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The FCC's monopoly investigation is in the data-gathering stage, with no action expected for several months. Commissioners Sykes, Brown & Walker are to handle the hearings. Judge Eugene Octave Sykes of Mississippi is the senior member of the FCC. Bland and calm, he has faith in the good intentions of the broadcasters. Cautious and noncommittal Colonel Thaddeus Harold Brown ranks next. Like the chairman, he was active in his support of Herbert Hoover in 1928, managing the Ohio campaign and appointed in 1929 to the post of general counsel to the old FRC. He is the short, fat member of the Commission and not easily aroused. A former schoolteacher, Oklahoma Democrat and public utility investigator, Paul Atlee Walker, whose A. T. & T. report drew blood from the telephone monopoly, is more skeptical. But he wants full data and will wait for it before he investigates.
Hearing. The seventh member of the FCC, Chairman McNinch, may get his most strenuous spring inquisitorial work-out not as an inquisitor but as the most authoritative witness the Celler Bill hearings can call upon.
The type of legislator who will make the most noise in behalf of the bill's provisions is Representative Lawrence Connery of Lynn, Mass. Catholic Mr. Connery, an oldtime song & dance man, dislikes the radio as much as Commissioner Payne, or perhaps any other oldtime song & dance man. The Mae West affair set him off for days and in Congress he keeps alive a complaint initiated by his late brother, Billy, against a Mexican Government broadcast over NBC. The broadcast included a reading of a poem in Spanish which Billy called obscene.
Against this sort of opposition, the broadcasters have for months been closing ranks and putting out defenses. The industry has reorganized its National Association of Broadcasters under temporary President Mark Foster Ethridge. Nonmember stations are joining the N. A. B. in droves and hoping that the permanent paid president will be a man chosen from outside the radio industry, a man with no station at stake, who can stand up to the Commission and to Congressional snipers.
Shrewdly the broadcasters have observed that one good way to lick the Celler Bill might be to encourage other similar bills. Already California's Senator McAdoo and New Mexico's Senator Chavez have suggested San Diego, Calif. as a site for a Government station, countered by Florida's Representative Lex Green, who wants it for his home State.
Broadcasting chains are extending their short-wave service to Pan American countries, ready to contend against the Celler Bill that they need only Government co-operation to do the whole anti-Fascist job through private enterprise. And the broadcasters have long been indirectly warding off domestic Government competition by spending big money on non-commercial programs like NBC's costly Toscanini concert series, CBS's Workshop. Most recent and most arch example of radio pointing to its good deeds in the public service is a series of WOR ads. One reads: