The Power Of Radio

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 127, 28 November 1941, Page 8

The Power Of Radio

re RADIO is dynamite. That is a word with a Greek derivation and an alarming connotation. The Greek word means power and it is the explosive power, the dynamite of radio, that has at once stirred such extravagant hopes and bred such caution over its use," says Charles Arthur Siepmann, BBC Director. According to "Time," Mr. Siepmann has just begun a course in radio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Educatién. He is firmly convinced that radio is one of the greatest forces in the world to-day. It permits the concentration of power-in the hands of a tewpower to blast social concepts, to construct, or destroy. In his pessimistic moments Mr. Siepmann feels that the misuse of radio is largely responsible for driving the public towards Fascism. He is also somewhat critical of U.S. radio for being complacent under "advertiser domination." To the claim of Commercial radio that it gives the public what it wants, he retorts with a crack from George Bernard Shaw: " Get what you want or you will soon get to like what you are given." Siepmann was one of the six children of a German emigré to England. He: attended Oxford University, won the Military Cross in the first World War, was pioneer headmaster of a Borstal school, where he introduced radio into the curriculum, joined the BBC in 1927, was made director of talks in 1932, and four years later became programme director. It will be no ordinary course that he takes at Harvard, because Charles Arthur Siepmann has some very definite ideas of his own.