The House Naval Affairs Committee last week set May 16 as the day it will begin hearings on Representative Emanuel Celler's Pan American Broadcasting Station Bill. This measure would: 1) authorize the Navy Department to construct and operate a $700,000 Government broadcasting station (with $50,000 for annual maintenance) with power and equipment adequate not only for short wave broadcasting to South America but for the whole U. S.; 2) instruct the Commissioner of Education to provide programs of national and international interest, running the full educational and entertainment gamut covered by commercial broadcasters.
Representative Celler comes from Brooklyn, and so has a very real and very natural dread of Naziism. Fundamentally he designed his bill to provide the U. S. with means of competing with short-wave propaganda regularly broadcast for the past four or five years from Europe's totalitarian countries. Of the 30-odd bills pending in House & Senate to muscle Government further into radio, the Celler Bill is closest to the hearing stage and is, therefore, hated & feared by private broadcasters. It is their contention that the radio industry already provides ample technical and artistic facilities for South American propaganda broadcasting. In spite of Representative Celler's contention that one Government station will scarcely interfere with the 728 private stations now licensed in the U. S., what particularly pains the broadcasters is the idea of domestic Government broadcasting. It sounds too much like the yardstick principle which is currently turning utility men's hair snowy white.
Therefore, with the Celler Bill hearings about to open in Washington this week, the QRX signal to stand by hummed through the U. S. radio industry. A more important fight than was ever put on the air—the match between the two great opposing philosophies of broadcasting— was about to begin. In this corner—the legislators and Government officials who look on radio as too vast and permeating a moral instrument to be left ungoverned by the body politic, too valuable a natural resource to be left free from State control. In that corner—the private broadcasters who have an estimated $150,000,000 invested in plant, who last year made some $140,000,000 from time sales, and gave a 24-hour free show 365 days to a whole nation.
This week's fight will have the additional flavor of a return match, for Government and private broadcasters have crossed gloves off & on for 26 years.
1912 to McNinch, The 1912 Radio Communication Act antedates the birth of broadcasting. The license plan adopted at that time was a system of registry for the three radio groups then active: the Navy, private companies engaged in ship communications and the small group of early-bird amateurs. Anybody who applied got a license. Its issuance was part of the job of the Secretary of Commerce, a very small part until 1920 when KDKA (Pittsburgh) applied for the first wireless telephone broadcasting station license. The Secretary granted it a wave length of 360 meters, continued issuing other stations licenses on the same wave length until 1923.