days of Radio” was the song the late funnyman Abe Burrows wrote in the late `40s. In fact, these days, as much as any other time, are the days of radio.
It is hardly the same medium it was back in those days. In a sense television did kill radio, but radio didn`t stay dead. In a manner that has gone largely ignored–because, in the age of television, almost nobody was paying attention–radio re-created itself, adjusting with extraordinary luck or skill to changes in society and to advances in electronic technology.
(Some in radio worry about even newer technology in the form of cable radio or music videos on TV, but neither has cut significantly into radio`s popularity thus far.)
And radio is still changing, continuing to adapt to social and technological changes. It is now easier and cheaper than ever to start a new radio station, which is why there are more stations than ever before and even more on the way. But it may be harder than ever to make a radio station a good one, to keep it faithful to what has made radio so successful, and harder also for station owners to fight off the big investors now moving into the field, thanks to government deregulation.
How big is radio in America today? The statistics are complex, confusing and even controversial, but what they boil down to is this: Almost without noticing it, nearly everybody in this country listens to the radio every day. They listen in bed and in the bathtub, in the kitchen and in the car, in their offices and at the beaches.
They listen to 8,260 commercial and 1,122 noncommercial radio stations, which, totaling 9,382, comprise more than 10 times the number of TV stations and which in a few years may rise to 13,000 stations as the Federal Communications Commission expands radio`s broadcast range and allows more frequencies to be used. They listen to hundreds of millions of radio sets, purchasing 84 million of them just last year and, according to marketing forecasts, on the way to buying even more than that this year. Almost every home has a radio; most have more than one.
Says the Radio Advertising Bureau, self-servingly but accurately,
”Clearly people are listening to radio more and more, and they like what they are listening to.”
Americans wake up with radio. It tells them if it`s going to rain or shine that day and what big news event, if any, happened overnight. And about half of all Americans go to bed with radio, listening to it until just before or even as they go to sleep.
Americans have a personal relationship with radio, a relationship so long-lasting and so pervasive that most people don`t even realize it. Radio has an unmeasurable but undeniable emotional pull on many people, which may be why there are songs about that relationship, like the country tune about the woman who gets ”a little salvation from a local station, she`s got a radio heart.”
Radio, more than television, is the companion of the lonely, of the different, of the off-beat, loved for its diversity, its relatively free-wheeling style and the odd characters it encourages or at least tolerates.
”Radio allows your imagination to roam,” says Jerry Gillman, owner of WDST-FM in Woodstock, N.Y, one of a growing number of innovative small and midsized stations that are bucking the prepackaged programs so prevalent in radio today.
Radio`s growth, health and influence can be seen in the statistics, but the statistics can`t show its real impact. Radio has a mystique. It is part of the American night, the companion of long-haul truck drivers, cross-country travelers and wanderers fiddling with their dials to get stations that could be hundreds of miles away–WHO in Des Moines, WWVA in Wheeling, WOWO in Ft. Wayne. ”It`s a wonderful thing that you can drive through Mississippi and Louisiana at night and get the Cardinals game (from St. Louis) on KMOX,” says radio consultant Sam Holt.
The secret of radio`s current success is its diversity, its localness, which allows it to reflect so well an increasingly diverse society. But because all that diversity is accessible through the same medium, radio is also a unifier, a bridge to America`s many subcultures.
On the highway or in a room, the listener can switch from a ball game to a fundamentalist sermon, from rock music to classical, from a contentious talk show to calming background tunes, from a psychologist to a Methodist to a socialist to a conservationist. Anyone wanting to understand this country today could do so by simply driving across it with a good car radio, tuning in to one station after another.
And despite all the changes and all its efforts to stay up to date, radio also helps provide a bridge between the past and the present. In New York thousands wake up each morning to John Gambling on WOR, as their parents woke up listening to his father, and their grandparents woke up listening to his grandfather. Later in the day the New Yorker weary of his city`s hectic lifestyle can find solace in the soothing low voice of William B. Williams, still playing Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Margaret Whiting, still calling his WNEW show ”The Make-Believe Ballroom,” exactly as the former shoe salesman Martin Block called it back in the 1930s when he became the world`s first disc jockey. Radio`s magic spans both space and time.
”The magic is that for the first time in the history of mankind, man was able to communicate long distances without any physical connection,” says Red Barber. ”TV really just added on by putting in the picture.”
Red Barber is 78 years old now, but his voice still has just the same Southern warmth that it had a generation ago when he sat in what he called
”the catbird seat” (just one of several phrases he gave to the American language) and brought the baseball adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers to the world. He is more than just a former sports announcer, as is obvious to anyone who sits in the study of his Tallahassee home and notes that his library is full of books on religion, history and radio as well as sports. ”I am in love with radio,” Barber says. ”As Churchill was a child of Parliament, I am a child of radio.” He is also an authority on it, having written ”The Broadcasters,” a fine history of radio`s early days.
”Radio is very simple,” he says. ”We just do it. Radio can go anyplace. It has an intimacy and a variety that television can`t hope to match.” He says this while sitting at the desk from which every Friday morning he talks into the phone for a few minutes to Bob Edwards of National Public Radio`s ”Morning Edition” and thus to several million others, many of whom tune in because they want to hear him.
”All I have to do,” says Barber, holding his hand over the telephone mouthpiece, ”is hold my hand over the speaker like this to avoid feedback. Then we can do whatever we want.”
This is part of the secret of radio. It can do whatever it wants. If television tried to do whatever it wanted, ”the intricacies would be enormous,” Barber says. Besides, television won`t even try to do very much that doesn`t look like much. If ”the visuals” are not there, television is wary, while radio need not be.
”There is the lure of invisibility,” says Garrison Keillor, whose independent inventiveness is probably too much for commercial radio, let alone television. It was, in fact, even too much for National Public Radio, which judged his program, ”Prairie Home Companion,” ”too local” for audiences beyond its Minnesota home.
