Radio: Onslaught

Radio & TV, which get almost daily insults from some direction, last week suffered two open assaults and one cryptic, underground attack:

¶ In Rome, Pope Pius XII told an international pilgrimage of editors that films and television exercised “a unilateral influence … on man, and more especially on youth, with its almost purely visual action carrying with it such a danger of intellectual degeneracy that one begins to consider it a danger for all people.”

¶ In Washington, Rear Admiral Arthur C. Davis, Staff Director for the Joint Chiefs, was back on the job after recovering from an acute eye infection. “There I was—unable to use my eyes,” he said. “I just listened to the radio all day. Soap operas! I never heard one before . . . What are we doing? We are raising a generation of morons. My God, I didn’t realize what sad shape the United States of America is in.”

¶ In Manhattan, an anonymous adman (following the slogan of the wartime campaign against venereal disease) was boring from within by flooding Madison Avenue and Rockefeller Center with matchbooks carrying the ominous message: “Help Stamp Out TV!”